The ter­ri­fy­ing tale of Tree­house of Horror

The Simp­sons’ lat­est Tree­house of Hor­ror episode opens with a famil­iar joke. Lured to a fog­gy sea­side town by a guide­book titled ​‘10 Places to Vis­it Before You Mys­te­ri­ous­ly Dis­ap­pear’, the tit­u­lar fam­i­ly dis­cov­er they’re to be sac­ri­ficed to an ancient ocean god (“Sponge­bob?!” asks Homer). The myth­i­cal mon­ster Cthul­hu then ris­es from the deep, and Homer chal­lenges him to an eat­ing con­test to deter­mine his family’s fate. Of course, Homer out-eats the giant Love­craft­ian sea crea­ture, because – like the haunt­ed man­sion of 1990’s inau­gur­al Tree­house, which sought to spook the fam­i­ly but end­ed up self-destruc­t­ing to avoid anoth­er spend anoth­er sec­ond in their com­pa­ny – the Simp­sons are often more beast­ly than what­ev­er is meant to be ter­ror­is­ing them.

It’s a twist that has made for some of the show’s best-loved Hal­loween spe­cials. In 1996’s ​‘The Thing and I’, the fam­i­ly are tor­ment­ed by Bart’s malev­o­lent secret broth­er, only for it to be revealed that Bart is the true evil twin. ​“If you want­ed to make Ser­ak the Pre­par­er cry, mis­sion accom­plished,” blub the Simp­sons’ alien abduc­tors in anoth­er ear­ly favourite, ​‘Hun­gry are the Damned’, after the family’s bad behav­iour costs them their tick­et to an out­er space par­adise ​“a thou­sand times greater than what you call ​‘fun’.”

As Lisa puts it at the end of that sto­ry, ​“there were mon­sters… and tru­ly we were them.” That sen­ti­ment could just as eas­i­ly be applied to 1993’s ​‘The Dev­il and Homer Simp­son’, in which Satan (a goat-legged ver­sion of evan­gel­i­cal neigh­bour Ned Flan­ders) sells Homer a dough­nut in exchange for his soul. Here, Homer proves more duplic­i­tous and full of sin than Lucifer him­self. Pre­sent­ed with ​“all the dough­nuts in the world” by Hell’s ​“iron­ic pun­ish­ment divi­sion”, the demon in charge of his tor­ture looks mys­ti­fied as an insa­tiable Homer keeps eat­ing and eat­ing. ​“More!”

For 29 years, Simp­sons fans have been devour­ing Tree­house par­o­dies with a glee not unlike Homer in that dough­nut-feed­ing tor­ture machine. ​“It’s people’s favourite episode that we do every year, the biggest event that we do,” says exec­u­tive pro­duc­er Al Jean, who has worked on every one of the show’s record-break­ing 30 sea­sons. Guiller­mo del Toro, who cre­at­ed a ter­ri­fy­ing spin on the famous open­ing couch gag sequence for 2013’s Tree­house of Hor­ror XXIV, agrees: ​“It’s often my favourite episode of the sea­son. Some of my favourite Simp­sons images and moments over the years come from there.”

When The Simp­sons first aired in 1989, it became an overnight phe­nom­e­non for its hon­est por­trait of a flawed, dys­func­tion­al nuclear fam­i­ly. Tree­house – which debuted three episodes into sea­son two and has been a main­stay of the show ever since – went about ampli­fy­ing that dys­func­tion to often vio­lent extremes. By the time The Simp­sons were par­o­dy­ing The Shin­ing in 1994’s Tree­house of Hor­ror V, instead of throt­tling mem­bers of his fam­i­ly, Homer was chas­ing them with an axe.

Macabre riots of smart cinephile homages to hor­ror films old and new, from Hitch­cock clas­sics to schlocky VHS chillers that time for­got, Tree­house quick­ly became an ingrained part of the Hal­loween pop cul­ture cal­en­dar as The Simp­sons’ pop­u­lar­i­ty bloomed in the ear­ly 1990s. ​“Here you had a fam­i­ly com­e­dy that right out of the gate was one of the most beloved shows in TV his­to­ry. Then three episodes into our sec­ond sea­son, we’re doing this absolute hor­ror show,” recalls Mike Reiss, anoth­er of the long­stand­ing cre­ative forces behind the show. ​“Maggie’s head is spin­ning, fam­i­ly mem­bers are mur­der­ing each oth­er… it was a real leap of faith that broke all real­i­ty of the show. It was an astound­ing thing.”

