The Simpsons: 10 Best Ever Treehouse Of Horror Stories
Don't have a cow, everyone.
The Treehouse of Horror formula has mutated a great deal since the first one back in 1990: from being fairly straight-ish retellings of classic horror tales ((like The Raven) to parodies of contemporary horror films and tropes, and then on to faintly bewildering takes on Dr Seuss without quite enough jokes in (Oh, The Places Youll Doh!).
It might be a little old hat now, but in its day the Treehouse of Horror episodes pulled in a good three or four million more viewers than the standard episodes surrounding them and, apart from anything else, really allowed the writing team to flex their collective muscles. Given the freedom to do basically anything they wanted in a mini-episode, up to and including turning the entire principle cast inside out with poisonous fog, they strained at the edges of what family cartoons were meant to do.
The latitude which a totally consequence-free sandbox environment gives to the writers can go either one of two ways: either it's a self-indulgent mess with more vapid cultural references than actual jokes; or we get extraordinarily imaginative re-jiggings of horror classics which basically ruin the original for us forever because it's now impossible not to think of Groundskeeper Willie as Freddy Krueger. This list is all about the latter.