For as down as I tend to be on The Simpsons' tenth season, and on Mike Scully's whole era as showrunner, I'll admit that their Halloween offering for 1998, "Treehouse of Horror IX" (AABF01), doesn't hold up too badly. The first two segments, "Hell Toupee" and "Terror of Tiny Toon", are solid pieces that reap ample pleasures from the kinds of macabre "What if?" scenarios that only the Halloween episodes could allow. What if Homer's yearning for a full head of hair caused him to become possessed by a vengeful villain serial killing from beyond the grave? What if Bart and Lisa were placed in the same reality as Itchy and Scratchy and had to contend with being on the receiving end of their cartoon brutality? The third segment, "Starship Poopers" (what if the Simpsons and the Rigellians were competing for custody of Maggie and went on The Jerry Springer Show?), holds up less well than the others, being the one that most screams "product of its time", but Kodos and Kang are at least on typically strong form. What is largely absent, and very much missed, is the genuine spookiness that characterised many of those earlier installments, when a trip inside the Treehouse of Horror meant getting to revel in Simpsons uncanniness as its own art form. This is something that peaked around "Treehouse of Horror VI"; after that, it seemed that the Halloween episodes were putting emphasis on being funny and outlandish but not necessarily creepy. The only part of "IX" to really embrace that former ideal is the opening sequence, which takes us through the familiar intro, but with everything going morbidly wrong. As they touch down on the driveway, Bart and Lisa each trip and suffer neck-breaking injuries, while Homer fails to outrun a conspicuously crazed Marge as she pulls into the garage. It's such an obvious way to open a Halloween installment that it seems strange that it took them until the ninth attempt to make it happen, but is definitely all the more impactful for having taken that long to brew. The family rushing home to watch themselves (I guess?) on television is a sequence we'd seen play out for almost a decade and knew beat for beat; the image of Marge nearly running Homer down week after week had come to feel safe, warm and familiar. To see it take such a twisted turn after all this time is one heck of a jarring experience - particularly the misplaced shot of Marge and Maggie doing their synchronised horn beep, normally a tender moment of bonding between parent and child, here recontextualised to make it plain that their ramming of Homer is no accident. The cherry on top is in cutting to the couch to find it occupied by Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees (the former voiced by Robert Englund), baffled by the family's failure to appear. Best Halloween couch gag ever - not least because, at the time, Freddy vs. Jason was still five years away, so this might have been the closest the world had gotten yet to the epic crossover promised at the end of Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday (not actually the final Friday).
The episode itself is never quite able to live up to the glory of that opening sequence, but you do see momentary flickers of that sublime eeriness skulking in its deepest nooks and crannies. In "Hell Toupee", some of the most unsettling moments occur at the lowest possible key. A Krusty doll (presumably not set to Evil) makes an appearance as Bart is in danger of being bludgeoned with a mallet, offering both sympathy and mockery with its cry of: "Stop it, you're killing me!" Wiggum berates Lou for not alerting him sooner to Apu's mangled remains inside the Squishee Machine he's already dispensed and sampled a beverage from, only to continue slurping nonchalantly at his straw, a gag that's a lot more disturbing than first meets the eye. On the surface it plays like a gag about a typically lackadaisical Wiggum, but it also evokes an idea central to the "Nightmare Cafeteria" segment from "Treehouse of Horror V", regarding the supposedly addictive nature of cannibalism.
According to the episode's Wikipedia page, "Hell Toupee" is a parody of an episode of Amazing Stories from 1986, which was also called "Hell Toupee", and also about a malevolent toupee that transforms anyone who dons it into a relentless killer. This, though, isn't exactly supported by the DVD commentary, which gives conflicting testimony on the consciousness of the allusion. David X Cohen, who wrote the "Starship Poopers" segment, claims that "Hell Toupee" was initially conceived as a placeholder title, and that he was surprised that it wasn't changed, on the basis that Amazing Stories long beaten them to the punch. Ron Hauge, who worked as an executive producer on the episode, disputes Cohen's account, stating that the original title was "A High Price Toupee", that Cohen was actually very enthusiastic about the change to "Hell Toupee" and that nobody was thinking about Amazing Stories at the time: "Someone pointed out later, after it aired, that it had been the name of something, but that's not where we got it." While it's possible that Hauge is being deliberately disingenuous for legal reasons, straight-up copying the title of whatever they're spoofing does seem like an uncharacteristically lazy move for The Simpsons; you can usually count on them to come up with some sort of sly twist, even if it's as simple as tacking on an extra letter, eg: "The Shinning" or "Cape Feare". Maybe it's a case of "Hell Toupee" being such an irresistibly delicious pun that popular culture is going to keep recycling it over and over, with nobody having any particular claim to it (case in point - only last month we had it crop up as the name of a song in the new Spinal Tap movie). Besides, having watched the Amazing Stories episode...it really does strike me as the kind of thing that is beyond all parody. Although it shares its central conceit with the Simpsons segment, the two offer very different takes on the same idea. For one, in Amazing Stories the bald man possessed by the psychopathic hairpiece is only a minor character; we open with the critical murders (all lawyers) having already occurred, and the focus on the attorney hired to defend him (played by Tony Kientz). It's also a far lighter, goofier and all-around more ridiculous affair than the Simpsons segment (yes, exactly). A condemned offender is once again the source of the cursed hair, which she'd sold to a wig-maker to fund her (ineffective) legal defence, but she herself is not a character - the villain, for all intents and purposes, is the toupee, which spends much of the narrative crawling about in search of its next victim like some form of demonic guinea pig. By contrast, the Simpsons' take is darker and grungier, more closely parodying the schlocky thrillers about supernatural serial killers that might have haunted your late night cable viewings back in the day - something along the lines of The First Power (1990), Ghost In The Machine (1993) or Hideaway (1995).