So how did the biggest fam­i­ly show in Amer­i­ca end up, by its bloody mid-’90s peak, bring­ing can­ni­bal school teach­ers, killer clown dolls, post-apoc­a­lyp­tic mutants and flesh-eat­ing fogs to prime­time TV? Did its bar­rage of riffs on hor­rors from across cin­e­ma his­to­ry inspire a new gen­er­a­tion of view­ers to explore the genre? And exact­ly how is Tree­house in part respon­si­ble for Shrek? Accord­ing to Simp­sons writ­ers, ani­ma­tors, pro­duc­ers and crit­ics, it all start­ed with a comic.

The decade or so pre­ced­ing The Simp­sons saw ​“a real trans­for­ma­tion” in hor­ror cin­e­ma, remem­bers Jean, at the time a stu­dent in Boston. His local cin­e­ma, the Har­vard Square The­atre, used to show two films a day (“Which was fan­tas­tic; well, not so fan­tas­tic for my grades”) and it was here Jean observed a sea change in the genre that primed Amer­i­ca for its first Tree­house. ​“Hor­ror movies used to be known as B‑movies, the kind of things you would watch on Fri­day nights when you were sleep­ing over at friends’ house or what­ev­er. But movies like The Exor­cist in 1973 – one of the finest movies ever made, peri­od – and Hal­loween in 1978 launched a whole new era of hor­rors that were high­er bud­get and scari­er and made by A‑list direc­tors. The 1980s were very dif­fer­ent for the genre.”

“It was a sort of gold­en age for hor­ror in Amer­i­ca,” says Reiss. ​“They seemed to be giv­ing you a new Fred­dy Krueger every week. Man, I loved those days.” As The Simp­sons began to take shape, Jean, Reiss, cre­ator Matt Groen­ing and the rest of the show’s core cre­ative team bond­ed over their shared pas­sion for slash­ers, tak­ing group trips to the cin­e­ma to see Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II and the Night­mare on Elm Street sequels. ​“There was an almost uni­ver­sal love of hor­ror at The Simp­sons,” explains Reiss. ​“We were all unmar­ried men in our twen­ties mak­ing the show. Of course we all loved this stuff.”

Showrun­ner Sam Simon had in his office a col­lec­tion of EC Comics, famous for its ​‘Tales from the Crypt’ and ​‘Weird Sci­ence’ antholo­gies of strange and sin­is­ter hor­ror vignettes. Those comics were a prod­uct of mar­ket research sug­gest­ing sol­diers who served in World War Two no longer want­ed caped cru­saders, crav­ing sex and vio­lence in their read­ing mate­r­i­al instead. ​“The idea was to do some­thing that emu­lat­ed those comics,” recalls ani­ma­tor David Sil­ver­man, one of the three direc­tors respon­si­ble for the first Tree­house. ​“Kang and Kodos, the slob­ber­ing aliens in the sec­ond seg­ment of the first Hal­loween spe­cial, were ripped straight off one of the covers.”

Pair­ing the out­landish tales of EC with the oth­er­world­li­ness and irony of the Twi­light Zone and Stephen King, the first Tree­house episode – a trio of par­o­dies of famous hor­ror nar­ra­tives, set­ting the frame­work for every sub­se­quent Simp­sons Hal­loween spe­cial – was notable for its dar­ing clos­ing spin on the Edgar Allen Poe poem ​‘The Raven’, nar­rat­ed by Darth Vad­er him­self, James Earl Jones. In it, Homer por­trays the poem’s griev­ing pro­tag­o­nist, slow­ly mad­dened by a mis­chie­vous talk­ing bird (Bart, obvi­ous­ly). ​“It was an exper­i­ment, but then the whole show was an exper­i­ment then,” says Reiss.

“It’s my under­stand­ing that right away, audi­ences just real­ly embraced it,” says writer and con­sult­ing pro­duc­er Car­olyn Omine, who joined The Simp­sons in its 12^th sea­son, pen­ning 2000’s ​‘Night of the Dol­phin’ seg­ment and all of Tree­house of Hor­ror XXII in 2011. ​“Just as well, real­ly, because they are seri­ous­ly tough to make. The Hal­loween episode tends to need a real­ly long lead time. It always takes at least nine months to write and ani­mate an episode.” Sil­ver­man esti­mates that they require ​“three times the amount of design work” than a reg­u­lar episode.

