1. Tim Burton didn't actually direct it. Despite the fact that is very much says 'Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas' everywhere. Tim was tied up with Batman Returns so got his pal Henry Selick to make his feature directorial debut with this bad boy. In fairness though, Tim did produce, and come up with the story and the look of the characters of TNBC, so it's not like he didn't work for that mention.

2. Tim came up with the idea for the film after seeing Halloween and Christmas decorations on sale at the same time. Growing up in California, Tim said the seasons sort-of rolled into one, so the seasonal changes were marked more by holiday decorations than the weather. And in autumn he saw both Halloween and Christmas bits on sale at the same time, which planted the idea of TNBC.

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3. Disney wanted Jack Skellington to have eyes. Animators and puppet-makers are always told that eyes are crucial to having an audience connect to a character, so Disney fought for Jack to have his empty sockets filled. But Tim and Henry weren't having any of it.

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4. The hardest scene to create was Jack opening the Christmas door. A close-up of the door's shiny gold doorknob shows a reflection of Jack and a number of trees from the forest behind him. Getting the reflection just right was one hell of a struggle.

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5. The inventor from Edward Scissorhands (Vincent Price) was supposed to voice Father Christmas in TNBC. But, tragically Vincent's wife passed away just before production began. When it came to his parts, he was so grief-stricken that the director felt he sounded too sad to play Santa. So they got Edward Ivory in instead.

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6. The model artists drew concepts, characters and settings with their non-dominant hand. This gave the film an unsettling look.

7. Patrick Stewart was cut from the film. The Star Trek actor read poetry that was intended for the film's opening and closing credits, but the poem ended up being cut right down and the remaining lines were given to Santa. But panic not! You can still hear Pat's version on the film's soundtrack.

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8. Production began before the script had been completed. Because stop-motion takes soooooooo long, once Danny Elfman – the man behind the film's songs – had done his bit, animators got to work on the musical numbers. The first scene they worked on was Jack's song, What's This.

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9. Tim was supposed to make a cameo but it was deemed too grisly. About five minutes into the film, a bunch of ice-skating vampires punt a pumpkin towards the screen. However, the original version of this scene had them batting about a decapitated head that looked a lot like Tim.

10. Some of the presents that Jack delivers while taking on Father Christmas' role are a nod to other Tim Burton films. There's a snake that looks like a sandworm from Beetlejuice as well as a cat and duck that feature in Batman Returns.

11. There were more than 400 Jack Skellington heads used during production. Each one had a different expression

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12. The Nightmare Before Christmas started life as a poem. Tim wrote it as a parody of Clement Clarke Moore's A Visit From St. Nicholas (also known as The Night Before Christmas). It featured Jack and his ghost dog Zero as well as Father Christmas.

13. Jack Skellington appears in Henry's later films. If you look closely, you'll spot Jack as a spooky pirate in 1996's James And The Giant Peach. And he pops up in an egg yolk in Coraline in 2009.

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14. Tim Burton said no to a The Nightmare Before Christmas sequel. He told MTV, "I was always very protective of [Nightmare Before Christmas], not to do sequels or things of that kind. You know, 'Jack visits Thanksgiving world' or other kinds of things, just because I felt the movie had a purity to it and the people that like it. Because it's not a mass-market kind of thing, it was important to kind of keep that purity of it. I try to respect people and keep the purity of the project as much as possible."

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Anna Lewis News Editor Anna Lewis is the News Editor at Delish UK, which means she’s always either writing about food, cooking food or eating food.

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