The Simpsons: 10 Best Treehouse Of Horror Episodes
Ned Flanders as Satan? Homer in 3-D? The Joy of Cooking Milhouse? Which Treehouse will be top?
It's Halloween, and there are plenty of ways to celebrate it. Maybe that's dressing up as a zombie and partying with other costumed zombies. Maybe it's lighting candles and trying out some incantations you found at the back of large book.
If you're really out of ideas this year, you can guarantee you can turn on a TV in any country in the world and find a Treehouse of Horror episode of The Simpsons to tide you over for 22 spooky minutes.
Out of the 32 Halloween specials, there are quite a few that just aren't very good; an unfortunate symptom of the show's wildly fluctuating quality over the decades. But, the top 10 are all solid slices of Halloween spookiness.
Some Treehouse episodes just missed out due to one poor segment letting down an otherwise strong line-up (see Starship Poopers in Treehouse IX). Whereas sometimes you'll have an absolute gem of a standalone segment, like It's the Grand Pumpkin, Milhouse, hidden amongst mediocre ones.
Nonetheless, here are the best of the bunch - 10 anthologies containing 30 spine-tingling and rib-tickling stories. Expect movie parodies, Twilight Zone riffs, and plenty of Kang and Kodos.
10. Treehouse XIII
Season 14 is by no means vintage Simpsons.
Six seasons since the golden age of The Simpsons had ended, the show’s decline was starting to become apparent. But this Halloween special holds up as one of the better of Springfield’s spooky anthologies, and is notable as having the only title card in any of the Halloween specials to refer to itself as a “Treehouse of Horror”.
Our first tale, Send in the Clones, is a strong story full of lovely sight gags, wherein Homer buys an evil hammock from the “hammock man” to create a swarm of Homer clones. The shot of Peter Griffin standing amongst the Homer Simpson clones still gets a chuckle, and the clones lacking belly buttons is a nice sci-fi detail.
The next tale, involving Lisa ridding Springfield of guns thus putting them at the mercy of zombie cowboys, is the weakest of the three, although the faux-moral that gun violence solves all problems is darkly amusing.
Finally is The Island of Dr. Hibbert, another decent story, packed with wonderful, anthropomorphic sight gags. Frink as a roast turkey, Ned as a half-man half-cow asking Homer to milk him, and Disco Shrew are but a few of the man-beast hybrids that populate Hibbert’s eerie island.
Oh yeah, and Homer shamelessly has sex with the cat-creature version of Marge. Very shamelessly.