The Making of Danny Elfman’s ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ Song “What’s This?”

Tired of the gloom and doom of Halloween Town and the typical shenanigans of the macabre Dr. Finkelstein, the Corpse family, the Mayor and other dreary townsfolk, Jack Skellington happened upon a portal to another world, one filled with lightness, and laughter, and happy days.

As Skellingon’s eyes are opened to Christmas Town in Tim Burton’s 1993 animated film The Nightmare Before Christmas, the character’s experience is narrated in song. Written, composed, and voiced by Danny Elfman, who scored the film, “What’s This?” reveals the wonderment and glee Skellington feels after finding a town with white things in the air and colors everywhere.

What’s this? What’s this?
There’s color everywhere
What’s this?
There’s white things in the air
What’s this?
I can’t believe my eyes, I must be dreaming
Wake up, Jack, this isn’t fair
What’s this?

What’s this? What’s this?
There’s something very wrong
What’s this?
There’s people singing songs
What’s this?
The streets are lined with little creatures laughing
Everybody seems so happy
Have I possibly gone daffy? What is this?
What’s this?

Tchaikovsky

“The way we did the whole musical was I would say, ‘Just tell me the story as if you were telling it to like, you know, some nephew or niece around a fire or at night, and just tell me a little bit at a time,’” said Elfman on writing the song in a 2021 interview.”And he [Burton] said, ‘Okay, Jack wanders into the forest, and there’s three doors, and he’s mystified,’ and I’m picturing this. And he said, ‘He’s going to open the door. And he gets sucked in when he pops out, he’s in this snowy world, there’s snowflakes falling, and he’s seeing things he’s never seen before. Everything’s new to him.’”

Elfman said he wanted to start the song with strings and the celesta, or celeste, a more orchestral-sounding keyboard. “And since I’m doing kind of a classic arrangement here, harp seemed like a natural,” added Elfman. And it’s Jack arriving in Christmas Town, and seeing it for the first time. … I often write for celestes, and I often write for voices, and I think it probably just goes back to Tchaikovsky. The use of celeste in Tchaikovsky’s ballets.”

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In between the fragments of the storyline fed by Burton, Elfman was taking notes and piecing together the tempo of Skellington’s adventure. “I really wanted it to sound timeless, but not self-consciously timeless,” said Elfman. “I’m not trying to recreate an old style that somebody would go, ‘Oh, that’s an old-style song of such and such’ but to feel like it could be any time or place.”

He added “The only thing consciously I thought about a little bit when I was doing ‘What’s This?’ was Gilbert and Sullivan [‘I Am The Very Model’], that very kind of a tongue twister type of a thing. … ‘What’s this? What’s this? / There’s color everywhere / What’s this? There’s white things in the air / What’s this?’And it’s like, ‘Okay, I’m getting the cadence of it.’”

Jack Skellington

Becoming Jack Skellington also came naturally to Elfman, who said he felt a strong “kinship” to the character. While working on The Nightmare Before Christmas, Elfman was at a crossroads and wanted to leave his band Oingo Boingo, and wanted to leave.

“I felt for Jack who’s this character that was really the king of his own world, but wanted out,” said Elfman. “He wanted something else because that’s exactly how I felt at that moment. You know, when you’re a songwriter, singer in a band, you know, it’s your universe. You’ve created that universe, and you’re kind of the center of that universe. And that’s exactly what Jack was in Halloweenland. And like Jack, I was looking for a door. I was really looking for a door to take me into another world.”

Elfman’s other world segued him into scoring more films beyond his previous work with Burton on Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Edwards Scissorhands, and the 1989 and 1992 Batman films—and creating the theme song for The Simpsons. After Nightmare, Elfman scores have spanned three more decades of films, including Mission Impossible, Good Will Hunting, and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films, among many others through more work with Marvel and DC in the 2010s.

A Living ‘Nightmare‘

Released two days before Halloween in 1993, The Nightmare Before Christmas made more than $100 million at the box office and is a film, Elfman said was misunderstood when it first came out, before gaining its cult following.

“It was one of these incredibly lucky things of a movie that took on a life after it came out, which is so rare,” said Elfman. “I think if I was going to have any one piece that gets to have a second life on its own, what’s it going to be? And I would say ‘Nightmare Before Christmas,’ because every other film I’d done, I’d only worked on it for three months, and here I’d worked on this film for close to two years. And so, I felt really, really lucky when years afterwards I saw that it hasn’t gone away. In fact, it’s kind of growing.”

Photo: Timothy Norris/Getty Images