Now this is how you mark Halloween everyone!
Particularly if you’re Matt Groening and you want your then-latest Treehouse of Horror intro – this was for the 2013 special – to include everything from zombies to mummies to mutants and apocalyptic visions of a hellish future.
Hire master storyteller Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Crimson Peak), ask him to throw in pretty much everything horror-oriented he can conceive of – and remember this man not only has a prodigious imagination and vast storehouse of horror knowledge, he knows how to use it elegantly and well – and then some such as:
- Zombies, most likely from George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (brains!)
- Giant robots and monsters duking it out (Pacific Rim)
- The Birds with Mrs Crabapple playing the part of a soon-to-be ornithophobic Tippi Hedren
- Mr Burns and Smithers as the Pale Man and fairy from Pan’s Labyrinth
- Maggie being scanned as 666 at the supermarket checkout
- Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein’s Monster and Mummy, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, Lon Chaney Jr’s The Wolfman, Gillman from the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Claude Rains’ Invisible Man.
- Even the robot from Lost in Space!
There’s a ton of brilliantly-clever references crammed into this short opening sequence, making it a joy to watch again and again – see Simpsons Wiki for the first list of references – while you thank your lucky stars you don’t live in an horrific Springfield.
Or do you? Shhhh – DON’T … LOOK … BACK …