Halloween is quickly approaching, and this week’s Trick or Flick takes a slight detour away from cinema, and features four of my top picks for Halloween-themed television episodes.
The Simpsons—“Halloween of Horror”
Halloween usually means another segment of The Simpsons’ “Treehouse of Horror,” however, on Oct. 18 The Simpsons aired their very first, real, Halloween episode, and they nailed it. The episode is also one of the best Simpsons episodes in general, with heart warming character development and a refreshingly solid plotline.
The episode plays on an emotional display of father-daughter love, and brings the viewer closer into the hearts of Homer and Lisa. Though it has taken the series this long to give us a Halloween episode, this episode has brought The Simpsons back down to earth for its fans, and will most likely become a classic over the next decade.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer—“Fear Itself”
“Fear Itself” is arguably one of the best Halloween episodes to air in the realm of television. First aired in 1999, this episode features a haunted house that comes to life. The Buffy gang head to a college Halloween party, hosted at a frat house, when a frat boy draws a demonic symbol on the floor of the party room as decoration and accidentally releases a demon. Everyone at the party, including Buffy and her friends, becomes trapped in the house when all of the doors and windows disappear. All of the decorations in the house become real, including the creepy slasher skeleton and a decorative head that sits at the house’s entrance. As the episode plays out, each character’s true fears are revealed as part of their reality in the house. Leave it to Joss Whedon to add an existential twist to a good, old-fashioned Halloween episode.
Boy Meets World—“And Then There Was Shawn”
This episode wasn’t aired as a Halloween episode, though it’s included in this list because it was the best horror-themed episode that a sitcom has ever produced. It is also one of the best episodes of the entire series. “And Then There Was Shawn” pays tribute to a bunch of Slasher films, including Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer. Each character is killed off throughout the episode, and the killer isn’t revealed until the end. Jennifer Love Hewitt also makes a guest appearance as the episode’s main “screamer”—a scream that became famous in I Know What You Did Last Summer. The plotline follows a deeper subplot that comments on the state of Cory and Topanga’s relationship, and the way it has affected the rest of the gang.
Goosebumps—“The Haunted Mask”
One of the scariest Goosebumps episodes to air, “The Haunted Mask” tells the story of a young girl, Carly Beth Caldwell, who steals a Halloween mask from a mask shop in order to scare a few bullies at school. Carly doesn’t know that the mask is truly evil, and it slowly begins to take over her body. When she wears the mask to scare her brother, her voice changes and she has trouble removing the mask from her head. The mask’s personality becomes Carly’s, and she finds herself unwillingly terrorizing her neighbourhood. The mask then becomes stuck to Carly and morphs into her face, becoming a part of her body. Just when Carly thinks she’s figured it out, the episode ends in a horrifying twist.