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 Disney. A landmark in stop-motion animation, the film brought a distinctly gothic sensibility to mainstream audiences and established itself as a perennial classic straddling Halloween and Christmas culture. Its handcrafted artistry, frame by painstaking frame, makes original 35mm film cells genuinely meaningful artifacts of the production process.

This cell, titled Lock, Shock and Barrel, captures the film's mischievous trio mid-mission, their signature costumes and masks clearly distinguishable against dark wooden surroundings. Spanning three frames from a single continuous shot, the sequence shows subtle movement variation as Lock, Shock, and Barrel navigate the scene in their memorable contraption, preserving a quiet moment of the film's handmade magic in physical form.