The Nightmare Before Christmas

The Nightmare Before Christmas (often called Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas) is a 1993 American stop-motion animated musical fantasy film. Henry Selick directed it, and Caroline Thompson wrote the screenplay. The story follows Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town, who discovers Christmas Town and becomes determined to run the holiday himself. Danny Elfman wrote the score and songs and provided Jack's singing voice; the main voice cast also includes Chris Sarandon, Ken Page, Catherine O'Hara, Glenn Shadix, William Hickey, Paul Reubens, and Ed Ivory.

The project began as a poem Tim Burton wrote in 1982 while working as an animator at Walt Disney Productions. After the critical success of his short film *Vincent* that same year, Burton considered turning the poem into a short film or a half-hour TV special, but nothing came of it. He returned to the idea over the years, and in 1990 he made a development deal with Walt Disney Studios. Production, overseen by Burton and Denise Di Novi, started in July 1991. Disney initially released the film under the Touchstone Pictures label, worried that its Gothic tone would be "too dark and scary for kids."

The film premiered at the New York Film Festival on October 9, 1993, had a limited release on October 13, and went wide on October 29 via Buena Vista Pictures Distribution. It was a critical and commercial success and developed a cult following. It earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Visual Effects, the first for an animated film. Thirteen years after its original release, Walt Disney Pictures reissued it, and it was re-released annually from 2006 to 2010. In 2023, the Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry, calling it "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant."