The Nightmare Before Christmas The Nightmare Before Christmas The Nightmare Before Christmas (marketed as Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas) is a 1993 American stop-motion animated musical dark fantasy Halloween-Christmas film directed by Henry Selick, and produced and conceived by Tim Burton. It tells the story of Jack Skellington, the King of "Halloween Town" who stumbles through a portal to "Christmas Town" and decides to celebrate the holiday. Danny Elfman wrote the songs and score, and provided the singing voice of Jack. The principal voice cast also includes Chris Sarandon, Catherine O'Hara, William Hickey, Ken Page, Paul Reubens, Glenn Shadix, and Ed Ivory. "The
Tim Burton of the film helped establish Burton as a profitable director, and it proved to be a huge influence on future superhero films, which eschewed the bright, all-American heroism of Richard Donner's "Superman" for a grimmer, more realistic look and characters with more psychological depth. It also became a major inspiration for the successful 1990s cartoon "", in as much as the darkness of the picture and its sequel allowed for a darker Batman on television. Burton claimed that the graphic novel "" was a major influence on his film adaptation of "Batman": I was never a giant comic book fan,