Jeff Grant's 1973 film Lonely Water is as perfectly crafted a horror experience as you're likely to find in just 90 seconds. It has everything - atmospheric chills, an unforgettable villain, a couple of gut-wrenching character demises, even a sequel hook. That it was created for the purpose of educating children about the dangers of straying too close to the water's edge should not surprise us, given that there is a certain level of thematic intersection between the horror and the public information film - both deal in nasty surprises and morbid fascinations, with the intended outcome of maybe costing their audience a sleepless night or two. All the same, Grant's film leans more conspicuously on horror iconography than most others of its ilk, by envisioning the aquatic threat as a new kind of boogeyman, one who wears a hooded robe and hangs around bodies of water, anticipating the various ways in which reckless or unwary children will obligingly drag themselves to their liquid graves. "No one expects to find me here", muses the self-professed Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, as he lingers behind a group of children attempting to to retrieve a football from a muddy bog, and one of their party, identified as a "show-off", one of three victim archetypes with which the Spirit is accustomed to working, treads too far down the slope and loses his footing. "It seems too ordinary." An ominous splash, as we are reminded of the fine line that all-too frequently hangs between the ordinary and the catastrophic. That the Spirit boasts such an instantly recognisable voice - Donald Pleasence, on ghoulishly good form - does little to dispel his unearthly aura. Lonely Water was also unmistakably the product of the UK of the 1970s, a time when public information films were not only a prolific component of the children's television landscape, but were of the philosophy that a little psychological scarring at teatime was a sure-fire way to get results (Lonely Water, for all of its unabashed creepiness, might be considered positively soothing next to the drama of poor Jimmy and his frisbee). Things had definitely changed by my day. The water safety video I remember being shown in school (circa 1991) was comparatively lighter - it was narrated by a talking dog, and the only casualty was an inflatable bed that got abandoned by its teenaged owners and lost to the current.
Lonely Water was part of a spate of PIFs from the early 1970s aimed at reducing the number of deaths by drowning among the young. Charley the cat got in on the campaign, with the animated short Charley Says: Falling In The Water, also released in 1973, to which Robbie Edmonstone, writing for the BFI release The COI Collection Volume Four: Stop! Look! Listen!, describes Lonely Water as an "infinitely more disturbing alternative". That may be so, although I would counter that Falling In The Water is still the most harrowing of all the Charley shorts, because it is the one in which danger is most immediately felt - the sequence where Charley is shown struggling underwater, before Dad's resourcefulness as an angler saves the day, plays like a miniature nightmare in its own right. In typical Charley fashion, the expressed moral is specifically about not straying far from the watchful eye of adult authority - the mistake Charley concludes that he made was not in failing to look before he leapt, but in not adhering to Dad's command that he remain by his side. Teach Them To Swim with Rolf Harris adopted an altogether gentler approach; directed at the aforementioned adult authority, it urged them to book swimming lessons for their children in order to broaden their survival artillery. Of the three, it has aged the least elegantly, although not just for the reasons you're inevitably thinking. I would not disagree that swimming is a valuable skill for anyone to acquire (not least because it is fun and good exercise), but the assumptions at the heart of Harris's monologue seem profoundly wrong-headed - that you should teach your children to be confident and competent swimmers in a heated swimming pool with trained lifeguards on duty, so that if they fall into a river with freezing temperatures and raging currents, you can be sure they'll be able to handle it. Lonely Water, however heavy-handed its tactics, seems to have the better idea, in encouraging children not to take chances with the water to begin with. There was also Teenagers Learn To Swim from 1972, which accords with the Harris film in insisting that an education in swimming could save your life, although the preoccupations of the accompanying narrative have more to do with genetic survival - Dave the non-swimmer is dumped by his unnamed girlfriend for Mike (who swims like a fish) because aquaphobia just isn't an attractive quality in a mate. If so, it would have surely been bad news for the reproductive prospects of the generation reared on Lonely Water - at least, according to Edmonstone, who muses that the film's approach was enough to ensure that its target viewership "will never so much as get into a bath for the rest of their lives."
