Elfman has frequently worked with directors Tim Burton, Sam Raimi, and Gus Van Sant, contributing music to nearly 20 Burton projects, including Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns, Mars Attacks!, Sleepy Hollow, Big Fish and Alice in Wonderland,[5] as well as scoring Raimi's Darkman, A Simple Plan, Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, Oz the Great and Powerful, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,[6] and Van Sant's Academy Award-winning films Good Will Hunting and Milk.

[18] Elfman has admitted to fabricating stories about his past out of boredom, including a false birthplace of Amarillo, Texas, and parents in the United States Air Force.

[21][22] Elfman left school to follow his brother Richard to France, where he performed violin with Jérôme Savary's Le Grand Magic Circus, an avant-garde musical theater group.

[23] He then embarked on a ten-month, self-guided tour through Africa, busking and collecting a range of West African percussion instruments until a series of illnesses forced him to return home.

[25] After returning to Los Angeles from Africa in the early 1970s, Elfman was asked by his brother Richard to serve as musical director of his street theatre performance art troupe The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo.

[20]: 22  Elfman was tasked with adapting and arranging 1920s and 1930s jazz and big band music by artists such as Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Django Reinhardt and Josephine Baker for the ensemble, which consisted of up to 15 performers playing upwards of 30 instruments.

Citing permanent hearing damage from performing live and conflicts with his film-scoring career,[20]: 137  Elfman retired Oingo Boingo in 1995 with a series of five sold-out final concerts at the Universal Amphitheatre ending on Halloween night.

[33][34] On October 31, 2015, Elfman and Oingo Boingo guitarist Steve Bartek performed the song "Dead Man's Party" with an orchestra as an encore to a live-to-film concert of The Nightmare Before Christmas score at the Hollywood Bowl.

[41] Following Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Elfman scored a string of comedies in the late 1980s, including Back to School starring Rodney Dangerfield, Burton's Beetlejuice and the Bill Murray film Scrooged.

Non-comedy work included the all-synth score to Emilio Estevez's crime drama Wisdom and the big band, blues-infused music for Martin Brest's buddy cop action film Midnight Run.

In addition to frequent collaborations with Burton, Raimi and Gus Van Sant, Elfman has worked with directors such as Brian De Palma, Peter Jackson, Joss Whedon, Errol Morris, Ang Lee, Richard Donner, Guillermo del Toro, David O. Russell, Taylor Hackford, Jon Amiel, Joe Johnston, and Barry Sonnenfeld.

[4] Since the mid-1990s, Elfman expanded his craft to a range of genres, including thrillers (Dolores Claiborne, A Simple Plan, The Kingdom, The Girl on the Train, The Woman in the Window), dramas (Sommersby, A Civil Action, Hitchcock), indies (Freeway, Silver Linings Playbook, Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot, White Noise), family (Flubber, Charlotte's Web, Frankenweenie, Goosebumps, Dolittle), documentary (Standard Operating Procedure, The Unknown Known), and horror (Red Dragon, The Wolfman), as well as entries in his well-established areas of horror comedy (The Frighteners, Mars Attacks!, Dark Shadows) and comic book-inspired action films (Hulk, Wanted, Hellboy II: The Golden Army).

[48] For several high-profile sequel and reboot projects in the 2010s, Elfman incorporated established musical themes with his own original thematic material, including the DC Extended Universe's Justice League,[49] The Grinch,[50] Dumbo[51] and Men in Black International.

[54] Subsequent concert works include his first Violin Concerto "Eleven Eleven", co-commissioned by the Czech National Symphony Orchestra, Stanford Live at Stanford University, and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, which premiered at Smetana Hall in Prague on June 21, 2017, with Sandy Cameron on violin and John Mauceri conducting the Czech National Symphony Orchestra;[55] the Piano Quartet, co-commissioned by the Lied Center for Performing Arts University of Nebraska and the Berlin Philharmonic Piano Quartet, which premiered February 6, 2018, in Lincoln, Nebraska;[56] and the Percussion Quartet, commissioned by Third Coast Percussion and premiered at the Philip Glass Days And Nights Festival in Big Sur on October 10, 2019.

Since 2015, Elfman has appeared regularly in a Hollywood Bowl Halloween concert featuring full orchestra performing the Nightmare Before Christmas score live to the film projection.

Occasional forays into serial television include episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Amazing Stories and Pee-wee's Playhouse, the miniseries When We Rise co-composed with Chris Bacon, and themes for the Netflix series Wednesday.

[86] On October 31, 2019, the MasterClass online educational series released "Making Music out of Chaos," presenting 21 compositional and career lessons from Elfman's four decades of experience primarily in the film industry.

[90] From January 2021 on the eleventh day of each month, he released five subsequent singles "Sorry", "Love in the Time of COVID", "Kick Me", "True", and a reworking of the Oingo Boingo song "Insects" from the album Nothing to Fear.

[94] A year later, Elfman released Bigger Messier, a compilation of 23 remixes of songs on the album Big Mess by artists including Reznor, Iggy Pop, Blixa Bargeld, Squarepusher, Boy Harsher and more.

[96][97][98] Influences on specific scores include Erik Satie (Forbidden Zone), Nino Rota (Pee-wee's Big Adventure), George Gershwin (Dick Tracy), Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Edward Scissorhands), and Jimi Hendrix (Dead Presidents).

While Elfman is primarily known for writing large-scale orchestral works in the romantic, 20th century and Hollywood Golden Age film score traditions, his compositions have used a wide range of idioms, including rock and blues (Midnight Run, Hot to Trot), big band and jazz (Dick Tracy, Chicago), operetta (The Nightmare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride), funk and hip hop (Dead Presidents, Notorious), folk and indie rock (Taking Woodstock, Silver Linings Playbook), Americana (Article 99, Sommersby, Big Fish), minimalism (Good Will Hunting, Standard Operating Procedure, The Unknown Known), and atonal or experimental (Freeway, A Simple Plan, The Girl on the Train).

[109] At the request of Tim Burton, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory songs drew inspiration from Bollywood, the Mamas and the Papas, ABBA, and Earth, Wind & Fire individually.

[3] While he prefers not to work from script, story or concept, exceptions include The Nightmare Before Christmas, for which ten songs needed to be written in advance of filmmaking, and Dumbo, for which he composed the main theme before filming began.

[127] In the liner notes for the 2006 CD recording of his first concert work Serenada Schizophrana, Elfman wrote: "I began composing several dozen short improvisational compositions, maybe a minute each.

Evoking the "O Fortuna" from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, he set made-up, Latin-sounding text for SATB choir in standout cue "Descent into Mystery" from Batman.

[20]: 63 For Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Elfman set Roald Dahl's text for the Oompa-Loompa characters as four stylistically distinct songs: the Bollywood-influenced "Augustus Gloop", the funk-infused "Violet Beauregarde", the psychedelic pop stylings of "Veruca Salt" and the baroque rock of "Mike Teavee".

Elfman wrote the lyrics to all of Oingo Boingo's original songs 1979–1994[138] and has made residuals on the titular two-word opening phrase sung in his The Simpsons theme since the series first aired in 1989.

[151] In a series of posts on his Instagram page discussing the video, Elfman criticized Donald Trump, Richard Nixon, and the electoral college, and linked to several voter resources.

[152] During his 18 years with Oingo Boingo, Elfman developed significant hearing damage as a result of the continuous exposure to the high noise levels involved in performing in a rock band.

[163] In October 2016, Elfman produced a video clip for Funny or Die with original "horror" music composed to footage of Donald Trump pacing around Hillary Clinton at the second United States presidential election debates, 2016.