Although it’s been well over half-a-decade since I’ve tuned into Fox’s Sunday night animation, every now and then there will be a gag or a cameo appearance I’ll catch after the fact. This morning, however, one of the most impressive sequences in recent memory has arrived a few days early. Ahead of this Sunday’s Treehouse of Horror XXIV, the annual Halloween-themed episode of The Simpsons, we’ve got a major treat.
The crew brought on none other than Guillermo del Toro to craft a three-minute opening for the episode, which took many months to put together. Riffing on countless horror entries, from The Shining to his very own Pan’s Labyrinth, it’s a wildly fun preview to get you into the holiday mood. One can check it out below, along with a quote from del Toro himself, speaking to EW.
“The Simpsons titles are so iconic and yet they’ve never been riffed in this vein,” he says. “I really wanted to land the connections between the [show’s] set pieces and the titles and some of the most iconic horror movies, and intersperse them with some of my stuff in there for pure joy. For example the idea that Ms. Krabappel could be outside the school with Alfred Hitchcock which is a reference to the sequence in The Birds that happens outside of the school in Bodega Bay. To use Chief Wiggum as the Cyclops from Harryhausen, dipping the [Lard Lad] donut in a water tank, to have the nuclear spill from Mr. Burns’ plant create zombies — all of this stuff seems to make sense to interconnect. If Homer really gets a radioactive isotope, he could turn into a reaper from Blade. Or the famous shot that is always in the titles — Maggie driving and then you pull back and there’s Marge driving, right? But in this case Maggie is driving, and she’s driving the car from the horror movie from the 70s called The Car, which is one of my favorite guilty pleasure B-movies. And what if Lisa is in the music class, but she’s in the music class with every Phantom of the Opera ever made? It was a unique opportunity.”
What references did you spot?