The key to the Spirit's unsettling energy, besides Pleasence's baleful vocals, is his seemingly passive approach to ensnaring his prey - he never has to lift a finger to lure any of these children to their doom, preferring instead to loiter in the backdrop, a horrifying presence to whom his young quarries remain as perpetually oblivious as they do the risk of submergence. The Spirit's modus operandi appears to be based purely on anticipation, and in knowing all too well how each of these scenarios will play out - the show-off will venture too far into the mud, the unwary will fail to take account of whether the branch on which he's leaning can take his weight, the fool will ignore the literal warning signs. There is a sense of chilling inevitability about their respective fates, as if the children were compelled by something deep within their callow natures; their playful curiosity, along with their failure to comprehend their surroundings and their own limitations, prompts them to waltz directly into the deathtraps before them, while all the Spirit has to do is to wait and claim his prize. There are times when the ease of the catching seems to get too much even for our narrator - when the unwary takes his predicted plunge, the Spirit immediately turns away, as if even he can't stomach to watch the outcome, leaving the horror of the incident to be articulated by the local ducks, who react noisily to the disturbance. Meanwhile, the landscape scarred by various discarded, rusting vehicles and appliances tells its own horror story, revealing how the children's longevity is threatened not only by their fundamental human weaknesses against the elements, but also the wastefulness of their adult caregivers, whose own careless habits risk transforming their playground into a hazard-filled wasteland. The power on which the Spirit thrives appears to be a melting pot of various forces working all at once - the deadliness of the water, the obliviousness of the children, the indifference of nature, and the unspoken complicity of adults.
Despite his astuteness in assessing human folly, we see at the end of the film that things don't always run according to the Spirit's plans. His conquest of the fool is thwarted by the arrival of the one thing the Spirit dreads - not adult authority, which does a grand job of staying out of the picture for the full 90 seconds, but rather "Sensible children...I have no power over them." A couple of children wise to the dangers appear and manage to save the fool from drowning, after which they obligingly take the place of the absent authority, by berating him for his poor judgement: "Mate, that was a stupid place to swim." It's through the sensible children that we get our only instance of direct interaction between the Spirit and the children over whom he presides - one of them, looking for something in which to wrap the shivering fool, finds the Spirit's delated robe upon the ground (having trampled over it earlier), but some deep-rooted sense of revulsion causes her to reject the item and to toss it into the waters, where it sinks beneath the surface. The final message of the film is one of empowerment to its young viewers - they have the power to vanquish the Spirit, provided they refrain from putting themselves at risk. Yet like any great horror villain, the Spirit refuses to be overcome that easily. He gets the last say on the matter, submerging out of sight to the foreboding cackle of "I'll be back!"
The sequelisation threatened in the Spirit's closing words never materialised - Lonely Water was the only PIF featuring the Spirit ever produced, but the staying power of the film proved so immense that this needn't matter. True to his word, the Spirit WAS back, in multiple ways - the film continued to make the rounds on children's television into the 1980s, meaning that you risked bumping into him in every next commercial break you watched for the better part of a decade. Vanishing from the airwaves didn't quell the Spirit either; his memory continues to haunt those raised on his teachings, with the childhood nightmares he inspired proving so enduring that in 2003 that Lonely Water landed a place in Channel 4's list of the 100 Greatest Scary Moments (if you can put stock in such things). The film's subsequent notoriety, and its reputation as one of the finest public information films ever made, has ensured that successive generations (among them, yours truly), who might have otherwise lived in blissful ignorance, have had the chance to get acquainted with the Spirit's charms. On a significantly grimmer note, there's also the extent to which the threat that the Spirit symbolises has remained as persistent and as deadly as ever. Katy McGahan, covering the film for the BFI, notes that: "Although statistics have shown a downward turn since the 1970s, drowning remains
the third most common cause of accidental death among the under 16s." The essence of the Spirit's warnings are still relevant, even if his phobia-inducing tactics are from another world entirely.
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.