It's also a scenario that feels perfectly suited to The Simpsons. We'd already observed in "Simpson and Delilah" the difference that a full head of hair can make for Homer's self-perception. What if, instead of giving him the confidence to scale the top of the power plant ladder, his new look brought out some very dark urges inside him indeed, effectively transforming him into a different person? In this case, the hair comes from a less reputable source than Dimoxinil - Snake, who is arrested for smoking inside the Kwik-E-Mart and sentenced to the electric chair under the three strikes law. Before his (televised) execution, he vows revenge against the three witnesses to whom Chief Wiggum attributes the open-and-shut conviction: Apu, Moe and Bart. And then when Homer inherits the deceased Snake's hair via a transplant procedure, the witnesses start being offed in a series of gruesome and mysterious murders, until Bart is the last one standing and deduces that he's next.
"Hell Toupee" does not, admittedly, have the most novel of premises. Bart squirming in terror at the prospect of a pathologically vindictive criminal being on his tail is not something you had to wait until the Halloween specials to see. And even then, we were only three years removed from a Treehouse of Horror segment about another Springfieldian embarking on an undead killing spree as revenge for mistreatment, with Bart as one of his targets. What differentiates "Hell Toupee" from "Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace" is that the emphasis here is not on Bart's quest for survival, but on Homer's unwitting alliance with the malign force that threatens his son. That too was a major theme of "Nightmare", where you didn't have to squint terribly hard to see the adults as the story's real evil, ignoring Willie in his moment of need and addressing the problem of their children being violently slaughtered in their sleep by pretending that it wasn't happening. There was the sense that (as in the slasher picture it was homaging) the negligence of the parents and the monstrousness of the killer were really two sides of the same coin. "Toupee" has a similar idea, but with Homer taking an active role in the carnage, so that the would-be protector and ruthless persecutor become physically one and the same. The alliance is similar to that proposed by Freddy Krueger to Jesse Walsh in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985) - Homer has the body and Snake has the brain. Or the hair, as it were. Its influence becomes so pervasive that even when Homer's actions are not being directly dictated by Snake's hair he still ends up doing Snake's bidding, barricading himself inside Bart's bedroom with his son and a murder weapon to hand.
Like many fictional serial killers, supernatural or otherwise, Snake bumps off his victims according to a specific order (in this case, the order in which Wiggum identified them as suspects) and a certain sardonic methodology (Apu and Moe both die in ways pertaining to their trade, with Apu being fed into the aforementioned Squishee machine and Moe's heart being removed with a corkscrew; with Bart I guess Snake was running low on inspiration and settled for simply going at him with a mallet). What makes the trajectory unsettling is the knowledge that, as we watch the threat get progressively closer to Bart, the malign force itself has spent much of the segment right next to him, on the head of someone he trusts. Compared to "Nightmare", where the viewer's understanding of the situation was in sync with Bart and Lisa's, "Toupee" leans heavily on dramatic irony, with the viewer knowing what's going on long before the characters have figured it out. The script's wittiest moment occurs toward the end, when Lisa is about to verbalise that Snake's hair must be controlling Homer, only for Marge to abruptly cut her off and point out that the exposition dump is redundant.
