THE SIMPSONS: Matt Selman Previews ‘Treehouse of Horror XXXV’

THE SIMPSONS celebrates its jaw-dropping 35th annual “Treehouse of Horror” episode on Sunday, November 3—and the series is going all out to celebrate.

“A good Halloween [episode] is a mix of satire, old-time horror, and a big, silly idea,” THE SIMPSONS showrunner Matt Selman tells Give Me My Remote. “So I’m happy about [‘Treehouse of Horror XXXV’]. I feel like we have a good mix for those three elements.”

Kicking things off, the long-running animated series brought in an animation MVP to help with the show’s introduction. “[We have] a fantastic original opening by Jorge Gutierrez, who is a fantastic animator; he directed THE BOOK OF LIFE,” Selman shares. “He brought his own style to THE SIMPSONS universe for a kickass way to start to show off with a bang: Kind of an homage to Day of the Dead slash to the video game ‘Street Fighter II.’”

The first full segment of “Treehouse of Horror XXXV” is more rooted in modern times, as political unease causes unexpected side effects in the town. “We have a [story that is] ripped from the pages of our broken modern world of political echo chamber nightmare,” Selman says. “Springfield, like America, is horribly divided, and our division is fuel[ed by] echo chambers of social media and cable news, which tell us to be angry all the time. So what happens to all that rage? Well, they turn into giant monsters.”

The second segment finds doomed workers seeking revenge on a Victorian-era Mr. Burns.“We have the throwback [segment], an old-school kind of horror: Old rich man in his house being punished for his crimes,” Selman teases. “An even older-timey version of Mr. Burns is haunted by the ghosts of his corn syrup factory. We tried to do the jump scares that the kids like in their modern horror movies, but I don’t know how scary they are; it’s hard to do jump scares in animation.”

In that segment, the creative team “gave it an old-timey look” to be more true to the story they were telling. “We have treated the animation to look a little flickery and filmy,” Selman shares. “That was fun. And then we realized the jump scares weren’t super scary, so we tried to make them silly.”

The final portion of the episode is “probably the marquee segment: The parody of VENOM called ‘Denim,’” Selman says. “Which, awesomely, is coming out literally one weekend after an actual VENOM movie came out.”

The team was particularly ambitious with this section, utilizing stop-motion (in partnership with Stoopid Buddy Stoodios) to create the Denim creature that attaches itself to Homer.

“You have stop-motion pants of Homer’s, sentient pants, talking to him in a love triangle between him and the pants and Marge,” Selman says with a laugh. “They’re made of real denim. And you can tell that they’re actual cloth, which is awesome. They’re not just 3D like VENOM, or 2D like regular SIMPSONS…I just think Denim is really funny. I wanted him to be a little cute. Like, not like Venom; Venom is not cute. Denim is a little cute, he’s a sweetheart. He doesn’t even really do anything that bad; he doesn’t kill anybody…We weren’t really trying to out violence VENOM [as a story].” 

The idea to do the pants in stop-motion for the segment was devised “early” in the process of crafting this year’s “Treehouse,” Selman shares. “I had a meeting with the Stoopid Buddy animators—who are terrific, fun, and great to work with—right after the writers’ strike ended because they were like, ‘Hey, we should do another SIMPSONS collab,” he recalls. “And so I called them right away with this idea. And then we wrote it, did the table read. Then I had to convince everyone that we had to pay for the stop-motion animation. They tried to say, ‘Well, we could probably fake it with CGI.’ But no, it has to be real puppets. Now we’re gonna have the denim puppet; it can live in our office and we can play with it. So we’re so lucky that we have these grand visions, and that—most of the time—they come true.”

THE SIMPSONS, Sundays, 8/7c, Fox

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