“It’s bru­tal­ly hard on the ani­ma­tors,” agrees Reiss. ​“Say one sto­ry is a Jack the Rip­per par­o­dy. All of a sud­den, the ani­ma­tors have got­ta redesign every­one in Spring­field. What does Chief Wig­gum look like in the 18^th cen­tu­ry? What does Homer wear? What does the 18^th cen­tu­ry ver­sion of their home look like? Everything’s got­ta be redesigned. ​‘The Simp­sons are at a Hal­loween par­ty’ is sev­en words for me to write, but demands a crazy amount of think­ing and inven­tion to design. What cos­tumes are they all wear­ing? If Bart is dressed up as a droog from A Clock­work Orange, it might take sev­er­al attempts to nail, unlike every oth­er episode, where we already know what every­one looks like, what all the loca­tions look like.”

Part of Treehouse’s sparkle is down to the cre­ative free­dom it was afford­ed from the get-go. ​“When The Simp­sons was first cre­at­ed, Fox was a young, strug­gling net­work,” says John Ortved, author of ​‘The Simp­sons: An Uncen­sored, Unau­tho­rized His­to­ry’. ​“James L Brooks, the exec pro­duc­er, could not have been more pow­er­ful in Hol­ly­wood. For Fox to get Brooks to bring them a series was a very big deal. They weren’t gonna try to mess with his stuff. The stu­dio might have giv­en notes but The Simp­sons didn’t look at them.”

“We were com­plete­ly left to our own devices,” says Omine. ​“I’ve worked on oth­er shows where they’re inun­dat­ed with ​‘what does the research say’ and all that. ​‘Woah, you haven’t used the catch­phrase by that char­ac­ter!’ If you try to guess what the audi­ence might find fun­ny and inter­est­ing, that’s when you run into trou­ble. Instead, we were allowed to run riot. That came in handy with Tree­house, for sure.”

It cer­tain­ly did: the result­ing Hal­loween spe­cials were free to be thrilling­ly adven­tur­ous. Reg­u­lar Simp­sons nar­ra­tives rifled through pop cul­ture ref­er­ences at a fero­cious pace. The way Tree­house aban­doned the rules, log­ic and style that nor­mal­ly gov­erned over Spring­field allowed the show to lay ref­er­ences on even thick­er and faster than usu­al, occa­sion­al­ly get­ting impres­sive­ly obscure with these nods. ​“Tree­house IV par­o­died Rod Serling’s Night Gallery – a homage not a lot of peo­ple would have under­stood at the time,” says Sil­ver­man. ​“There was anoth­er par­o­dy of David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone we did called ​‘The Ned Zone’, which prob­a­bly had a few peo­ple scratch­ing their heads too. The rule was, even if the audi­ence don’t notice it or under­stand, they’ll feel it.”

Pre-inter­net, with­out fan forums, Red­dit and the like to imme­di­ate­ly inter­pret these episodes’ myr­i­ad homages, the effect was mag­i­cal, sug­gests Jean. ​“It’s fun­ny. Now you can go online and get the whole thing bro­ken down for you and watch the orig­i­nal clip being ref­er­enced in two min­utes. It was a for­eign con­cept back then. It had a bit more mys­tery to it.” Reiss calls these ref­er­ences ​“lit­tle time­bombs. It’s a very com­mon thing for peo­ple to see some­thing on The Simp­sons and 20 years lat­er see the actu­al thing we were par­o­dy­ing. I love the idea that peo­ple see some­thing first and it sticks in their head.” Omine says she can imag­ine Tree­house episodes becom­ing gate­ways for young peo­ple into hor­ror: ​“Gen­er­al­ly, what hap­pens is either peo­ple go, ​‘Oh, they’re par­o­dy­ing that thing I love’ or they’ll be like, ​‘They’re par­o­dy­ing some­thing I don’t know, I ought to check that out.’ We’re very hap­py about that.”