When "Treehouse of Horror VI" (aka episode 3F04) first aired on October 29th 1995, it represented the brand new model for the Treehouse of Horrors going forward. The show had finally shaken off a lot of the silly conventions that had served the earliest Halloween intsallments well, but become increasingly cumbersome as time went on. Gone were the framing narratives, the amusing tombstones and the cautionary introduction sequences. The only traditions that still clung on (besides the basic three story formula) were the pun-ridden production credits (although some mud - or should I say obtrusive green slime - is slung at these on the DVD commentary) and the arbitrary cameo from malevolent space squids Kodos & Kang (the writers hadn't been able to integrate them into an actual story since "Treehouse of Horror II", although that much would change come the next Halloween). In place of a humorous content warning we get a short skit based on Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, with Krusty as The Headless Horseman. It's a nice enough tone-setter, but an absolute waste conceptually, since it leaves me hungry for a full-fledged Simpsons take on Sleepy Hollow that sadly doesn't materialise. Because think about it - if Krusty is our Headless Horseman, then the most logical Springfieldian to cast in the role of Ichabod Crane would be Sideshow Bob (bonus credentials for his connections to another of popular culture's most celebrated Cranes), and that's a retelling of Sleepy Hollow I would be totally down for. Alas, all Krusty does is hurl his severed head at the camera and immediately regret it, and we move on into our main event.
After the censor-baiting marathon that was "Treehouse of Horror V", an episode that went out of its way to be as violent and blood-soaked as the series could conceivably get away with, as a response to contemporary hand-wringing about the ubiquitousness of televised violence, "Treehouse of Horror VI" is a comparatively sedate affair...to a point. The most obvious heir to its predecessor's bloodlust is "Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace", which continues the infanticidal preoccupations of V's "Nightmare Cafeteria", with the attendees of Springfield Elementary once again being ruthlessly victimised by a murderous member of staff. (The casting of Willie in the role of Freddy Krueger itself feels like a
bit of an in-joke, carried over from the running gag throughout V in
which Willie was repeatedly butchered whenever he attempted to come to the Simpsons' aid, a parody of Scatman Crothers' doomed
rescue effort in The Shining; it seems only fitting that Willie would himself have an axe to grind on the following Halloween.) By contrast, the last of the segments, "Homer3", is an unusually violence-free addition to the "Treehouse of Horror" canon, with the family pitted against a monster of a very different variety, ie: computer-generated imagery, which was about to lay waste to traditional animation techniques and change the industry beyond all recognition within less than a decade. Not even The Simpsons could have predicted just what kind of bear they were poking.
Before both of those, though, we get "Attack of The 50-Foot Eyesores", my personal pick of the bunch, although it's my impression that this is the most undervalued of the three. At the time, the segment that got everybody talking was "Homer3", on account of its 3D animation, which was super-novel (the episode aired behind Casperbut ahead of Toy Story), but as those kinds of visual techniques became commonplace, "Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace" seems to have superseded it as the fan favourite (thanks largely to Homer's grumblings about the lousy Smarch weather). Compared to the technical ambitions of "Homer3", and to the visceral slasher scares of "Nightmare", "Attack" possibly seems like quite a modest offering - it's a smart segment, and yet it wraps itself up in a concept that's fundamentally so silly. It might seem churlish to accuse a "Treehouse of Horror" segment of being "fundamentally silly", but the plot of "Attack" - in which an ionic disturbance causes the various fibreglass advertising figures at Springfield's Miracle Mile retail district (in Homer's words, where value wears a neon sombrero and there's not a single church or library to offend the eye) to come to life and demolish the city - really does feel like the most far-out ToH premise the series had come up with up to this point. Likewise, it's probably fair to say that "Attack" is the least plot-driven of the "VI" segments, a good chunk of the story being made up of skits in which the advertising mascots wreak havoc on the townspeople in ways that are pertinent to each mascot's marketing niche (eg: a Mr Peanut knock-off who tears the roofs off of cars and eats the occupants like he was cracking peanut shells), and which also tease out the monstrous energies lurking within the townspeople themselves (among them, Wiggum murdering a local basketball captain, Bart becoming the devil on the shoulder of the Red Devil Realty devil, and Otto, on being seized by said devil whilst helming a bus-load of screaming schoolchildren, remarking: "Another acid flashback - man, I'd hate to be driving a bus right now!"). All great skits, but it leaves the segment feeling somewhat fragmented. It also feels, more so that most "Treehouse of Horror" segments, like a story specifically conceived with an eye toward building to its final, fourth wall-breaking punchline. It's an extremely clever punchline, but alas, a punchline that hinges 100% on you seeing it in the correct context. Which totally didn't happen when the episode aired on UK television (and I'm guessing a few other countries as well), making the ending yet another source of childhood bafflement for me. It's also not a punchline that favours being watched on DVD or Disney+.
