The Simpsons: 10 Best Treehouse Of Horror Episodes

The fifth Halloween special tops the list and it’s not hard to see why. From start to finish it’s the perfect All Hallow’s anthology.

The Shinning is the greatest parody of Kubrick’s masterpiece that there’s ever been. Loving recreations of shots from the movie abound, starting with the top down shot of the Simpsons’ car navigating the mountain trail, and ending with the entire family frozen in the Overlook maze. The blood getting off at the wrong floor is fabulous, and Homer’s “no beer and no TV” meltdown, with the lightning revealing the scrawled writing on the walls, is genuinely a better version of the original scene from the movie.

In the sci-fi shenanigans of Time and Punishment, Homer proves to be the worst person to entrust the stability of the temporal continuum to. His inadvertent bug and fish squishings result in catastrophic consequences, the most dreadful being a totalitarian world overseen by Ned Flanders. This story is four minutes brimming with imagination and hilarity, from a timely downpour of donuts to a lobotomised Moe.

And we end on the grisly finale Nightmare Cafeteria. The cannibalistic teachers of Springfield Elementary turning the students into Sloppy Jimbos and Uterbraten is as funny as it is horrific, and keep an eye out for the series’ best cookbook gag - ‘The Joy of Cooking Milhouse’.

Aside from these three sellar stories, there’s also the episode’s musical finale involving a fog that turns people inside out, and poor Willie being axed to death in each of the three tales. Superb.