XXIV (Season 25, Episode 2, Aired October 6th, 2013)
So, yeah, the opening was directed by Guillermo del Toro, who directed two of my favorite movies: Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water, and is one of the greatest genre directors working today. He just knocks it out of the park here, surprisingly for the opening of a late period Simpsons episode. He gets the parody aspect down pat here, getting that these are essentially Mad Magazine type parodies of various horror franchises (he even cited Mad as the main influence), and he just puts in all the references. You have references to his films (Groundskeeper Willie as Hellboy, Carl as Blade, the cockroaches similar to Mimic, various references to, like I said, one of my favorite movies, Pan’s Labyrinth, which I greatly appreciated, a brief allusion to Pacific Rim), and you get a lot of references to stuff he loves, including various references to old SF/horror/monster movies like Godzilla, Ray Harryhausen movies, and even a part where Bart skateboards past HP Lovecraft, Edgar Allen Poe, Ray Bradbury, and (I think) Richard Matheson (whose stories the Simpsons had parodied several times in earlier seasons), which is just a sampling, because there’s even more (Alfred Hitchcock, the Universal Monsters, the deeply underrated film Phantom of the Paradise, various SF aliens). As someone who also enjoys this stuff (I very much respect del Toro living in his own version of Forrest Ackerman’s Ackermansion), this was just a treat to watch from beginning to end. What makes this truly great is how the Simpsons characters…
