It might have been all a massive coincidence, but for a while there, Groundskeeper Willie seemed to be one of those Simpsons characters who was intrinsically tied to the Halloween season. While it's not altogether clear if the writers were working him in intentionally, a la Kodos and Kang, he appeared in every "Treehouse of Horror" from II to VIII (I think IX may finally have broken his streak, but if there's a Willie appearance in that episode that's slipped my mind, by all means pipe up in the comments). Whether by design or not, it was nice having this through line for the character in the early Halloween specials, particularly as he seemed to be getting increasingly centremost roles with every passing year. In "II" and "III" he had minor cameos as a disgruntled gravedigger, then in "IV" he was a prominent passenger (and fake-out threat) on the gremlin-ravaged school bus, before graduating to play the equivalent of Dick Hallorann in The Simpsons' take on The Shining in "V". I don't think there's much contention as to where Willie's run as a Halloween tradition peaked, however. Next October, when the series finally tackled Nightmare on Elm Street, he got to be Freddy fucking Krueger. And I'd at least like to think it wasn't a coincidence that Willie went from being the butchered would-be hero of "V" (in all three segments!) to a homicidal boogeyman with a razor-sharp axe of his own to grind. On the one hand, the casting was probably motivated in order to tie in with Freddy's own blue collar backstory as a boiler room operator, but it wouldn't be half as satisfying seeing Willie go this malignantly apeshit over the Simpson children if not for the phenomenonally raw deal he'd had trying to protect them the previous Halloween. Are there any other characters who might have worked in the role of Freddy? I've no doubt Sideshow Bob would have yielded his own perfectly wonderful take on the character, and Ned's donning of the Krueger gloves in "Cape Feare" does have me kind of curious to see how much further he could go with that whole energy. But rightfully, this was all Willie's privilege. He'd earned it.
And Willie does make for a convincing Freddy analogue, which is perhaps the most surprising thing about the segment - they managed to make the character legitimately spine-chilling. No small feat, given that in the series proper he's depicted as this predominantly comic lackey to Seymour Skinner and - his ability to wrestle timber wolves with his bare hands notwithstanding - is basically benign. But then Willie also has a savage temper, an uncouth demeanour and an endless heap of eccentricities, and that's something this segment really manages to tap into and exploit in order to bring out this latent dark side to the Scottish janitor. This is where I feel that "Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace" triumphs over "The Shinning", in terms of adapting its source material into a viable scenario for the Simpsons cast. As brilliantly-observed and as lovingly drawn as those parodies of Stanley Kubrick's picture are, "The Shinning" always plays conspicuously like the family acting out roles in a story that is decidedly not their own. When Homer goes nuts and takes to chasing his family with an axe, he gets down the cartoonish fever of Jack Nicholson's rampage beautifully, but it never feels like anything less than Homer being used as a vessel for parodying Nicholson, as opposed to Homer doing anything that could be deemed conceivably Homer. Not so with Willie as Freddy Krueger. He's no more a supernatural serial killer than Homer is a scenery-chewing axe murderer, but he seizes the part with so much malevolent relish that I almost feel that we're witnessing a valid alternative trajectory for the character. He isn't doing a slavish recreation of Robert Englund's shtick - this is still recognisably Willie throughout, with all of his dialogue belted out in Dan Castelleneta's comically exaggerated Scottish accent - but he nails all the most important beats, not least Freddy's characteristically smart-alecky sense of humor. One of the qualities that always set Freddy apart as a slasher villain (other than his unique gimmick of playing cat and mouse with his victims in their sleep) was his verboseness - unlike Jason Vorhees and Michael Myers, who were both silent stalkers, Freddy loved to torment his quarries with cutting quips and gleeful rejoinders, and Willie proves himself to be more than up to that challenge. I particularly like the taunt he hurls at the Latin-savvy Martin before throttling him with an elasticated tongue: "You've mastered a dead tongue...but can you handle a live one?!" He's well fun - as any character filling in for Freddy should be.