Those 90s supernatural killer pictures were certainly ripe for parody, and "Hell Toupee" does a decent job in nailing the obligatory dingy tone, although I do have this one lingering doubt - was Snake really the best character to use as the villain? No duh, you might be thinking, for on the one hand, Snake would appear to have it all - the checkered history, the luxuriant head of hair, the California Surfer Dude accent that exudes the kind of swagger and attitude that oughtn't come naturally to Homer. But looking at some of the other regular characters who were successfully recast as Halloween villains, I can't help but feel that he lacks that extra mind-blowing factor that makes you feel like you're seeing those familiar faces in a whole new, entirely valid light. Such castings were never arbitrary. Willie as Freddy Krueger? Shockingly good. On the whole, Willie's a benign character who takes more abuse than he dishes out, but he's got that distinctly uncouth, grimy nature that translates perfectly into Freddy's brand of monstrous sleaze. Krusty as Chucky/Talky Tina? Oh heck yeah. What's creepier than a clown doll with a gaping, vacant smile, the soul of a scuzzbag and the voice of a chain-smoker? Burns as Dracula? He's practically inhuman, why not go all the way with that idea? Ned Flanders as the Devil? A no-brainer. Not only is it a total subversion of who he is in the series proper (as Ned drolly puts it, "It's always the one you least suspect"), there's something enormously hilarious, sinister and convincing about the Devil using Ned's gentle, polite tones to conceal his nefarious agenda. With Snake, though, the gap between who he is in the series proper and who he is in this segment feels a whole lot thinner. He comes off less as assuming a role that serves as a playful extension of his regular self than as a version of his regular self played curiously straight. This is Snake if he was capable of acting on his character's threatening overtones - if, instead of holding Springfieldians at gun point, he killed them without inhibition, remorse or indeed humor. The correct tonal balance isn't struck.
Snake's an interesting case, because although he was introduced way back in the Season 2 episode "The War of The Simpsons" (as Otto's funky friend), the writers hadn't started to use him as a major villain until relatively recently. If you look at the kinds of roles he played in the earlier seasons, he very rarely had much to do with the Simpsons themselves. Sure, you had episodes like "Separate Vocations" and "The Springfield Connection" where he was used as a momentary threat, but he was predominantly more of a joke character than anything. His purpose was to be a humorous representative of Springfield's criminal element, showing up wherever gags were required about crime sprees and jailbreaks, with Apu and Chief Wiggum as his recurring nemeses. I'm not sure, but I think "Realty Bites" of Season 9 might have been the first instance of him coming into any kind of sustained conflict with a Simpson. Even then, they kept his antagonism light - though he beat the shit out of Homer in "Realty Bites" he was unable to do any actual damage, while in "All Singing, All Dancing" he was only ever a fake-out threat. There is, I think, a telling tidbit about Snake shared on the commentary to the Season 5 episode "Homer and Apu", which climaxes with Apu being shot saving James Woods from an armed robber who is bizarrely not our hero. David Mirkin queries why they bothered with this nondescript robber when they had an established character who should have worked perfectly aptly in the role. The answer given is that some of the writers took issue with the idea of Snake seriously hurting anyone, so they brought in a one-off rando to do the dirty deed in his place. They laugh at the absurdity of wanting to maintain purity in a character like Snake and comment that they probably wouldn't worry about that so much now, presumably alluding to the more imposing turn he'd taken during Scully's era. Nevertheless, they capture how there was traditionally always an element of play pretence to Snake's villainy. He was a caricature of a habitual criminal, and there was something almost endearing about his lawlessness, and how, as Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood deftly sum it up in I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide, he appeared to be his own "one-man crime wave". You might argue that removing that safety barrier and allowing Snake to kill and not merely threaten was a logical means of expanding on his menace in a Halloween show, much like how removing the safety barrier that made Marge nearly running Homer over week after week seem cute and comical and depicting its more horrific implications made for an inspired opening sequence. To actually give the characters' actions consequences - because, of course, there are none in a Halloween show. There's merit to the idea, but it's hampered by a fundamental lack of twisted joy. Take the scene where Snake-Homer kills Apu. Sure, it's followed up by that beautifully disturbing moment with Wiggum sipping at the carcass-infused Squishee, but the killing itself is disconcertingly joke-free. On the one hand, I like the intensity of the sequence, and how legitimately threatening Snake becomes, but he could have afforded to ham it up a notch. Moe's murder goes down a little better, but there the gags come squarely from Moe's obtuseness, not from Snake himself.
You know which character I think would have been really fun to have as a serial killer in a Treehouse of Horror segment? Hans Moleman. We already saw him sentenced to the chair in "The Springfield Connection", so why not revisit that here and make more of a thing of it? The man must have a tremendous axe to grind with countless Springfieldians, so imagine him getting to go absolutely rampant with his vengeance for seven minutes. The possibilities are endless! Except he doesn't have hair, does he? So maybe Snake was the most viable choice for this particular narrative. I just wish they'd allowed him to take a bit more glee in the part. The only point where he does get to realise a few of the comic possibilities is at the end, when Homer and Snake get into a back-and-forth over Bart's fate. ("I love my son!" "More than a lush head of hair?")
