Halloween-o-rama: Treehouse of Horror mini-marathon

Every year, usually around November, The Simpsons indulges its writers and their penchant for dorkiness and goes off the rails with a Halloween-themed anthology episode, a 'Treehouse of Horror' (I know you know all this, but pretend you don't for the sake of introduction).

And these segments are usually hilarious. I love them so much that right now they are the only episodes I still look forward to watching, despite them being unable to avoid the decline in quality that affects all new Simpsons episodes.

Because I love them so, and it's that time of year, I watched four classic episodes: 'Treehouse of Horror' numbers III-VI. In rewatching them for the umpteenth time, I think what makes them so funny is the writer's sinister adjustment of their characters' general...well, character. It's not just The Simpsons finding themselves in a horror movie setting; their personalities subtly adjust with the story to make it genuinely-if-only-slightly creepy. They approach the terror and weird goings-on with such an emotional detachment that it adds a tinge of real horror. Take this exchange between Marge and Bart and Lisa in 'Nightmare Cafeteria', segment 3 of 'Treehouse of Horror V':

     Lisa: Mom!  Mom!  You've gotta help: they're cooking kids in the
           school cafeteria!
    Marge: Listen, kids: you're eight and ten years old now.  I can't be
           fighting all your battles for you.
     Bart: But Mom --
    Marge: No buts!  You march right back to that school, look them
           straight in the eye, and say "Don't eat me"!
Bart+Lisa: [disappointed] OK.

Marge's lack of empathy sucks the obvious solution out of the episode, duh, because she's usually a loving, doting, overprotective mother. But here she also lacks any faculty to see a problem, and when as a kid you can't trust any adults around you, that's kind of scary. The kids are doomed because the adults have lost their ability to reason - not just the teachers who are eating them, but the ones who are supposed to protect them. And this is usually the case with many of the characters in all the 'Treehouse' episodes, where even someone as reckless as Homer loses his already diminished ability to think critically as an adult. It's in the details, as this throwaway line in 'Dial Z for Zombies', segment three from 'Treehouse of Horror III,' shows:

Bart: Dad, you killed zombie Flanders!

Homer: He was a zombie?

But it's not just the murder, the zombies, or the hidden dimensions that appear out of nowhere and are never explained that make these seasonal episodes different. A classic 'Treehouse' segment is a carefully manicured bit of nonsense, sending up not just horror movie tropes but social reactions to onscreen violence, pop culture rules, and even the characters themselves.

My marathon ran a pretty long gamut, from episodes devoted to clever meta-jokes on The Simpsons universe ('Homer³') to actual, pretty horrifying depictions of cartoon violence ('Nightmare Cafeteria' is soaked in blood, and in every segment of 'Treehouse of Horror V' Groundskeeper Willy gets an axe to the back). But looking back on them, I don't think there's even one 'Treehouse' episode that came out in the Nineties that I don't find clever and hilarious through and through. It's comfort food in a way that a hard-earned pillowcase of candy was for me as a kid: a super fun indulgence filled with everything you love, enjoyed in a weird costume just for Halloween.

I'm of the opinion that 'Treehouse of Horror IV' is one of the best episodes of The Simpsons in general, so that's something. But if I was to rank my top 10 segments, including those I didn't watch for this mini-marathon, this would be it:

1. Time and Punishment ('Treehouse of Horror V')
2. Citizen Kang (VII)
3. The Devil and Homer Simpson (IV)
4. The Raven (I)
5. Lisa's Nightmare (the Monkey Paw segment, II)
6. Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace (VI)
7. The Shinning (V)
8. The Homega Man (VIII)
9. Homer³ (VI)
10. The Thing and I (VII)

Honorable mentions go to "Life's a Glitch, Then You Die" (X), "Bart Simpson's Dracula" (IV), and "Hungry are the Damned" (I).