Free of the styl­is­tic and canon­i­cal con­straints of reg­u­lar episodes, in which ​“peo­ple could die, have limbs chopped off with­out a sec­ond thought,” as Omine points out, writ­ers’ imag­i­na­tions went wild as each instal­ment became more hot­ly antic­i­pat­ed than the last, verg­ing into exper­i­men­ta­tion and often meta com­men­tary. Tree­house has been the place over the years The Simp­sons has been most self-reflec­tive on its own place in pop cul­tur­al landscape.

In 1991, the huge­ly pop­u­lar Monkey’s Paw sto­ry deliv­ered not only some of Treehouse’s fun­ni­est ever lines (“Homer, there’s some­thing I don’t like about that sev­ered hand”) but also a hilar­i­ous swipe at the show’s own cul­tur­al and com­mer­cial sat­u­ra­tion. At the peak of Bart­ma­nia, as Fox’s mer­chan­dis­ing machine went into over­drive and Simp­sons toys, lunch­box­es and every­thing in between filled store shelves across Amer­i­ca, the episode saw Bart use a mag­i­cal monkey’s paw to wish fame and for­tune for the fam­i­ly. ​“They used to be cute and fun­ny but now they make me sick,” com­plains a char­ac­ter as the family’s nov­el­ty calyp­so albums and over­priced t‑shirts (“18 bucks for this?! For­get it!”) becomes a plight on society.

Else­where, seg­ments have made com­plex cri­tiques of Amer­i­can con­sumerism. The sto­ry ​‘Attack of the 50ft Eye­sores’ sees adver­tis­ing fig­ures come to life, ram­pag­ing across Spring­field. They’re defeat­ed when Lisa helps write a jin­gle advis­ing ter­rorised cit­i­zens: ​“Just don’t look, just don’t look.” Ortved claims that sto­ry con­tains, ​“Deep truths about cap­i­tal­ism and mar­ket­ing that I think about all the time today. We’re at a point where neg­a­tive and pos­i­tive atten­tion are real­ly equiv­a­lent in the media. If you do some­thing bad, you get to become a mil­lion­aire. If you brag about sex­u­al­ly assault­ing women, you get to be pres­i­dent. What’s good atten­tion and bad atten­tion with social media and the way we see media now, there’s real­ly a thin line, if there’s any line at all. The truth they instil into this tiny lit­tle joke is that the only way to tri­umph over that is to give it zero attention.”

‘The Shin­ning’ – a spin on Stan­ley Kubrick’s 1980 hor­ror that’s reg­u­lar­ly vot­ed the best Tree­house sto­ry ever – appar­ent­ly won the seal of approval from the direc­tor him­self in 1994. ​“After he died, we found out he got a case of The Simp­sons deliv­ered to him,” says Jean (a lengthy trib­ute to Kubrick fol­lowed in Tree­house XXV a year lat­er). In the same episode, Bart and Lisa uncov­er a plot to cook unruly Spring­field Ele­men­tary stu­dents and feed their remains to oth­er pupils in one of the most chill­ing seg­ments in Tree­house his­to­ry. This was all down to that era’s showrun­ner, David Mirkin, who – rebelling against tele­vi­sion reg­u­la­to­ry board the FCC, who were in the midst of a cru­sade to curb car­toon vio­lence – filled that year’s show with as much vio­lence as pos­si­ble. ​“He loved dis­mem­ber­ment and gore,” recalls Jean, ​“I remem­ber us think­ing, ​‘Oh, he’s going a lit­tle too far here.’ But it obvi­ous­ly end­ed up so great.”

Then there’s ​‘Homer Cubed’, which famous­ly sees Homer escape into an alter­nate, CGI dimen­sion to avoid Pat­ty and Sel­ma. The seg­ment land­ed a month before Toy Sto­ry was released and, in a strange twist of fate, had a hand in the rise of Dream­Works Ani­ma­tions. Intent on cre­at­ing a CG ani­ma­tion after see­ing a Dire Straits music video, Sil­ver­man was able to enlist a com­pa­ny called Pacif­ic Data Images, who pro­vid­ed the then cut­ting-edge com­put­er graph­ics for free as an advert for their com­pa­ny. It worked: Dream­Works lat­er acquired PDI, lead­ing to a spate of CG ani­mat­ed films includ­ing Antz, Shrek and Kung-Fu Pan­da. (Sil­ver­man, inci­den­tal­ly, went to work for Dream­Works’ rivals Pixar, co-direct­ing Mon­sters, Inc. in 2001).

