As a kid, Halloween was always Danny Elfman’s favorite holiday.
“I was one of those kids where Christmas was a really depressing time of the year,” Elfman says as he prepares to make his annual Halloween-timed appearance at the Hollywood Bowl on Friday, Nov. 2. “Halloween was the really exciting time of the year. They were polar opposites.
“Halloween was this wild night,” he says. “Back in the ’60s, when I was a kid, we ran amok amongst ourselves. There were no parents escorting like we would today, or even when my kids were kids.
“It was just like a wild night of kids, free, on the loose in crazy disguises, just being nutty. And what’s more fun than that for a kid?”
But unlike all those other kids, Elfman, who grew up to be the singer in Oingo Boingo, and later an acclaimed film composer, never really left Halloween behind.
Starting in 1986, Oingo Boingo played multiple nights each Halloween season at Irvine Meadows in Orange County, and later at Universal Amphitheatre, before Elfman retired from the band after its five-night Halloween run in 1995.
After finding success as a film composer, often with director Tim Burton on films such as “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” “Beetlejuice,” and “Batman,” Elfman returned to the stage for spooky season in 2015 for annual Halloween performances at the Hollywood Bowl of his songs and score for Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas.”
“It’s interesting,” Elfman says of how this last decade saw him return to performance on his favorite holiday of the year. “Just when I thought I was free on Halloween, here I am doing Halloween shows. Now, with the new solo show, it’s like, ‘OK, between one show or the other it looks like I’m just going to be doing Halloween for the rest of my life.”
In recent years, Elfman has faced lawsuits related to allegations of sexual harassment. In 2023, Rolling Stone reported that Elfman was being sued for breach of contract for failing to complete the $830,000 worth of settlement payments due to allegations of sexual harassment by a female composer. In a statement to the magazine, Elfman concluded by saying .”..these accusations are false. This is the last I will say on this subject.” In July 2024, the composer filed a second lawsuit alleging Elfman defamed her in his comments to Rolling Stone. A lawsuit from a second woman was dismissed in September.
In an interview edited for length and clarity, Elfman talked about his plans for “From Boing to Batman to Big Mess and Beyond” at the Hollywood Bowl, how the show is traveling outside of Los Angeles to play the Bay Area for the first time this year, what it was like making this fall’s “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” sequel and more.
Q: Why did Boingo and Halloween become a thing in the first place?
A: I have no idea. I think maybe it was because one of our early albums had ‘Dead Man’s Party’ and the artwork was kind of Dia de Los Muertos and it just stuck. But I couldn’t tell you why it stuck.
Q: What’s planned for the shows this year?
A: It’s basically the same concept as Coachella [which he played in 2022] but it’s double the stuff. Coachella was a short set and I thought that would go catastrophically for various reasons. So we just decided to elaborate on it like a much bigger version.
It’s still basically divided into thirds. A third old music [from Boingo], a third new music [including his solo album ‘Big Mess’], and a third film and television music. And it’s mixed together in a very random, nonsensical way.
When I was doing Coachella it made sense to me for a second, and then quickly it’s like, ‘Oh my God, what am doing?’ Before walking out onto that stage I felt like I was walking out into a firing squad.
Q: Why’d you worry about Coachella? You had to know the crowd there already loved your work.
A: Well, first off, I didn’t know. First time I’m at Coachella. I’m not at an Oingo Boingo concert. Those people didn’t pay to see me. You know, when you buy a ticket for Coachella, you don’t necessarily know who’s headlining at that point.
Add to that this crazy blend of playing things which have no relationship to each other at all, and suddenly it just seemed like the worst idea I ever had. I just said I’ve created a train wreck. It really wasn’t until I got off the stage that I started looking at the reactions online and I realized people were really into it. Then the second week at Coachella the audience size had like doubled, so word had gotten around and everybody wants to see it.
Q: How’d you decide to take the show to Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View this year?
A: We’ve only played the show in Southern California. It’s a very difficult show to tour. There’s probably 65, 70 people on stage, because we have a whole orchestra, as well as the band, as well as a choir, as well as an additional percussion section. It’s definitely not an easy show to take on the road.
