The Simpsons' Treehouse Of Horror Tradition Almost Ended Before It Could Begin
Fun trivia! For its first 12 installments, the annual "Treehouse of Horror" episodes of "The Simpsons" were merely called "The Simpsons Halloween Special." It wouldn't be until 2002 that "The Simpsons" would adopt the more familiar "Treehouse" title for its horror shows.
Starting with the show's second season, the "Simpsons" showrunners used their Halloween episodes to tell shorter, more outlandish stories wherein fantasy elements could be more openly employed, monsters could coexist with the title family, and the characters could die horrible, bloody deaths. For the most part, the "Treehouse of Horror" episodes were anthology shows, with each installment featuring three brief segments, many of them openly ripped off from "The Twilight Zone." Later on, "Treehouse" would be used to lampoon movies in a more general fashion, as when Homer (Dan Castellaneta) and Marge (Julie Kavner) re-enacted the 2005 action film "Mr. & Mrs. Smith."
As of this writing, there have been 34 "Treehouse of Horror" episodes, including an additional recent special called "Not It." A 35th is scheduled to air on November 5, 2023, and a 36th, coming out of the show's upcoming season, is inevitable.
As with anything with such longevity, the "Treehouse of Horror" episodes have become a Halloween tradition, and many "Simpsons" fans hold the "Treehouses" in high esteem.
According to a recent retrospective in Mel Magazine, however, the traditional nearly didn't come to pass. The first Halloween Special was initially intended to be a one-time event. The segments were constructed in a hurry, based only on show creator Matt Groening's idea that there be an episode wherein the Simpson kids Bart (Nancy Cartwright) and Lisa (Yeardley Smith) tell ghost stories. One of the episode's writers, Jay Kogen, recalled how it all came together.
There's no tradition like a new tradition
Kogan spelled out how the idea came together, and how the showrunners workshopped the idea, saying:
"[Groening] had an idea for an episode where the kids tell ghost stories in a tree house. [...] It wasn't met with much excitement, but my partner Wally [Wolodarsky] and I championed it over and over until Sam Simon, the showrunner, finally agreed. For Matt, the idea was kids telling stories. Sam decided it should be more about the archness of the stories themselves. It gave us a chance to be even weirder and break out of the sitcom form we were in most of the time. It was meant as a one-off, but it was so much fun we did it again the next year and it became a tradition."
Kogan may also take credit for creating two of the most revisited Halloween characters on "The Simpsons," Kang (Harry Shearer) and Kodos (Castellaneta). Kang and Kodos are two nine-foot-tall, cycloptic squid-like aliens who constantly drool and cackle about the grim fate of humankind. They were introduced in a segment called "Hungry Are the Damned," which heavily spoofed elements from the 1962 "Twilight Zone" episode "To Serve Man." The title of that episode (spoilers) was revealed to be the title of an alien cookbook. Kogan was proud of his twist on the original, saying:
"When [the Simpsons] discovered the [cook]book, it kept changing its meaning when they dusted off more of the title. It goes from 'How to Cook Humans' to 'How to Cook for Humans' to 'How to Cook Forty Humans' to 'How to Cook for Forty Humans.'"
Kogan also notes that he drew the initial designs for Kang and Kodos, a monumental achievement indeed.
The formula
Because the anthology of the first Halloween Special was so effective, and because the writers were eager to work within the short-form structure, the "Treehouse of Horror" format almost immediately became immutable. Writer/producer Bill Oakley was able to quickly rattle off the formula that the crew would follow every Halloween, almost to a T. Oakley said:
"There would be a warning or wraparound up front (though as the episodes got longer these sometimes got cut for time) and three one-act segments. The other traditions were obviously everyone having a funny Halloween name in the credits, and for a time, there was a thing with funny tombstones in the opening. But again, these ended up getting cut for time when we were running the show. Plus, the tombstones were notoriously hard to come up with."
The first five or six "Treehouses" contained slow pans through a cemetery, with the tombstones bearing topical names like "American Workmanship." Even early on, one tombstone merely said "Funny Tombstone Joke," indicating that ideas wore thin pretty easily. For the first, second, third, and fifth Halloweens, Marge would introduce the show in front of a red curtain, warning audiences that tonight's episode was going to be really scary. That tradition was abandoned quickly.
"Not It," a spoof of Stephen King's "It" from 2022, was the first Halloween special not to be an anthology show. However, to make sure that audiences were still provided with their usual, annual traditions, "The Simpsons" aired the 34th anthology-based "Treehouse of Horror" the following week.
New episodes of "The Simpsons" premiere every Sunday on Fox, and stream the next day on Hulu.