The Nightmare Before Christmas — Jack Skellington silhouette on Spiral Hill in front of a glowing full moon.

The Nightmare Before Christmas

1993viral videoclassic

Published October 2, 2026

The Nightmare Before Christmas is a 1993 stop-motion holiday musical directed by Henry Selick and produced by Tim Burton that grew a massive online fandom. The film became a yearly October-through-December fixture across YouTube, DeviantArt and Tumblr, spawning thousands of fan works and a long-running tradition of song parodies based on its soundtrack.

disney memes halloween memes seasonal memes annual tradition memes parody song memes

Overview

The Nightmare Before Christmas, often credited as Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, is a stop-motion musical about Halloween Town's Jack Skellington stumbling into Christmas Town and trying to run the holiday himself1. The 1993 film pulled a 96% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, giving it the kind of long tail that keeps it in rotation every Halloween and Christmas1.

Online the title works less like a single meme and more like a dense fandom cluster. Fans post character edits, Jack-and-Sally cosplay, and remixes of Danny Elfman's score, and the soundtrack track "What's This?" is still the most-parodied song from the movie2. Urban Dictionary entries from the 10th-anniversary DVD era already treated the film as a cult favorite rather than a normal kids' movie3.

Origin & Background

Platform
Theatrical film (origin) / YouTube and Tumblr (fandom spread)
Creator
Tim Burton; Henry Selick
Date
1993

Tim Burton first wrote The Nightmare Before Christmas as a short poem in 1982 while he was working as an animator at Disney, pitched internally as a possible short or TV special2. Burton closed a deal with Disney in 1990, production started in San Francisco in 1991 under director Henry Selick, and the finished feature shipped in 19932.

Disney considered the tone too dark for the main brand, so the film was released through its Touchstone Pictures label instead2. Reviews were strong on arrival, with Rotten Tomatoes later logging a 96% critics score for the picture1.

How It Spread

After its 1993 theatrical run the film kept building an audience through home video and annual holiday reruns, and the 10th-anniversary 2003 DVD push helped a new wave of fans adopt it as a cult object rather than a one-off kids' movie3. Urban Dictionary entries from that period openly ranked it as a lifetime favorite and praised Danny Elfman's score3.

Online the fandom grew fastest on YouTube, where creators built out a long-running genre of song parodies using the movie's soundtrack, with "What's This?" as the most frequent target2. Examples include fan-written reworkings of the song uploaded directly to YouTube45, along with other parody edits of tracks from the score67.

The fandom also spread across art and fiction communities: Know Your Meme's writeup points to more than 76,000 Nightmare Before Christmas works on DeviantArt and over 1,000 entries on Fanfiction.net, plus multiple Tumblr blogs dedicated to the film2.

Timeline

1982

Tim Burton writes the original Nightmare Before Christmas poem while working as an animator at Disney.

1990

Burton signs a deal with Disney to develop the poem into a feature film.

1991

Stop-motion production begins in San Francisco under director Henry Selick.

1993-10-29

The film is released theatrically in the US through Touchstone Pictures.

2003

The 10th-anniversary DVD release helps re-brand the movie as a cult holiday favorite online.

How to Use This Meme

The dominant fan format is a song parody set to the film's soundtrack, typically rewriting "What's This?" or "This Is Halloween" with new lyrics about a show, game or holiday the creator is a fan of4. Other common conventions include Jack Skellington reaction edits, Halloween-to-Christmas transition videos, and crossover art that places Jack and Sally into other franchises.

Frequently Asked Questions