The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror

Abstract

First introduced in October 1990 in the show's second season, the "Treehouse of Horror" series now amounts to fifty-seven individual segments over nineteen episodes to date (plus extras, in the form of opening and closing credits sequences and their associated trappings, such as the alternate scary names for cast and crew that get more elaborate by the year - Dan Blackulaneta, for example). At its best, the Halloween special has re-enacted classic horror movies ('King Homer'; 'The Shinning'; 'Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace') and television shows {The Twilight Zcwe-inspired 'Clown Without Pity'; 'Terror at 5'A Feet' and 'Homer3', among others, proving especially memorable) and squeezed many a gem into the introductory segments that anticipate the main attractions (Marge's warnings; Bart and Homer's Outer Limits-styled takeover of the airwaves; Homer's stint as Alfred Hitchcock).

(20th Century 1990-present)

The Simpsons may have made their full-length television debut with a Christmas episode ('Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire'), but in the nineteen years since they've made Halloween their signature holiday with the annual "Treehouse of Horror" episode. First introduced in October 1990 in the show's second season, the "Treehouse of Horror" series now amounts to fifty-seven individual segments over nineteen episodes to date (plus extras, in the form of opening and closing credits sequences and their associated trappings, such as the alternate scary names for cast and crew that get more elaborate by the year - Dan Blackulaneta, for example). Over the years, The Simpsons has parodied and paid homage to all kinds of supernatural and extra-terrestrial beasties culled from popular culture, and taken pot-shots at television censors, politicians, and the television programmers that now regularly schedule the show to appear in November. At its best, the Halloween special has re-enacted classic horror movies ('King Homer'; 'The Shinning'; 'Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace') and television shows {The Twilight Zcwe-inspired 'Clown Without Pity'; 'Terror at 5'A Feet' and 'Homer3', among others, proving especially memorable) and squeezed many a gem into the introductory segments that anticipate the main attractions (Marge's warnings; Bart and Homer's Outer Limits-styled takeover of the airwaves; Homer's stint as Alfred Hitchcock). In recent years, though, it has faltered somewhat, displaying the same kind of patchiness that has been evident in latter-day Simpsons as a whole, and showing signs of the law of diminishing returns to which horror franchises are so fatally prone.

It started on a real high with the trio of 'Bad Dream House' (a spin on The Amityville Horror)', 'Hungry are the Damned' (based on a Twilight Zone episode 'To Serve Man', itself based on a short story of the same name) and the real highlight, 'The Raven'. The latter, read by James Earl Jones, is plainly conceived and brilliantly executed, casting Homer as the poem's main character, Marge as the lost Lenore and Bart as the raven (just one of a series of appearances by Edgar Allan Poe which reached its zenith in Season 9's episode 'Lisa the Simpson', which featured Bart and Homer whooping to the fall of the House of Usher on a fictional Fox special, When Buildings Collapse). Indeed, the first nine instalments of the "Treehouse of Horror" produced moment after moment of perfectly-honed horror pastiche, from 'The Devil and Homer Simpson' (in which Homer sells his soul for a donut and faces a trial by the jury of the damned, including Benedict Arnold, Lizzie Borden and the then-still-very-much-alive Richard Nixon) to 'The Thing and F, where Bart's discovery that he was born with a conjoined brother (Hugo) who now lives in the attic leads to the revelation that it is Bart himself who is the evil twin. As the show really hit its stride, its experiments became more elaborate (most obviously in the Tron-inflected 3-D animation of 'Homer3') - but also with more and more playful narratives in which advertisements come to life and terrorise Springfield ('Attack of the 50-Foot Eyesores') or Itchy and Scratchy break down the fourth wall of the Simpsons' world ('The Terror of Tiny Toon'). Throughout its run as a whole, the show has also maintained a healthy propensity towards punning in their tradition of scary names, and for segment titles - the best from the show's heyday probably being 'The HQmega Man' and 'Clown Without Pity'. In recent years in particular, these titles have veered more and more towards the tortured (and I must confess I'm very fond of a tortured pun, as is probably evident from the film section... ), giving us such classics as 'You Gotta Know When to Golem' and (my favourite) 'I've Grown a Costume on Your Face'...