"Nightmare" is notable for being the "Treehouse of Horror" canon's first really concentrated foray into lampooning the slasher picture, a genre that had, at the time, fallen sharply out of fashion (the fact that we were six Halloween shows in before The Simpsons considered it as spoof material may well be a testament to that), although Wes Craven, creator of Nightmare on Elm Street, was all poised to breathe new life into the formula the following year with the innovative Scream. Given the rules of the game, it comes as no surprise that "Nightmare" is by far the most viscerally nasty of the "VI" offerings. The deaths in "Attack of The 50-Foot Eyesores" are unsettling, but (other than Santa's Little Helper's) are as fundamentally ludicrous as you would expect from a massacre dished out by giant man-eating peanuts and realty-shilling devils, while "Homer3" eschews brutality altogether in favour of atmospheric sombreness. "Nightmare", though, manages to work in a few genuinely grisly details into the mix, right from the beginning of the segment, when Bart wakes up to find slash marks across his chest. And what's a slasher with no pointed reminder of just how rapidly and how messily a human being can be transformed into a pallid corpse? Martin is actually the only child casualty of the segment, but his drawn-out choking demise more than meets our quotient for ghastliness, a shining example of how a death doesn't require blood or splatter to be horrific. (As a bonus, it also manages to cram in homages to multiple Freddy kills - the specific manner in which Martin expires is reminiscent of how Freddy offs Toy Newkirk's character in Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, while his warlock get-up recalls Freddy's confrontation with Ira Heiden's "Wizard Master" in Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors.)
"Nightmare" is also the most story-orientated of the "VI" segments; it has a lot of plot to cram into seven and a half minutes, and there's little that happens that doesn't serve to directly further the narrative - although in some ways it figures that the solitary non-sequitur of the segment should be the one to gain all the memetic momentum, that being Homer's observations about the lousy Smarch weather. I feel like this joke has been somewhat lost to time, but Marge's comment about it all starting "at the 13th hour on the 13th day of the 13th month" was a dig at Apollo 13. I recall the marketing for that film making a big, bombastic deal of the fact that "on the 13th minute of the 13th hour, the 13th mission was launched!", with "on the 13th month?" being the standard response from any smart-aleck on the other side of the screen. The first time I saw this episode, I was mildly disappointed to see The Simpsons go for such a hoary punchline, but it was immediately salvaged by Marge's follow-up statement, "We were there to discuss the misprinted calendars the school had purchased." (Her insistence that it happened at the 13th hour is frankly just as ridiculous, given that that fateful PTA meeting is blatantly taking place at night.)
Willie may be a menace, but the real nightmare on Evergreen Terrace is, inevitably, the indifference of the adult populace toward the trauma of the young, another key ingredient of the template franchise that the segment understands and successfully incorporates into its own DNA. Lurking at the back of "Nightmare" is a subtext about how the children of Springfield are having to contend with Willie's spectral killing spree only because their caregivers are enabling it. The parents and teaching staff (authority figures entrusted to act within the children's interests) are complicit in Willie's nightly offensive - they know exactly what is going on, but would sooner conceal that knowledge, and their own hand in birthing the evil with which the children have been saddled, than attempt any kind of protective action. Skinner's lackadaisical (and obviously doomed) efforts to keep the kindergarteners from witnessing Martin's strangled corpse as it is wheeled out of the classroom is an apt analogue for their strategy throughout - flimsy cover that won't keep the real horror from gushing out. Marge does eventually spill the beans to Bart and Lisa (having accidentally exposed that she knows more than she's let on), but she and Homer otherwise don't lift a finger to help their children. When we later see Bart, Lisa and Maggie struggling to keep themselves awake with an endless flow of coffee, Buzz Cola and graveyard slot television, Marge and Homer are nowhere in sight, apparently having toddled off to bed to leave the children to battle their demons all by their lonesome. And that, really, is as unsettling as anything that our undead janitor dishes out. Having incurred Willie's wrath through no fault of their own, the kids are left completely on their own, to the point that the adults have effectively disappeared from the story altogether in the latter half - the only grown-up who appears past this point, besides Willie himself, is Krusty (or at least a dreamed approximation of him), and he too abandons Bart the instant that danger rears its head.
This subtext of parental negligence echoes the uneasy duality at the heart of Nightmare on Elm Street, where the parents whose sins have been lumbered upon the younger generation, and the avenging boogeyman determined to ensure that their debt is paid in full, are really two sides of the same coin. For Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp), the sleep-deprived nemesis of Freddy in the original film, overcoming her demons means having to navigate her way through the chaotic wreckage of the world molded for her by her parents (her denunciatory father and her alcoholic mother - whose name, incidentally, is also Marge) and emerge as a survivor on her own independent terms (and, for all the charges levelled at the slasher genre for catering to the most base and sadistic itches in the human psyche, they are tales of survival, and how the Final Girl comes out in one piece). Freddy embodies the abuses inflicted by adults onto children at their most conspicuously ugly, but he is merely the shadowy extension of the Elm Street glimpsed during Nancy's waking hours, and the failure of its older denizens to look out for the young - a grotesque form given to the void where parental warmth and connection should be, and which the children have no recourse but to battle on their own, lest they get dragged into the despair.
