This is my favourite “Treehouse Of Horror” episode. For me, the fun of these episodes is that they have three elements going on at once: 1) They’re genuine horror stories, 2) they’re about the Simpsons, and 3) they’re funny. All three elements have to be going at once to make a great “Treehouse” segment, and they have to do that three times! And I don’t think they ever did that better than they did here, certainly up until now. We’ve talked before about how the “Treehouse” episodes worked to feel like a legitimate horror story in the design (and often a specific kind, like a Hammer Horror), and we’ve talked about the animation kicking it up a notch this season, and both of those ideas come together as the reality-bending movement of the characters takes on both hilarious and horrifying qualities – I think here especially of Homer’s “give me the bat!” rant, the teachers standing over the students, and the fog that turns people inside out. The characters become grotesque, misshapen monsters; this at minimum has to be the grossest “Treehouse” yet.
(There’s also still the traditional funny animation. I love the weird gesture Burns does on “I owe you a Coke.”)
Expanding on that second element, character is a crucial, underrated element of parody. I don’t think there’s a single joke in “The Shinning” at the expense of the movie; it’s all about asking, like, why Homer would go mad, or what Bart would do with a hedge maze, or how he’d react to being locked in a pantry (although my favourite character gag of the segment is Marge responding to “Is Dad going to kill us?” with “We’re just going to have to wait and see.”). Sometimes this, too, rolls into the horror – we’ve known for ages that standards at the school are very, very low, so it seems almost plausible that Skinner would eventually try serving students as food, and his battle with cynicism towards his job is so entrenched that it makes sense that he’d go mad with the taste.
(Oh wait, there’s one exception: “That’s odd. Usually the blood gets off at the second floor.”)
As always, it’s really hard to write about “Treehouse” episodes in the individual; they tend to inspire a whole lot of individual insights that barely tie together as opposed to some all-encompassing insight that a full episode normally does. Each segment is small enough that what it’s doing is really obvious, but long enough to take up a lot of space, a smidgen of content stretched out over a longer period; that’s not a bad thing while watching, but it does make my job here a little difficult. Hopefully it’s not gonna cost me.
Tombstone Gag: “Amusing tombstones”, before giving way to tableaus of various Simpsons character brutally dying.
Couch Gag: Zombie versions of the family sit down before swapping heads.
This episode was written by Greg Daniels, Dan McGrath, David Cohen, and Bob Kushell, and directed by Jim Reardon. That gore I noticed comes from David Mirkin being offended by censorship issues and deliberately pushing the boundaries as much as possible. James Earl Jones cameos as an alternate version of Maggie.
No word on what Stephen King thinks of “The Shinning”. Most people (including me) assume “I’m the first non-Brazilian person to travel through time!” is a reference to something obscure, but as far as I can tell it’s just an odd statement. There’s an equally odd moment where Yeardley Smith tries conveying that Lisa is gigantic but deepening her voice, but Nancy Cartwright doesn’t do the same thing for Bart.
The opening scene is a parody of The Outer Limits. “The Shinning” is a parody of The Shining, and Homer’s attempt to recreate the “Heeeeeeeere’s Johnny!” sequence leads to him recreating both David Letterman and 60 Minutes’ parodies of that moment. “Time And Punishment” parodies Crime And Punishment with its title and the Ray Bradbury short story “A Sound Of Thunder” with its plot. Peabody and Sherman from The Adventures Of ROcky And Bullwinkle cameo. The floor morphing into a screen references both Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Time Bandits. The title of “Nightmare Cafeteria” is a reference to Nightmare Cafe and the plot loosely references Soylent Green. The song at the end is a parody of “One” from A Chorus Line. The fog that turns people inside out is from an episode of the radio show Lights Out.
Iconic Moments: 3. “Urge to kill rising.” | “Quiet you.” | “In fact, you might even say we just ate Uter, and he’s in our stomachs right now! Ha ha! Wait, scratch that one.”
Biggest Laugh: Astoundingly, this episode contains three different scenes that made me weep with laughter as a child and then made me weep with laughter again every time I randomly remembered them as an adult: “Is that the best ye can do?!” | “Dad! Your hand is jammed in the toaster!” | “What the hell are you smilin’ at!”