These Hal­loween sto­ries worked because although Tree­house broke from the style and con­ti­nu­ity of reg­u­lar Simp­sons episodes, it nev­er under­mined or upend­ed its char­ac­ters. It makes sense when Marge falls in love with Homer in 1992’s King Kong par­o­dy, because when isn’t Homer an over­sized ape who Marge finds a way to love despite his ram­pag­ing id? Even the Tree­house of Hor­ror V alter­na­tive real­i­ty in which Flan­ders is the over­lord of earth rings true to that char­ac­ter: when he greets his army of min­ions, he does so with a cheery ​“hide­ly-ho, slaverinos!”

But find­ing those sto­ries – hor­ror nar­ra­tives that the char­ac­ters we know and love can authen­ti­cal­ly fill – has become hard­er over the years. The writ­ing staff, Reiss insists, don’t want to just churn out Simp­sonised ver­sions of what­ev­er block­buster hor­ror made a splash at the box office that year. ​“The movie It is about a scary clown, and we’ve got Krusty – but we didn’t do it. We don’t try and jump on the obvi­ous thing.” The advent of the inter­net, meme cul­ture and YouTube is a fac­tor here. ​“We didn’t want to par­o­dy that because by the time we get our par­o­dy out, every­one will have par­o­died it.”

Back in the show’s ear­ly days, con­tin­ues Reiss, ​“It used to be very fun because we just had the whole world of hor­ror to choose from. We’d say, ​‘Okay, let’s make fun of this beloved old movie here, let’s do that beloved Twi­light Zone episode there, then maybe we’ll do an orig­i­nal thing.’ But I real­ly think we’ve kind of scraped the earth now. We’re writ­ing our 30^th one now. Thir­ty times three seg­ments per episode? That’s 90 arche­typ­al hor­ror sto­ries we’ve had to come up with. It just gets hard­er and hard­er, and when I see what we wind up par­o­dy­ing some­times, it’s like, ​‘Alright – we’re out of ideas, folks.’”

It’s easy to under­stand Reiss’ sen­ti­ment, and tempt­ing to extrap­o­late it to the show as a whole (accu­sa­tions of declin­ing qual­i­ty and imag­i­na­tion have dogged The Simp­sons since rough­ly its 10^th sea­son). This year’s Tree­house also fea­tured par­o­dies of M Night Shyamalan’s Split, Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers and Juras­sic Park, receiv­ing low view­ing fig­ures (19 per cent down on 2017, accord­ing to Dead­line) from the pub­lic and despon­dent sighs from crit­ics. As Den­nis Perkins wrote in The AV Club: ​“More often than not in these late days, the year­ly Tree­house of Hor­ror func­tions less like a glee­ful­ly dis­rep­utable com­e­dy recess for writ­ers look­ing to exper­i­ment with their less-rep­utable ideas than just anoth­er oblig­a­tion to fill out The Simp­sons’ nev­er-end­ing 23-episode sea­son man­date with some genre-spe­cif­ic pop cul­ture ref­er­ences.” This review and oth­ers like it allege that the fact the films being spoofed are bare­ly hor­ror films is proof that Tree­house is feel­ing tired. This accu­sa­tion is noth­ing new for Omine.

“In 2011, I wrote a very con­tro­ver­sial par­o­dy of The Div­ing Bell and the But­ter­fly, about a man trapped in his own body. The movie’s not an actu­al hor­ror movie but it is hor­ri­fy­ing,” she says. ​“That was this weird art­house movie and I feel like our ver­sion was very touch­ing: Homer can only com­mu­ni­cate through fart­ing but finds him­self able to say things to Marge that was nev­er able to say through words. Some very angry fans con­front­ed me about why that wasn’t a hor­ror movie soon after.”

Reiss also feels this is unfair. ​“Lists on the inter­net down­grade Tree­house seg­ments that aren’t from that genre: like, hey, Trans­form­ers is not a hor­ror movie. Well, hey, we know!” He points out that ​‘Time and Pun­ish­ment’ – not only a clas­sic Tree­house sto­ry but an all-time clas­sic Simp­sons sto­ry – in which Homer acci­den­tal­ly invents a toast­er that can zap him through time, is more sci-fi than hor­ror, but is still raved about on the same lists.