In "Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace", the connection is perhaps even easier to draw, with Willie not only putting a face on that same void, but being directly begot by the terminal apathy with which the parents of Springfield seem primed to respond to any crisis. Compared to Craven's film, where the parents murdered Freddy, a local child-killer who escaped justice on a technicality, in a barbaric vigilante attack, in the Simpsons' equivalent the parents allow Willie to die through nothing less than their own unabating negligence. They would sooner ignore the man on fire and screaming for help than interrupt the flow of the PTA meeting, where the grievous possibility of Milhouse having two spaghetti dinners in one day is currently the hot item on the agenda. And fair play to Kirk for wanting his son to have variety in his diet, but the issue of whether Milhouse gets torn apart by a homicidal wraith does not, later on, seem to illicit half as much concern - the emphasis of their parental oversight is all on pedantic formalities, with no acknowledgment of the traumatic happenings going on right under their noses. With the parents having collectively voted to turn a blind eye, an expiring Willie warns them that the price for their negligence will be their children's blood; in exacting his vengeance, he acts as a proxy to the parents' inattentive tendencies and their compromising of their children's ability to thrive (to the point where one wonders why he even needs to attack the children in what is explicitly described as a place where their parents can't protect them, when the parents seem so ill-inclined toward protective action to begin with). But Willie is notably also an innocent prior to his fiery transformation. Unlike Freddy, he has no track record for murder before the parents reveal their capacity for cruelty - it is their apathy that corrupts him, an arrangement that would appear to align him better with the children as a fellow sufferer. To that end, we might see Willie as specifically reflecting the damaged part of the children's own psyches, a throbbing emotional lesion that threatens to grow and consume them, and which, having brought into being, the adults around them would sooner continue to deny and ignore. When a genre-smart Bart resolves to enter into a dream and force Willie into a final showdown, it is a motion of self-actualisation, both to rise above the indifference of the adults and cement himself as a survivor, and to reclaim his future from the dark, despairing path that Willie would beckon him down.
There are times when the segment's condensed length gets the better of it. Maggie saves the day at the end, but she's had so little involvement in the story up until this point that there is a slight whiff of deus ex machina about it. Nevertheless, it is always nice to get confirmation that the Simpson children have each other's backs (it also provides another callback to "Treehouse of Horror V", where Maggie offed Willie in one of the segments), to an extent that will always compensate for where the adults in their lives are failing them. They emerge as survivors, but only by virtue of their unity.
"Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace" has something of a a strange ending, but then the original Nightmare on Elm Street bows out on quite a head-scratching epilogue too, so in that regard it's only playing with the cards it's been dealt. The Simpson children wake up to a bright new dawn, but Lisa feels unsettled, sensing that Willie is still alive and will be scratching at their proverbial door again before very long. She has an intuitive understanding of how sequelisation works in the slasher genre, where no matter how many times you kill the villain, they'll always come back and have another stab it. But she needn't be worried - Willie shows up again almost immediately but, bucking slasher convention in which the stalker is usually allocated one final, franchise-baiting scare before the credits roll, seems to have lost his spectral powers and is no more intimidating than is regular Willie. From the looks of things, he still has his sights on killing the children, making some disturbing reference to having left his gun on the seat of the bus he rode in on, but for all intents and purposes he's clearly been deposed as a threat. Since no rules have been established to suggest if or how Willie can come after the children in the waking world, it raises questions as to whether the kids are still dreaming at this point, although that's ultimately all moot. What's important is that Bart, Lisa and Maggie are all standing and facing Willie together, an act of solidarity that exposes him for what he really is - not a dangerous boogeyman but a bungling janitor who can't so much as chase after bus without his shoe coming off (and given that "Attack of The 50-Foot Eyesores" ends with the Simpsons' house in ruins, and Homer never actually gets back home in "Homer3", it can be considered the most status quo-restoring of the endings in "VI"). This feels, in part, like a joke at the expense of the viewer, by reminding us that the source of tension throughout this entire segment has been a character whom we would not, ordinarily, be inclined to take seriously. But it also works as an illustration of what successfully navigating through emotional trauma looks like, in a manner that would liken Willie to a far more recent horror creation - The Babadook. You can't get rid of The Babadook, aka your own personal demon. But you can learn to live with it, and to keep it in its place.
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