Even without its slick writing and smart subtext, "Attack" would still stand out for boasting what is, for my money, one of the most eerily disturbing death scenes in the ToH canon. It's not a gory demise by any stretch, but it never fails to get me wincing. I speak of the scene where the neon cowboy on the Duff billboard comes to life and is greeted enthusiastically by a crowd of college-aged Springfieldians, whom he proceeds to pulverise like bugs beneath his neon beer bottle. No blood or guts are seen trickling out from beneath the bottle, the squishing noises heard are fairly moderate and the victims barely even have time to scream, but I think what really bothers me about this sequence is the cowboy's sheer, unrelenting meanness. His destruction of the onlookers in question is so wholly unmotivated that it's chilling - he crushes them for seemingly no other reason than that he could, and they were just too easy targets to pass up. It's one way to get across the inhumanity of the advertising mascots - their foremost compulsion is to destroy, and they seem totally indifferent to the fact that a lot of mankind would sooner party with them than oppose them. But more importantly still, this is all a gigantic metaphor, correct? The onlookers welcome the Duff cowboy because they believe, erroneously, that he's their friend, when all he's actually out to do is to have them writhing helplessly beneath the weight of his oversized beer bottle, a sure-fire signifier for alcoholism if ever there was one.
The segment's title derives from that of the classic 1958 B-picture Attack of The 50 Foot Woman, and the story has nods to the Japanese kaiju genre (after coming to life, Lard Lad gives the iconic Godzilla roar), but its most obvious antecedent, in the pop cultural sphere, would be the climactic showdown with the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters (1984), another corporate logo given the opportunity to reduce a city to rubble. "Attack" takes the idea implicit to the Ghostbusters climax, and spins a deliciously satirical six-minute nightmare from the notion that the corporate logos that pervade every square inch of our existence, and which we casually accept as the cute and familiar faces of the surplus of products vying for our consumption, are actually monsters ceaselessly assaulting us and browbeating us into submission. We might be designated the status of consumers, but the corporate giants are really the ones consuming us. "Attack" also ultimately teaches us that advertising is a monster that will eat you only if you look at it. So, stop feeding it, you slack-jawed gawkers.
Hmm...
The conclusions of "Attack" - that advertising has no sway wherever it fails to grab attention - is one that ought to be empowering to the consumer (see Negativland's "Bite Back"). At one point, the script even gets on the nose enough with its themes to flat-out tell us that, "If you stop paying attention to the monsters, they'll lose their powers." But then "Attack" is blatantly skeptical of the consumer's capacity for resistance. In the end, Lisa is able to convince the people of Springfield to turn their backs on the mascots, causing them to become rigid and die, yet she does so not by appealing to the people's sense of defiance, but by competing with the mascots using two of advertising's other go-tos - a catchy jingle and celebrity endorsement (Paul Anka, who seems a random choice, although that's undoubtedly the point, and besides, the story of how he got the gig is a cute one; having previously received a shout-out in the Season 6 episode "Grampa vs. Sexual Inadequacy", Anka wrote the producers a fan letter to let them know how touched he was, and they in turn were so touched that they gave him the opportunity to guest star). Even then, the gambit nearly fails, as Lard Lad is able to cling onto relevancy for just a mite longer than his brethren, by promising Homer that, never mind all that, his donuts now come with sprinkles.
