Summary

• The musical numbers in Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas are just as important to its success as the weird and imaginative characters and gripping concept.
• Danny Elfman's excellent songs, which marry heartfelt romance with bombastic spooky numbers, are a crucial part of the film's soundtrack and contribute to its long-term popularity and success.
• From classics like "What's This?" and "Making Christmas", the soundtrack is packed with some of Disney's finest dark songs.

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, 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, Danny Elfman - who also voices Jack Skellington - is the musical mind behind The Nightmare Before Christmas' excellent songs. Marrying heartfelt romance to bombastic spooky numbers and a genius villain song, the soundtrack is as much a part of the film's success as anything else. Here's every song in The Nightmare Before Christmas ranked from worst to best.

Related: What Happened To Jack & Sally After Nightmare Before Christmas Ended

Listen To The Full Nightmare Before Christmas Soundtrack

11 Finale/Reprise

As beautifully scored as the rest of the movie, the functionally-titled "Finale/Reprise" is a final showcase of Danny Elfman's musical skill. The Nightmare Before Christmas' slightest and most 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 sort of handy megamix of the score's best moments with some swapped singers, with "This Is Halloween", "What's This?", and "Sally's Song" combined. The ensemble song is touchingly crowned by Jack and Sally getting their touching "now and forever" moment confirming that, in fact, Jack's obsession has been far more healthily replaced with love.

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 slightly less entertaining as a result), "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 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.

It's essentially an exposition song, and arguably the closest thing The Nightmare Before Christmas has to a blustering hero song, much like Disney classics like "I Just Can't Wait To Be King" from The Lion King and "A Girl Worth Fighting For" from Mulan. As with those more famous examples, it's a pride before a fall type song, as Jack merrily sings his way towards disaster, in blissful ignorance. There's a perverse childlike wonder that carries over from "What's This?" and Danny Elfman's vocal performance is similarly great.

8 Jack's Obsession

As part of the quartet of "Jack" songs, "Jack's Obsession" is essentially just the lead character justifying his crime of stealing Christmas, very much like "Town Meeting Song". 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. This is Jack's villain song in conventional terms, as he sets out his plan, while justifying himself (mostly to himself).

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.

It's also a very important song, as it 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. "Making Christmas" also has the added bonus of sounding an awful lot like another of Elfman's best scores, for Beetlejuice.

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, it's a strong opener, and the important introduction to Jack Skellington's world and his legend. The animated sequence also includes The Nightmare Before Christmas' hand-drawn animation, alongside the immediately recognizable art style Burton brought to things alongside director Henry Selick. In this dark world. "This Is Halloween" is the answer to Beauty & The Beast's "Belle", establishing the world and the lead character at its center.

5 Kidnap The Sandy Claws

The subject of an excellent (and in fact superior) cover by mighty Nu-Metal gods 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. The vocal performances by Catherine O'Hara (in her other role as mini witch Shock), the late, great Paul Reubens (as Lock), and Danny Elfman again (as Barrel) are brilliantly unhinged.

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.

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. It also carries a lot of The Nightmare Before Christmas' true emo credentials on its shoulders, throwing a love story alongside the macabre tones of the other songs on the soundtrack.

3 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 assigned 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 might be quite as catchy as some of the other songs on The Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack, but it's a very important one that takes full advantage of Elfman's theatrical delivery. There's also a contradictory haunting tone to the song's end as Jack reveals the sham of his Halloween performance, setting up the story as one of misguided wish fulfilment.

2 Oogie Boogie's 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, and most impressively of all, despite the darkness of the lyrics, "What's This?" genuinely feels like a Christmas song. Fall Out Boy recorded an excellent cover for the re-release of the soundtrack (and later Nightmare Revisited) but Elfman's mixture of naivety and barely concealed excitement is still the best way to enjoy the best song in The Nightmare Before Christmas.