Ortved has anoth­er the­o­ry as to why Tree­house might seem less potent in 2018. ​“For the first sev­en or eight years or so, The Simp­sons had to be pret­ty tied to real­i­ty. There were rules to that uni­verse. If Homer fell down a hill, he had to be real­ly hurt. In lat­er sea­sons, the Simp­sons became unmoored from that. I think of the new intro­duc­tion to the show, which debuted about 10 years ago or so, the bul­lies are saw­ing the head off a stat­ue that falls onto Ralph’s head and he walks away kind of con­fused. I think that shows the entire devo­lu­tion of the show from that real­i­ty. At the begin­ning of the series they had an episode where Bart had to remove the head of that stat­ue and had to do it with a saw and lug it around town and it was this huge heavy thing.”

His point is that the bound­ary between the fan­tas­ti­cal Tree­house of Hor­rors and reg­u­lar Simp­sons episodes has become blurred, tak­ing away the nov­el­ty of these Hal­loween spe­cials in which the impos­si­ble is explored. ​“There used to be rules to The Simp­sons,” says Ortved. ​“Once a year with Tree­house they got to play with those rules. They could do things they couldn’t nor­mal­ly do, which I think is what made them fun for the writ­ers and fun for the view­ers. I’m not sure that’s there now.”

Crit­i­cism of ​‘New Simp­sons’, as every­thing after sea­son 10 is referred to by fans, over­looks a lot of mem­o­rable Tree­house moments: a twist­ed 2017 seg­ment, ​‘Mmm Homer’, in which the char­ac­ter devel­ops a can­ni­bal­is­tic taste for his own flesh (“it was just this strange, very, very dis­turb­ing idea,” remem­bers Jean), and del Toro’s ref­er­ence-packed open­ing sequence in Tree­house XXIV to name a few. ​“For me, as a Simp­sons fanat­ic, that was a dream come true,” says the Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water direc­tor. ​“I had been cam­paign­ing for a small cameo as Bum­ble­bee Man’s broth­er from Guadala­jara. This was even bet­ter. Tree­house had not had a couch gag ever. So I sug­gest­ed to Al and Matt that I design a bizarro world one in which we hit the same beats as the nor­mal one but twist every gag around.” The result was a ​“love let­ter to clas­sic mon­sters,” he explains.

Will The Simp­sons’ showrun­ners ever decide to make Tree­house, in the words of Bart’s raven, ​“nev­er­more”? Jean says it’s unlike­ly. ​“Tree­house 30 will be episode 666. It’s worked out so per­fect­ly – it’s insane. After all these years and all the per­mu­ta­tions, it’s worked out that way. Crazy. I’m still excit­ed for the Hal­loween show every every year. And I find that The Simp­sons works if there’s prob­lems in the world that are affect­ing fam­i­lies and unfor­tu­nate­ly that’s got­ten worse instead of bet­ter. Good for the show, bad for humanity.”

Reiss is sim­i­lar­ly upbeat about Treehouse’s future, despite the strug­gle involved in con­tin­u­ing to cre­ate them. ​“Fans love it, and as hard as they are to do, at least we go, ​‘Alright, that’s what one episode of the Simp­sons is going to be this year.’ A lot of peo­ple try to think of us as artists, or think of the show as ​‘craft­ed.’ But to me, it’s always a 22-minute hole that we shov­el jokes into every week. And we’ve got 22 graves we got­ta fill in every week. It’s nice to know one of them is going to be the Hal­loween show.”

Ortved also sees no end in sight for The Simp­sons or its for­ays into hor­ror, though he thinks it’s pos­si­ble that one day it may tran­scend the 22-minute TV show for­mat. ​“I wrote in my book that The Simp­sons will be like Mick­ey Mouse. There’s already a Simp­sons land theme park area, at Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios. I think even­tu­al­ly they will live as this pop cul­ture touch­stone that’s maybe not as big as Mick­ey Mouse. I’m not smart enough to know what the future of media will look like, but I know they will be icon­ic with­in that, and Tree­house of Hor­ror will be part of that legacy.”

Until then, expect the dough­nut-feed­ing tor­ture machine-like deploy­ment of Tree­house of Hor­ror episodes to con­tin­ue, and for them to con­tin­ue to be a dri­ving force of what makes The Simp­sons a prime time TV insti­tu­tion in its 30^th year and beyond. ​“Believe me,” says Jean. ​“If I could do 22 of them a year, I would.”