The final interplay between Lard Lad and Homer gives the story a neatly cyclic feeling, keeping in mind that this whole mess all started with Homer being lured into the Lard Lad bakery by the marketing gimmickry of its disarming mascot, and finding that the reality does not match his expectations. He wants a "colossal donut", as touted by the venue's signage; cheekily, this refers to the colossal donut brandished by the Lard Lad statue, and in the absence of a "not actual size" disclaimer, Homer is disappointed to
discover that the product itself is no bigger than any other donut on
the market. He cries false advertising, and his response - to steal the colossal donut and (somehow) squirrel it away inside his living room - is beyond overkill, given that it's not an item he has any use for, other than to lounge around inside as a giant trophy. Crucially, his actions implicate the consumer as being no innocent in this equation. The Simpsons' take on the matter is characteristically double-edged - on the one hand, the corporate giants lack compassion for the little people and, once they're accustomed to having the whole of Springfield under their thumb, show no inclination to stop. (At first, it appears as though the mascots are attacking Springfield out of solidarity
with Lard Lad, because Homer separated him from his colossal donut, creating some kind of upheaval in the order of the universe; it'll do for a rationale, except when the donut is returned to Lard Lad, it results not in a restoration of said order, but merely empowers the hulking baker boy to inflict even greater damage upon the town.) At the same time, "Attack" suggests that the monsters came because the consumers invited them with their own hollow insatiability. Such insatiability is further echoed in Kent Brockman's televised coverage of the occurrence, when he speculates that the monster rampage
might actually be part of an ambitious marketing campaign, but questions
what kind of product could possibly justify such carnage. He yields the answer - a fat-free fudge cake that doesn't let you down in the
flavour department - before being attacked by a monster created in his own image, an absurdly unsettling scenario insinuating that the commercial-saturated landscape we live in is as much a reflection of our own voracious cravings as it is their source. As "Attack" would have it, a Faustian complicity exists between the corporate giant and the consumer, with the latter allowing the former total dominance in exchange for satisfying their every frivolous whim. (Marge's failing in all of this, meanwhile, is to put too much faith in the intrinsic goodness of the universe. Which is why she has to contend with being wrong all the time.)
The means through which the advertising
mascots are ultimately overcome is itself reminiscent of how Nancy
Thompson manages to defeat Freddy Krueger (temporarily, anyway) in the original Nightmare on Elm Street. Interesting, then, that in the Simpsons' own take on Nightmare on Elm Street, coming up right afterward, this particular round of carnage gets started precisely because the characters don't look - at Willie, when he's going up in flames and in desperate need of aid. Once again, it's Homer who gets the calamity rolling, but when the burning Willie bursts into a PTA meeting crying for help, the gathering collectively chooses to ignore him (even Marge, I'm afraid), because the issue of whether or not Milhouse gets two spaghetti dinners in one day is more important. But then adult apathy being the root of all evil, as manifested through Willie's child-murdering energies, is entirely consistent with Freddy's own conceptual underpinnings (with the added bonus that the Krueger equivalent here gets to be on the receiving end of said apathy, making him a victim who lashes out at his fellow sufferers). Reviewing "Treehouse of Horror VI" on The AV Club, Erik Adams proposes that all three segments are linked by "a thread about the powers of perception". I would not disagree with that assessment, and would further argue that the first two segments in particular are specifically concerned with the atrocities committed by the eye, both through what it fuels in choosing where to direct its gaze, and what it willfully ignores.
The closing moments of "Attack" continue the growing trend among "Treehouse of Horror" installments for pessimistic endings that didn't necessarily reset the status quo. Even with the mascots vanquished, the city of Springfield lies in ruins, and we end with the troubling image of the Simpsons outside their trampled abode, with no clear indication as to how they're going to rebuild their lives. But the segment cunningly allows for broadcasting convention to get the final say, and to unwittingly uphold its final warnings about the pervasive, inescapable nature of those unrelenting prompts to consume, obey and conform. Kent Brockman (having inexplicably survived his encounter with his monstrous counterpart) advises his viewers to beware "the scourge of advertising", with an ominous message: "Lock your doors. Bar your windows. Because the next advertisement you see could destroy your house and eat your family!" Homer then takes it upon himself to address the viewer with a more ominous message still: "We'll be right back!" I absolutely dig this joke and yet, to my deepest chagrin, I have never seen it play out as the Simpsons gods intended. When "Treehouse of Horror VI" aired on Sky 1 in the UK, I recall that they used to put the ad break between "Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace" and "Homer3" - meaning that we went straight from "Attack" into "Nightmare", and this naturally took all the air out of the punchline of "Attack". Inevitably, the ending fared no better on BBC2, for while the Beeb's airing of "VI" was a fuller experience, restoring much of the material excised from the Sky 1 edit (among them, the couch gag with the family in hangman's nooses and the especially brutal moment where Lard Lad kills Santa's Little Helper by booting him like a football across Evergreen Terrace), they were a little hamstrung on this particular point, owing to the fact that the BBC has no ad breaks (this led to a number of "orphaned" jokes in various other episodes alluding to the knowledge that an advertising break was imminent - among them, Marge's motion in "And Maggie Makes Three" to spend the next few minutes thinking about products that she might like to purchase). Eventually, The Simpsons relocated to Channel 4, but as I've never seen "VI" as broadcast on 4, I can't comment on their handling of it. Regardless, it's a joke better suited to the US broadcasting format, in which the transition from scheduled programming to commercial break happens much more abruptly. Without ads, it's a gag that still kind of works, if we assume that the "we'll be right back" refers to an impending commercial break in-universe, for the viewers of Brockman's newscast. But then it lacks the interactive element, the turning of that complicity back on the Simpsons viewer, while also not really making a whole heap of sense for Homer to be the one to say it. I live in hope that I might one day find a recording of the episode's original US broadcast from October 29th 1995 - not least because I am curious to get a taste of exactly which ads had the privilege of directly following Homer's dire warning. Whoever paid for that particular nugget of advertising space certainly bought more than they bargained for.
