To celebrate the latest installment of their long-running Treehouse of Horror episodes — the annual Halloween-themed celebrations of mayhem and gore — Simpsons producers turned to Guillermo del Toro to put his spin on the show’s title sequence.
The acclaimed director of such modern horror classics as Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone — anda diehard Simpsons fan — was more than up to the task. His wondrously entertaining “couch gag” is a densely packed celebration of horror- and sci-fi-cinema.
We went through the footage and put together this collection of movies, characters, and real-life persons referenced in this nearly three-minute clip.
Mutated Springfielders swarm the power plant walls like the zombie hordes of this summers World War Z.
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Chief Wiggum, it seems, has been transformed into the Cyclops from Ray Harryhausen’sThe 7th Voyage of Sinbad.
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Poor Edna Krabappel has the misfortune of sitting next to Alfred Hitchcock and an avian army from The Birds
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Del Toro sneaks in several references to his own movies, including this Hellboy bit, in which a slumbering Karl Kroenen does battle with Groundskeeper Willie’s horned demon scourge
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Del Toro revisits another one of his movies — this time, Blade II: Homer is a Reaper and Carl is the vampire hunter
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More del Toro! Mr. Burns is the Pale Man from Pan’s Labyrinth. Waylon Smithers is his midnight snack.
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Lisa jams with various Phantoms of the Opera and, behind the keyboard, the Phantom of Paradise
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Bart tangles with a multi-tentacled beast straight out of the Cthulhu Mythos …
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…before skating right past Cthulhu creator H.P. Lovecraft, and fellow horror/fantasy greats Edgar Allen Poe, Ray Bradbury (adding some touches to his Illustrated Man), Richard Matheson (trying to ignore an albino mutant from The Omega Man)
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Bart is pursued by a gaggle of monsters and creatures from Universal Pictures’ heyday: Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman, the Mummy, a Zagon from This Island Earth, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, the Bride of Frankenstein, and the Invisible Man
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Maggie is behind the wheel of the killer sedan from the 1977 movie The Car
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Way too many characters tossed in here, among them: Robbie the Robot from Forbidden Planet, Nosferatu, the animated skeletons from Jason and the Argonauts, the Fly, the Half Boy from Freaks, and Klaatu from The Day the Earth Stood Still
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Lisa, dressed as Alice (of Wonderland fame), encounters Futurama‘s Hypnotoad
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Del Toro ends the sequence with a revisit to Pan’s Labyrinth, with Lisa as Ofelia and her parents as the King and Queen of the Underworld