A Conscientious Refusal to Rank the "Treehouse of Horror" Episodes
This is an attempt at something different, sorry
Before we get to today’s newsletter, which is not a ranked list, here is a different list, which contains four films you can watch for Halloween. This is in chronological order, meaning it is also not ranked.
The (Vincent) Price is Right (to Make So Many Good Horror Movies)
The 1960s are a tumultuous time in our history. There are richer and more interesting examples of this than in the world of film, but this isn’t a general history newsletter, so this is the perspective you get. The horror genre went through remarkable changes in tone, look, and severity in this decade. One way to chart that is through the works of Vincent Price. His 1960s output started with a series of Roger Corman-produced horror films inspired by the works of Edgar Allen Poe, but by the end of the decade (and into the 1970s) his works could be bleaker, meaner, and bloodier than his works at the beginning of the Sixties could have anticipated. This is an incomplete list, but a fun way to chart that progress into darker territory:
House of Usher
Roger Corman and Vincent Price collaborated on a series of films that drew from the work of Edgar Allen Poe; the first of that series, House of Usher, sets the visual style and overall tone for these works. This is arguably the most restrained of the series, leaning almost entirely on psychological unease and the eerie crumbling castle where the story is set to summon chills.
Masque of the Red Death
Arguably the high point of the Poe-inspired films, Masque of the Red Death is a fever dream of a horror movie, a color-drenched story about a sinister Prince played by Vincent Price who decides to party in defiance of the deadly illness rampaging through the countryside. It’s shockingly violent and sexual for its time, with a lurid quality that endures today. Even though it endures as likely the best representation of the Corman-produced Poe works, don’t start with it: It sets the bar shockingly high for everything else, and it works best when you have a sense of what it springs from.
Witchfinder General
Where Masque of the Red Death is operatic and lush in its depictions of evil and rampant death, Witchfinder General unsettles with a story of human ugliness as sparse and grim as sun-bleached bones. Price is both a steely and seedy presence as Matthew Hopkins, the witchfinder whose influence lets him torture and dominate others to his black heart’s content. His encounter with a soldier proves to be his undoing, but his fervor and cruelty manage to destroy the souls of those around him even after his death. There are certainly more fun depictions of evil in Price’s filmography, but few roles let him exude the kind of pure, loathsome menace found in Hopkins.
Theatre of Blood
A morbid yet zany exploration of a writer who was not Edgar Allen Poe, Theatre of Blood pulls from Shakespeare to concoct a series of jarring, comically ugly deaths for theater critics who once savaged the works of Edward Lionheart. The conceit pays off beautifully both because it gives us a series of inventive deaths (as our lead puts it in one moment: “Only Lionheart would have the temerity to rewrite Shakespeare”) and because it proves fusty, pretentious critics in their autumn years can be as fun to kill off onscreen as horny, doe-eyed teens.
A Conscientious Refusal to Rank the Treehouse of Horror Episodes
This is an attempt at something different, sorry
What was The Simpsons really supposed to mean to me? Whatever we’re supposed to ask of entertainment, the best of the series delivered it and more, creating a shared referential nexus for so in my generation and a functional argot of both contextual and non-sequitur references. The weakest of the post-prime seasons may trigger secondhand embarrassment or a dissociated feeling now, but like the innocence of childhood, the Golden Age of the series that ran during my youth was too magical and fragile to last in this cold world.
I will not rank the Treehouse of Horror episodes in this newsletter. There is an episode for every day of October now, and before the year is done there will be more Treehouse of Horror episodes than days in the month. While I can’t argue against the decline in quality the series has faced, something you can see neatly charted in the steady decline of the specials, I never know whether to regard the show’s longevity as a base testament to its enduring bankability or a kind of television Valhalla. It persists in might-as-well-be eternity cavorting and carousing, doing battle with one plot after another, all to repeat the merriment next week (save for when there’s a rerun or a season break). Which is significantly more distressing to consider when you start to question whether Valhalla itself was more of an ironic, Twilight Zone-esque prison for vikings, and whether there can be a notion of eternity that would always register as a reward in the human brain.
Am I depriving myself of an opportunity at more reach, that most vaunted prize for the newsletter-poster? A ranking starts an argument, which can be good for engagement. A ranking of this scale could even be seen as an undertaking worth commenting on irrespective of what’s listed. (“Scale” and “undertaking” here, of course, refer to watching and evaluating <15 hours of a television show; in other words, it’s not hard labor, both because it’s not physically taxing and because there are ways to make any money doing hard labor for 15 hours.) But then what? I feed the SEO gods in anticipation of more views? I calculate the ratio of new subscribers to death threats over the placement of Treehouse of Horror VII to determine if the gambit of the list paid off? I myself am catalogued in a list of best rankings of Treehouse of Horror episodes? These things have a way of spiraling, you know. Spiraling like some sort of mad Spirograph enthusiast spiraling away in an abandoned factory, an image I may have conjured with a little outside assistance:
I return to the question of what I was ever right to ask of The Simpsons, and a question of whether I’ve already taken too much. Even if I get whatever I’m supposed to want from a list, maybe it’s best that I let it lie. You can pay a relative pittance per month to stream every episode of the show that ever aired, and if you still have the DVDs you can watch them with commentary. I’ve used the series like iron to sharpen what would become my sense of humor, I’ve traded quotes from the series to establish friendships, and I’ve returned to the show at vulnerable periods (hangovers) where I just needed the succor of familiarity and irrefutable hilarity. If I’m supposed to decry the longevity of the show for arguably cheapening its peak, what can I say of myself if I exploit that longevity for more content? If I’m allowed to have a healthy appreciation for its best episodes without worrying over what else they’ve done, why make a newsletter that’s partly wallowing in the stuff I didn’t like? I object. This is an objection. I am freed of the obligation to cheapen what I love, and you are freed of the burden of reading and having to form your own opinion about where the episodes fall in terms of quality.
Oh, and Treehouse of Horror V is the best one.