Finally, a number of the evil advertising mascots featured in "Attack of The 50-Foot Eyesores" were parodies of actual existing mascots. Naturally, these are all American mascots, and for a while Mr Peanut was the only one I knew the origin of, but I think I'm more-or-less up to speed now. Others are based on familiar characters, like Aladdin, Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, although I couldn't say if this is a nod to such characters being appropriated for any specific ad campaign (or, in the case of Bunyan and Babe, to the various giant statues of the characters found in different locations across America). Here's what I've got so far:
The colossal donut held up by Lard Lad was inspired by the one atop the Randy's Donuts bakery in Inglewood, California, as is helpfully illuminated by the production team on the DVD commentary. Lard Lad himself, however, was blatantly modelled on Big Boy of the Big Boy restaurant chain (who is notable, among other things, for playing a prominent role in the 2009 film Logorama).
The neon cowboy, here seen shilling for Duff beer, was in reality from a contemporary campaign for Miller Genuine Draft. As in "Treehouse of Horror VI", he comes to life, but resists the temptation to squish the denizens of Vegas in favour of picking up a neon girl on the other side of the street. In the absence of such companionship, I have to wonder if his murder of the Springfieldian college students was at least partially motivated by sexual frustration.
The Zip Boys are a parody of the Pep Boys (or Manny, Moe and Jack, after the company founders), a chain specialising in auto repair and maintenance.
As noted above, the giant walking peanut with a taste for human motorists is based on Mr. Peanut, the mascot of snack food company Planters.
The man with a top hat and mallet (whom I originally thought was supposed to be Mr Monopoly) turns out to be the mascot of the Los Angeles-based Western Exterminator company - according to the episode's Simpsons Archive page, the logo consists of "a man in a top hat and black suit leaning over a rat with one hand shaking its index finger in a "no, no, no!" position and the other hand behind its back with a mallet". Gah. Well no way in hell am I doing a Google Image search on that.
She doesn't appear in person, but Lisa makes reference to "that old woman who couldn't find the beef". She speaks of Clara Peller, star of a popular Wendy's campaign from 1984, which gave rise to the zeitgeist-penetrating slogan, "Where's the beef?" Perhaps not the most apt example of a campaign waning through public disinterest, since Peller was dropped by Wendy's due to a dispute over her appearing in a commercial for Prego spaghetti sauce, in which she committed the ultimate transgression - from Wendy's standpoint, anyway - of declaring that she'd found that elusive beef elsewhere. But then The Simpsons had previously mocked the incomprehensibility of the phenomenon, to anybody who wasn't there, in the Season 4 episode "Lisa's First Word" - clearly, they were fascinated by the fickleness of cultural devotion, and by something that was once so massive becoming so remote in little time.
The mascots I continue to draw a blank on: the Red Devil Realty devil and the Tam O' Shanter hat. Oh, and it's glimpsed only briefly, but there is that purple octopus with the ice cream cones that appears in the distance when Lisa points out that the monsters may be difficult to ignore. I've no idea what that thing's deal is, either.
Naked emotional sincerity might have been the tactic favoured by the original batch of "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" films that began in 1987, but right from the beginning we were seeing teases of the bitter sardonicism that would come to characterise the campaign going into the 1990s.