We’ve been wanting to do different cities. We were hoping to take it to three or four or five Western state cities, but the only one in the amount of time we had that came together was that. We’re still hoping that early next year we could take it to more cities.
Q: So let me ask you about ‘Beetlejuice,’ since the new movie is a hit. Take me back to the first one, when you and Tim Burton worked on that.
A: Those early films with Tim, we just had no supervision. What was great about them, they were all, up until ‘Batman,’ at least ‘Pee-wee’ and ‘Beetlejuice’ and with ‘Edward Scissorhands, ‘Nightmare,’ they were relatively low budget. There wasn’t a lot of oversight.
When I was doing ‘Beetlejuice’ with Tim, it was just like, let’s have fun. There was no temp score to follow. There was no musical model of what it should sound like. I didn’t realize until later how lucky I was to have these films with virtually no model to hold next to it as to what it might sound like. I liken it to a couple of kids turned loose in the kindergarten playhouse with no teacher.
Q: Coming back years later for the ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ sequel, what was that like?
A: It was a dream. It really was a dream, because nobody gets to do that. You know, after five years, a movie comes back, it’s less likely to be sequel than a reboot. After 10 years, forget it, it’s definitely going to be a reboot, with different cast, different music, different everything in all likelihood.
So to have a sequel come back [after 36 years] and get to jump back into that playground, I never thought I would get an opportunity to do it. It was just kind of like a wild surprise and a delight.
Q: Coming back after all these years, how to balance elements of the original score with new things?
A: It’s very simple because part of the film is kind of its own new story with new characters and you just play the music that way. Then the moment Michael Keaton is on screen, or implied to being on screen, it just goes right back to the original. The mention of Beetlejuice, and certainly the moment Beetlejuice is on screen, it’s full-on ‘Beetlejuice’ again.
Q: ‘Big Mess’ came out in 2021. Any new solo projects in the works for you?
A: I’ve got a slew of new songs and I’m already launched. I’m starting to work on arrangements. Might be working with a couple of different producers, which is really exciting for me. And we are even possibly doing a quick recording of one song that we might release as a little Halloween bonus thing. And we’re definitely playing two new songs [in the upcoming concerts].
Q: ‘Pee-wee’s Big Adventure’ was your first film score. Paul Reubens died last year. How did his death affect you?
A: I miss him, you know. It just came as a shock because so many of us didn’t really know he was sick. He really kept it to himself, and it’s just really sad. The one thing I’m grateful for is that these last four or five years I got to know him better again. Got to spend more time together. And I’m grateful for that now.
Q: Ken Page, who played Oogie Boogie in ‘Nightmare’ and performed at the Bowl in your ‘Nightmare’ concerts, also just died a month ago.
A: That really hit out of the blue. I mean, good God, we just played with him. We were just going to be playing again. And he was such a light. Even in a dress rehearsal before a show, like at the Hollywood Bowl, where everybody’s stressed because we’re running 20 minutes late, and everybody’s sweating. Ken would walk on stage and the whole mood would just change.
He had this amazing ability to just say, take it easy everybody, and everybody would do it. It was just light up and brighten up the stage when he walked on it. He just carried this wonderful energy with him everywhere he went.
Q: You’ve done many films, but it’s ‘Nightmare’ we think about every single year. How did it become what it did?
A: It’s just impossible for me to say. When I was writing the music and lyrics and songs with Tim we were just going, we don’t know how to start a musical. Neither of us have ever done it. So let’s just start with a bunch of songs. It wasn’t even a script, it was just an outline.
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He would come over to the house and show me some pictures and tell me part of the story. I’d go, great, great, and do another song. Three days later and he’d come back. We do the same thing until we had 10 songs and now there was a framework.
It was really misunderstood when it came out. The thing that I heard constantly was, ‘Oh, this movie’s too scary for kids. It’s not for kids, they’ll hate it.’ It was like, ‘Oh, God.’ It was so sad and disappointing at the same time. So to have that all wrong, and to have it kind of develop its own life, which took years, it’s extraordinary.
It really was a wish fulfilled and a dream come true that it came back after being gone for 10 or 15 years. It was actually kind of growing up in a weird way.