The Nightmare Before Christmas, is a 1993 American stop motion musical fantasy-thriller film directed by Henry Selick and based on a poem written by Tim Burton in 1982 while working as an animator at Walt Disney Animation Studios. It tells the story of Jack Skellington, a being from "Halloween Town" who opens a portal to "Christmas Town" and decides to celebrate the holiday, with some dastardly and comical consequences. Danny Elfman wrote the film score and provided the singing voice of Jack, as well as other minor characters.

In 1990, Burton made a development deal with Disney to start production and to release the film under Disney’s Touchstone Pictures banner because the executives at Disney thought the movie would be "too dark, and scary for kids."

The film, though not traditionally a film for kids, has earned its place as a classic Christmas film and today is proudly marketed under the Disney label, re-released annually in the Disney Digital 3-D format and was the first stop-motion animated feature to be entirely converted to 3-D.

To convert the story, Burton collaborated with composer Danny Elfman to create the story line and two-thirds of the film’s songs, while director Selick and a crew of 120 workers utilizing 20 individual sounds stages to assemble the massive stop-action masterpiece comprising 109,440 frames.

Elfman stated that writing Nightmare’s 10 songs was “one of the easiest jobs I ever had. I had a lot in common with Jack Skellington.” Though conceived by Burton, the film was actually developed by Selick, Joe Ranft the storyboard supervisor, and the team of animators and artists who constructed 227 puppets to represent the characters in the movie. Jack Skellington alone required nearly 400 heads.

Elfman won the 1993 Saturn Award for best music, has received four Academy Award nominations, a Golden Globe Award and a Grammy for the score of Alice in Wonderland in 2010.