"Pier" (or "Victim", depending on your source) deviates from the formula in that it was, of that early wave, the only film to put the victim of a drink driving accident at the centre, in this case a young man who has been wheelchair-bound since being caught up in a collision caused by a drunk driver going through a red light (the driver themselves is, again, nowhere to be seen, and there are no consequences explicitly handed to them). It follows the same format as the others of its era, in consisting of a monologue set against a nondescript backdrop that stands in stark contrast to the violent horrors to which the characters allude, but sticks out for having a dash more bite than its contemporaries. The heartfelt emotivity that dominated the initial output has been swapped out for something altogether more bitterly understated. It's an angry film, but that anger is never forwardly expressed as it was in "Fireman's Story", culminating instead with a couple of low-key visual cues that crackle with silent acidity. The colours here are as lustreless as in the rest of the early monologues - we have not stumbled upon this pier on a radiantly sunny day - but the background ambience of rushing waves and calling gulls seems deceptively lulling (compare it to "Jenny", where all we had to accompany the protagonist's words was an eerie numbness); there is a soothing calmness to this film (at odds with the speaker's recollections of the noise of the collision being the most overwhelming aspect of the experience), which makes the sting in the tail all the more subdued, and potent.
I would also rate "Pier" as the D&DWL entry that is most misrepresented by its Wikipedia synopsis, which, as of the time of writing, has this to say about the film:
"Victim (1987) showed a man in a wheelchair on a day out to the
pier. He talks about a drink-driving accident he was in and says he is
lucky to be alive. His friend accompanying him helps him drink a cup of
coffee."
Not only does the Wikipedia synopsis fail to get across the twist of the film - it is, clearly, meant to be upsetting when the protagonist requires his friend to hold the styrofoam cup up to his mouth, as only then do we realise the full extent of his injuries - but the closing punchline has been totally misconstrued. Pay attention to the dialogue, and you'll notice that the protagonist never actually says that he is lucky to be alive. That is precisely what he does NOT say. He states that, "They reckon I'm lucky to be alive," in reference to the friends who have stood by him and supported him since that fateful accident. Once his companion has enabled him to sip his beverage, however, he flashes the camera a knowing look to indicate that he does not share the sentiment.
The extremity of the protagonist's injuries, and his final gesture of discontented resignation, disrupt the narrative we would prefer to ascribe to such a scenario - that of perpetual resilience and of soldiering on uncomplaining after life has dealt us the most appalling of blows. All of the early D&DWL do this to some degree, with the featured individuals giving off the guise of striving toward some form of normalcy when their lives have been shaken beyond repair, but none communicate their slogan-forming message with quite the same arrestingly passive-aggressive tone as "Pier".
"Pier" obviously goes for the body horror factor more than its contemporaries, however moderately, and this is where the film opens itself up to an additional level of scrutiny regarding its implicit narrative around the protagonist's wheelchair-bound existence. When it comes to making us rethink the consequences of our actions, there is great power to be had in emphasising the fundamental frailties of the human form (lest we forget how fragile we are), but the line that must be trodden is a fine one indeed, for there is a real risk that such tactics might end up inadvertently representing disability as grotesque and degrading. This is a charge we could potentially level at quite a few of the D&DWL films - all the way up until the final film to sport the campaign format, the astonishingly tone-deaf "Mirror" from 1996, in which a young woman laments how her disfiguring facial injury has precluded her from finding a loving relationship. I avoided explicitly commenting on this in my coverage of "Jenny", but I do wonder about the implications of that line, "After all, she is still my daughter..." Clearly, it's intended to encapsulate the protagonist's complex feelings on the state of her relationship with Jenny following her accident, but it also feeds into the narrative of invalidation surrounding the title character - Jenny's mother still recognises her as her daughter, but there is an air of reluctance about it. Compared to "Jenny", the injured crash victim in "Pier" has their own voice in the matter, and it's certainly not as witless about it as "Mirror" (the worst of the D&DWL films, bar none), with its refusal to romanticise its protagonist's near-death experience, however discreetly, being one of its strengths as a statement against the evils of drink driving. At the same time, it is hard to get around the fact that the payoff hinges on exploiting a distinctly negative impression of disability, and I could see this not playing so well to modern sensibilities. The one ostensible bright spot of the protagonist's life post-injury - the friends who have supported him - becomes the ultimate signifier of his entrapment, as his dependency on others is held up as the pinnacle of his wrecked being.
