National Film Vault

FILM NOTES

Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas was released by Touchstone Pictures in October 1993, produced through Burton's collaboration with director Henry Selick and composer Danny Elfman. The stop-motion animated feature represented a landmark in the medium, blending gothic sensibility with musical storytelling in a way that had rarely been attempted at studio scale. Its visual language, built frame by frame over years of painstaking production, made every individual frame a discrete work of craft.

This cell, titled Ghosts, captures three sequential prints of the same confrontation frame, presenting a dark and chaotic composition dominated by a luminous ghostly figure set against explosive bursts and the orange glow of jack-o-lantern fire along the lower edge. The repeated printing across all three frames offers an unusual look at how release prints were struck and distributed during the film's original theatrical run.