Truth be told, I actually feel a smidgeon of sympathy for Snake in this segment. Was he a monster before he became a supernatural killer? We know that he was certainly no angel - while he gets executed for something as ridiculous as lighting up in a no-smoking building, there is clearly meant to be some irony in this outcome when his two prior convictions were for torching an orphanage and blowing up a bus full of nuns. Still, we could give him the benefit of the doubt on both of those. Arson is no petty crime, but we don't know for a fact that there were any orphans inside the orphanage when he torched it. As for that bus full of nuns, he claims it was in self-defence, and perhaps it was. Either way, it's fair to say he's not an innocent - the innocents, in this particular story, are Apu, Moe and Bart (yes, even Moe; having syphilis is not an automatic disqualification). Someone who is also decidedly not an innocent is Homer, even before he acquires Snake's hair. Neither is Wiggum, nor Barney, Lenny, Carl, the Old Sea Captain - really, all of the rest of Springfield. "Toupee" is filled with social critiques about the US justice system, via its jokes about the three strikes law and capital punishment, but what happens to Snake at the start of the story feels positively dystopian, like a glimpse into some horrifying future society where you can be sentenced to death for the smallest of offences, barbecued for public entertainment on World's Deadliest Executions[1], then have your body carved up and your organs distributed among the very plebs who were getting off on your televised demise. Obviously, we only have seven minutes to tell a story, so some details must be expedited, but there's no indication that Snake was given a fair trial, or even a trial at all. We don't see Apu, Moe or Bart testify against him, nor are we given the impression that they would want to. Wiggum alone acted as judge, jury and executioner. Forget the supernatural slaughter-fest, that scenario is a big enough nightmare in itself. I can't really blame Snake for being pissed off and for aspiring to distribute some bad karma via those ill-gotten organs, though he takes it out on the wrong targets - the reluctant witnesses who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Still, the character whom Snake most forces to reckon with consequence is ultimately Homer. Where "Toupee" gets particularly clever is in its subtext about a society that brutalizes offenders inevitably becoming the very thing it sees itself as opposing, with innocence, as represented by Apu, Moe and Bart, doomed to be completely snuffed out. Homer is complicit in the grotesque execution ceremony, watching it from his living room and objecting only to the fact that crucifixions are reserved for sweeps; he later benefits from the process by taking Snake's hair and turning it into an extension of himself. It is this callousness and his willingness to get in on the exploitation that leads to his complicity in Snake's killing spree, degenerating him to the point that he almost bludgeons his own son, and is threatened with murder charges for two of his friends (although Wiggum agrees to drop one of those charges when it becomes too much of an effort to pronounce Nahasapeemapetilon). Homer realises that the only way to set himself free, and to save his son, is to sever himself from the hair, the token of his own capacity for callousness.
With the hair and Homer finally separated, "Toupee" mines a twist from the concept that was the big stupid hook of the Amazing Stories episode - the hairpiece becomes animate and lunges at Bart, but is ultimately destroyed by police gunfire. The segment ends with a variation on a stock Simpsons conclusion, where the characters downplay the uncomfortable reality of the matter by laughing uncontrollably at some idiotic joke, specifically at Wiggum's action hero quip of "Now that's what I call a bad hair day!". In this instance, Marge verbalises why the laughter is appropriate, pointing out that "two people are dead" (count again, Marge, three characters died in this segment), only for the pun to suddenly dawn on her and for her to agree that it's hilarious after all. And so the survivors laugh long and hard into the night. I'm not convinced that Snake has really been vanquished, however. A thought that keeps dancing away at the back of my head (and I am surprised that this wasn't brought up at the end) is that Snake's hair wasn't the only body part to be distributed among the townspeople. We don't know how far the man's malignant tissue has managed to spread. It was implied that Barney would get the liver, so does that mean Snake could strike again by taking control of him via that organ? Does it specifically need to enter into the brain, as the hair roots did, or could it find some other way to dictate influence eg: by altering the body chemistry? Treehouse of Horror segments tend to be entirely self-contained affairs and to not get follow-ups (seriously, has that ever happened?), but in this case the sequelisation practically writes itself. Clearly, there is an awful lot of Snake within this town; they won't be purged of his persisting presence with a bad pun and a belly laugh.
[1] You've probably heard the story about the lost Troy McClure cameo that would have been Phil Hartman's last, as the host of World's Deadliest Executions, but which was deemed inappropriate following Hartman's tragic death a few months prior and swapped out for a guest spot from Ed McMahon. It sounds convincing enough, only they don't bring it up on the DVD commentary, and Wikipedia has removed all reference to it, making me wonder if it was ever substantiated. The Simpsons Wiki still says it's true, but doesn't cite a source. A reviewer on The Simpsons Archive refers to a "wasted" final rendition from Hartman, but with no further context, and has Lionel Hutz down as the excised character (maybe they were familiar with the Amazing Stories episode and expected something closer to its plot). I'm not saying it's necessarily untrue, but I would like to see a more reliable source on the matter.