Of the early wave of "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" films that circulated UK television in the late 1980s, I give "Jenny" (or "Mother", according to some sources) props for most effectively accomplishing what it sets out to do - tell a story so searing in its emotivity that it somewhat dampens your ability to return to whatever escapist entertainment you happened to catch it in the middle of. Whereas "Funeral" is appropriately sombre without showing much teeth, and "Classroom" belabours its emotional heft to a near insufferable degree (I feel a bit heartless for saying it, though), "Jenny" strikes a good balance between the deceptive mundaneness of the imagery on offer and the overwhelming turmoil evidently raging below the surface. There is the perception of life carrying on as normal, and the semblance of resilience following a shocking event, as a portrait of grief is built up and borne out as utterly insurmountable.
"Jenny" follows a middle-aged woman returning home on what looks like a perfectly nondescript commute. She explains that this journey has become part of her daily routine, and that she is returning from visiting her daughter, who has been hospitalised after being hit by a drink driver, an accident that could have been easily avoided if not for the presence of alcohol in the equation. This film offers a slight twist on the standard set-up of the bereaved friend or family member - her Jenny is alive, but unresponsive. We can discern from the monologue that she is in a coma from which she is not expected to recover, and in some respects the indeterminate (although not really) nature of the ending makes the scenario all the more poignant. The protagonist reflects on the injustice of the matter, noting that the drink driver themselves left hospital a mere three days following the accident, whereas Jenny will likely never get to leave at all. She closes her monologue with the assertion that, "But I've got to believe she might...one day." "Jenny" thus ends not with acknowledgement of despair of the situation, but with the expression of hope, which is probably the harshest thing about it. The protagonist admits that the belief that things might eventually get better is the one thing that enables her to face the bleakness of her day-to-day reality; meanwhile, the final image, which shows the protagonist in the absent Jenny's bedroom, is one of total stagnation. Judging by the assortment of pop star pin-ups adorning the walls, Jenny was a teenager at the time of the accident, and she has been cruelly denied the opportunity to progress any further. As her mother assumes her place within this monument to a life disrupted, the implication is that she is as much a victim of this entrapment as her daughter, consigned to an existence as static as the pin-ups that surround her.
"Jenny" is notable for its lack of ambient noise - all that is heard throughout is the monologue, which hangs in its own dead, empty numbness. The mother, casting a shaken, vulnerable figure, is the only human in sight for its full duration, reinforcing the sense that, for all intents and purposes, she is completely alone in her broken world. In one shot, we see no shortage of traffic stirring in the street behind her, but it seems coldly indifferent, the world passing her by and leaving her stranded in her private desolation. In the backdrop of another shot, a stop sign is glimpsed, offering further symbolism of a life permanently on hold, while also doubling as a slick bit of subliminal messaging to the viewer.
Something you'll notice about the campaign's beginnings is that the immediate participants of the life-altering incident in question were usually kept firmly out of the picture. With one exception, the early films tended to avoid focussing directly on the victim of the collision, putting emphasis instead upon the knock-on victims who were tasked with living with the long-term consequences. In the case of "Jenny", the titular character is alive, but the lack of corporeality afforded her throughout the film regulates her status to that of a ghost; neither functionally living or conclusively gone, her existence is equated to one of living death, a fate paralleled in the sombre solitude of her mother's daily routine (and it must be said that, however authentically haunting the images of her mother's grief, the approach is somewhat invalidating to Jenny herself). The perpetrator likewise is nowhere to be seen - not only were the drink drivers never the focus, but they were seldom shown to take part in the suffering, with "Fireman's Story" being quite unusual in explicitly ruminating on the ramifications for the driver themselves. They became, in many respects, an invisible bogeyman, leaving a trail of devastation wherever they roamed and generally appearing to walk away scot-free. They too lacked corporeality, and while several later films would attempt to represent some of the horrors from the driver's side of the equation, many of those, such as "Arrest" and "Kathy", still opted to keep them off of screen. This might have prevented the perpetrator from being fully humanised, although paradoxically the driver was the figure that we were encouraged to think might have been us, were we not mindful of our choices. It was an ominous void, horrifying in the knowledge that somebody would inevitably step up to fill it.
