Nightmare Before Christmas Songs Ranked From Worst To Best

The Nightmare Before Christmas became a cult classic as much thanks to the haunting but entertaining musical numbers as it did for the holiday story.

You Are Reading :Nightmare Before Christmas Songs Ranked From Worst To Best

Which is the best song in Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas? The cult holiday animation may be known for Burton’s typically weird and imaginative characters and a gripping concept, but the musical numbers in there have been as important to its long-term success as anything else. The sheer number of cover versions – from the likes of Fallout Boy, Korn and The All-American Rejects – is a testament to that.

Infamously dark and macabre, the film is nevertheless still a Disney animated movie, so it comes with a lot of heart. Though the beloved stop motion animation was born in Burton’s mind, it was Henry Selick who directed it as his debut (before later going on to make the equally brilliant Coraline) and the pair’s genius was matched in the inspired choice of Danny Elfman as the composer and songwriter. Elfman famously also provided the singing voice for lead character Jack Skellington, though there are songs across the soundtrack by a host of characters, including villain Oogie Boogie, the tragic Sally, and Halloween Town’s ensemble cast of hellish residents.

Related: Nightmare Before Christmas: Why You THINK Tim Burton Directed The Movie

Marrying heartfelt romance to bombastic spooky numbers and a genius villain song, the soundtrack is as evocative and as characterful as Burton’s immediately recognizable character and world designs. Here’s every song in The Nightmare Before Christmas ranked from worst to best.

11. Finale/Reprise

The film’s most slight and insignificant song plays alongside the exposition-heavy finale explaining that Santa saved Christmas and Jack Skellington survived Oogie Boogie (to the townfolk’s collected glee). It’s short and by no means terrible, but it’s no more than a potted megamix of the score’s best moments with some swapped singers, which is crowned by Jack and Sally getting their touching “now and forever” moment.

10. Poor Jack

The Nightmare Before Christmas’ enduring popularity was cemented, in part, thanks to its resonance with counter-culture and fans of emo music. The Venn diagram of Nightmare fans and My Chemical Romance fans, for instance, is close to a perfect circle, and part of that is thanks to songs like “Poor Jack”, which sees the skeleton hero weighing up the cost of him stealing Christmas. It’s Jack’s Scrooge-like revelation moment as he contemplates punishing himself, despite his best intentions just to bring some happiness to his world. A little less theatrical and entertaining, “Poor Jack” is still an emotive song that is story heavy and shows Jack’s transformation from “woe is me” to savior of Christmas, without ranking as one of the musical’s most memorable.

9. Kidnap The Sandy Claws

The subject of an excellent (and in fact far superior) cover by Korn on the Nightmare Revisited album, “Kidnap The Sandy Claws” is a full-blooded, pantomime-like song that lays out the plans of tiny psychopaths Lock, Stock, and Barrel to kidnap Santa Claus to impress Oogie Boogie. While you’re supposed to believe they were just impressionable kids doing as they were told, the lyrics here go more into what Halloween Town residents’ grim idea of fun. There’s a lot of glee in the violence expressed, in case there was any confusion over The Nightmare Before Christmas being not quite suitable for kids.

8. Jack’s Lament

The first of Jack’s “woe is me” songs, “Jack’s Lament” is essentially another emo look into the Pumpkin King’s malcontent with being perfect at his job. The sentiment rings slightly hollow, because he’s complaining about being great, but Danny Elfman’s vocal performance is just about the right balance of melancholy and conceitedness and the lyrics do speak to Jack’s mental state more than any other song in the musical. It’s not as catchy as some of the others, but it’s basically the heart of the whole narrative, so it’s an important one.

7. Making Christmas

Musicals have a thing about transformation or process songs – in Frozen it’s “Let It Go” in Grease it’s “Greased Lightnin'” and “You’re The One That I Want” – and in The Nightmare Before Christmas, it’s “Making Christmas”, which relays Halloween Town’s misguided attempt at adopting Christmas. It’s the musical’s most outright comic song, as the residents misread everything Christmas ought to be (inevitably) and Jack attempts to reason with them. This number foreshadows the disastrous twist in the plot, but it’s more than exposition because Elfman’s choice of bombastic Bavarian oom-pah tones adds a strange otherworldly feel that works brilliantly well with the off-kilter story on show.

6. This Is Halloween

Kicking off The Nightmare Before Christmas, this karaoke-friendly number is a great establishing segment, giving each of the main characters (and the circus of supporting characters who otherwise get a little overlooked) their introductory moment. Most importantly, it also establishes Tim Burton’s imaginative world and hints at the conflicts (including with Oogie Boogie). Fundamentally, a strong opener.

5. Town Meeting Song

While “Jack’s Lament” and “Poor Jack” both focus on Jack Skellington’s strained mental state as he struggles with his role as the Pumpkin King and then watches his Christmas plan blow up in his skull, “Town Meeting Song” shows the other side of his psyche. The title is a misnomer, really, because this song is all about Jack again as he marvels at what he saw when he visited Christmas Town. There’s a perverse childlike wonder that carries over from “What’s This?” and Danny Elfman’s vocal performance is similarly great.

4. Sally’s Song

“Sally’s Song” is something of a change of pace from the rest of The Nightmare Before Christmas’ soundtrack, not only in pacing and style but in terms of the story. Other than one other, this is the only song included that isn’t telling Jack’s story in some way, whether through establishing his backstory broadly or speaking to his mental state. For “Sally’s Song”, which is song brilliantly by Catherine O’Hara the focus shifts to Sally, Jack’s soulmate, who pines for him in an old-fashioned romantic set-up (albeit with stranger story genetics) and whose melancholy parallels Jack’s. The message seems to be that Jack wouldn’t need to look elsewhere because he’s fundamentally missing Sally’s love, which is a surprisingly wholesome revelation for an otherwise dark story.

3. Jack’s Obsession

Completing the quarter of “Jack” songs, “Jack’s Obsession” is essentially just the lead character justifying his crime of stealing Christmas. Renewed in his zeal and commitment (to the extent that the Halloween Townsfolk worry that he has died in his castle lock-up), Jack obsesses about what he saw in Christmas Town and comes up with his dark epiphany in arguably the most emotionally weighted of Danny Elfman’s performances. It works on a slightly different level as it allows Elfman to marry both tender notes, where Jack struggles, with the bombastic, fierce confidence at the end when he sets his plan.

2. Oogie Boogie Song

Jack Skellington is obviously The Nightmare Before Christmas’ icon, but Oogie Boogie might even be a more interesting character. He’s certainly reserved as the musical’s secret weapon and consciously limited in his screen-time, no matter how much he would improve things by simply being around more. Oogie is so important to the film that he gets his own musical identity, bringing in a New Orleans jazz inflection to things that would later be mirrored in Disney’s The Princess And The Frog’s “Friends on the Other Side”. He’s creepy, generally unnerving, and delightfully cocky, gleefully offering his own aspirations for taking over from Jack Skellington as he threatens to torture Santa Claus. That unspeakably evil intention is his song’s crowning glory.

1. What’s This?

While it’s on the short side, “What’s This?” is a big part of the narrative heart of The Nightmare Before Christmas, as the audience gets to watch Jack experiencing Christmas through fresh eyes. Not only does that mean a celebration of the season in a more typical sense, but it’s spun deliciously through Tim Burton’s dark imagination as Jack compares his world to this new town – “and absolutely no-one’s dead” – with Danny Elfman’s performance soaring. It’s a smart reflection on the absurdity of Christmas, but in a way that doesn’t compromise the affection bundled within.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/nightmare-before-christmas-every-song-ranked-best-worst/