Equally, though it has sometimes seemed that more attention has been paid to lexical histrionics than the subject matter itself in some of the more recent episodes. Overall, the quality has certainly dipped, and has gone hand in hand with the downturn in quality in a lot of contemporary horror cinema - parodies of the likes of I Know What You Did Last Summer ('I Know What You Diddily-Iddily-Did') just don't quite cut it (although, in Homer's advice as to where each member of the family should take shelter from their pursuer, it does provide one of the show's funniest Halloween gags: "Marge, you hide in the abandoned amusement park. Lisa, the pet cemetery. Bart, spooky roller disco. And I'll go skinny dipping in that lake where the sexy teens were killed one hundred years ago tonight"). Too often of late, the show has tended to feature at least one segment per episode that merely retreads a recent release in a manner that is just a bit too straightforward - 'The Island of Dr Hibbert' (The Island of Dr Moreau), for example, or this year's 'Untitled Robot Parody' (Transformers). Indeed, 2008's offering proved notoriously weak, not even fulfilling the Halloween brief. One of the segments - 'Mr and Mrs Simpson' - is an uninspired take on Mr & Mrs Smith, while 'E.T., Go Home' recasts recurring favourite Kodos as a less-than-cuddly extra-terrestrial in a tiresome alien invasion story that had been done better in earlier, superior Halloween specials. This was particularly true in the 1996 election special 'Citizen Kang', a personal favourite, in which Homer uncovers an alien plot to replace then presidential candidates Bill Clinton and Bob Dole with Kang and Kodos, which leads to some quite blunt (but equally funny) satire along the lines of:

Kent Brockman: Senator Dole, why should people vote for you instead of President Clinton?

Kang: It makes no difference which one of us you vote for. Either way, your planet is doomed. DOOMED!

Kent: Well, a refreshingly frank response there from Senator Bob Dole.

And, when they are unmasked as the "hideous space reptiles" that they really are:

Kodos: It's true, we are aliens. But what are you going to do about it? It's a two-party system; you have to vote for one of us.

Man 7: He's right, this is a two-party system.

Man 2: Well, I believe I'll vote for a third-party candidate.

Kang: Go ahead, throw your vote away.

This impulse for political subversion still endures in the Halloween specials, though, and election time still seems to bring out the best in the Simpsons writers. The most recent "Treehouse of Horror" was first broadcast in the US a few days before Election Day, and boasted an introductory segment in which Homer's efforts at voting for Barack Obama are thwarted at every turn by a "haunted" voting machine that registers each vote for Obama as a vote for John McCain, before turning violent...

The rest of the episode that followed (tired Transformers parody aside) marked something of a return to form, certainly improving on the previous year's effort. This was particularly true of the final segment ('It's the Grand Pumpkin, Milhouse), which paid good-natured homage to another festive animated favourite, the Peanuts specials. This was a literal réanimation, then, which recreated Peanuts' signature animation style for Springfield and recast Springfield's inhabitants as characters from Charles Schultz's cartoons. This kind of playfulness is also evident in what is probably the best gothic sequence to have made a Simpsons appearance in recent years. This was not included in a Halloween special at all, but in a Season 18 episode ('Yokel Chords') in which Bart's story of the so-called "Dark Stanley murders" at school is animated in the style of macabre artist Edward Gorey (whose work has influenced the likes of Tim Burton, for one). This inventive and beautifully animated sequence managed to inject new life into the show's long-standing tradition of paying tribute to the gothic where that year's Halloween special had fallen flat, an upward spiral that continued into the most recent "Treehouse of Horror" itself. It looks like things might be on the up for The Simpsons horror oeuvre, then, and it may well continue on the trajectory envisioned by Kodos in 'Citizen Kang', moving "forward, not backward; upward, not forward; and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!"

JENNY MCDONNELL