‘Simpsons’ fanatics rank the show’s 6 creepiest Halloween episodes

They don’t call them “Treehouse of Horror” for nothing.

By

Ryan Reed

Oct 28, 2025

By Ryan Reed

October 28, 2025

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Photo credit: YouTube screenshots from Simpsons Clips (left) and steve’s videos (right) – Hardcore 'Simpsons' fans picked the show's creepiest Halloween segments.

The Simpsons, as of this writing, has existed for 37 seasons across 36 years—adding up to nearly 800 episodes, making it the longest-running animated sitcom.

It’s brought us some of the most influential scripted comedy ever, particularly during its early days, when the writers, animators, and voice actors seemed to defy some TV norm in every other episode. They were on fire back then. And they established one particularly unique tradition during Season Two: the Halloween-timed “Treehouse of Horror” episode, which adds a macabre twist to their regular style.

These have never been mere throwaway filler installments. In some ways, the format allows the writers to be even more ambitious, exploring their love of beloved horror/sci-fi anthology series like The Twilight Zone. They also exist in their own (mostly) self-contained universes—therefore not beholden to the canon of the actual show—bending reality while often spoofing classic film and TV staples. It’s become a fan-favorite concept, churning up some legitimately creepy moments.

Just ahead of Halloween, here are six unsettling Simpsons segments that diehards say have stuck with them:

6. “Life’s a Glitch, Then You Die” (1999)

(written by Ron Hauge, directed by Pete Michels)

Ah, the Y2K scare. It’s easy now to look back on this time of tech paranoia with an eye roll, but it was a somewhat disconcerting experience to live through. Everybody tried to brush aside the dire predictions of computer catastrophe, but many of us probably still grimaced when the New Year came, assuming there was indeed a small chance our digital systems would collapse.

This bleakly comic segment expertly plays on that very fear, with Homer Simpson—the “Y2K compliance officer” at the nuclear power plant—forgetting to “debug” the computers. “You did fix them, right, dad?” Lisa asks her bumbling father. “Because even a single faulty unit could corrupt every other computer in the world!”

Homer’s screw-up leads to a hilarious global disaster—though those laughs are laced with disturbing tension. “[T]hat was one of the first episodes I watched,” one Redditor wrote. “Nelson getting stuck in the copy machine creeped me out.” Another added, “[W]atching as a kid, I remember feeling the ending to the Y2K one was funny but also dark and [eerie] just because of the palpable Y2K anxiety among people back then, worrying what was gonna happen to computers everywhere on January 1, 2000.”

5. “Bart Sells His Soul” (1995)

(written by Greg Daniels, directed by Wes Archer)

OK, we’re slightly cheating here—this Season Seven classic is a regular standalone episode, not connected to the “Treehouse” series. But it had to make the cut. When one thread posed the question, “What are genuinely creepy Simpsons episodes?” this was the clear top pick, earning praise for its darkly psychological story.

Bart, enduring a punishment at his church, agrees to sell his soul to pal Milhouse—a decision he later comes to regret. For those of us who search for bad omens and/or torment ourselves over past screw-ups, this scenario may hit close to home.

“That episode is very odd,” one person commented on Reddit, while someone else compared it to The Twilight Zone. It definitely sticks with you.

4. “The Thing and I” (1996)

(written by Ken Keeler, directed by Mike B. Anderson)

Bart and Lisa, bothered by some strange sounds in their house, discover a monster living in the attic. But it’s a special kind of creature—Bart’s evil twin, Hugo, whom their parents have chained away in an effort to keep him away from the public.

Despite the dark storyline, so much of the characters’ behavior is mundane, and that contrast, according to one Redditor, is what makes the segment “extra unsettling.” “The family [acts] SO much like they do in the normal show,” they wrote. “Homer driving around in the rain instead of going to the car wash, Homer’s unsold autobiography, Lisa putting baby booties on the cat, the kids pestering Homer about what happens to nosy kids—just tons of completely typical Simpsons jokes happening around this story about Homer and Marge keeping a secret fourth child chained up in the attic.”

No argument there.

3. “Terror at 5 1/2 Feet” (1993)

(written by Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein, directed by David Silverman)

An overt homage to the classic Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” this early segment finds Bart disturbed by a gremlin that seems intent on killing him and his fellow classmates on their school bus. The problem is that, just like with William Shatner’s Twilight Zone character on board a plane, no one else can see this supernatural creature. The tone here is just perfect, balancing the humor of its parody and the genuinely creepy nature of what’s happening on screen.

“For me, it’s the part where the gremlin first sees Bart in the window and smiles,” one Redditor wrote. “Just thinking about it makes me shiver to this day…It’s more about the fact that that’s where you can tell that it isn’t just an animal mindlessly destroying things. It’s intelligent, and it’s enjoying tormenting people and causing fear and pain.”

Another Redditor zeroed in on the scene where the gremlin (spoiler alert) holds onto Ned’s severed head. “I was at least used to some kind of funny closure on the Treehouse of Horror segments,” they wrote. “But that one still stands out for its scariness.”

2. “Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace” (1995)

(written by Steve Tompkins, directed by Bob Anderson)

This Season 7 piece reads like pure nightmare fuel on paper. Logical, given that it’s a parody of A Nightmare on Elm Street, with the reliably hostile Groundskeeper Willie serving as proxy for the diabolical “Freddy” Krueger terrorizing the children of Springfield in their dreams (and, eventually, beyond).

“For me it is the Nightmare on Elm Street parody,” one Redditor wrote, adding that a scene with a “burning Willie” genuinely haunts them. “When Willie catches on fire,” another user confessed. “The black burning skeleton is pretty frightening.”

1. “Nightmare Cafeteria” (1994)

(written by David X. Cohen, directed by Jim Reardon)

So many “Treehouse of Horror” segments could appear on this list, but one seems to earn praise most consistently.

“Nightmare Cafeteria,” a standout from Season Six, has a wildly creepy premise: In an effort to solve two distinct problems—poor-quality cafeteria food and too many troublemakers—Principal Skinner decided that any kid sent to detention shall be…cooked and eaten. The climactic scene, featuring a gruesome musical number, left some fans especially weirded out.

“I found this very disturbing the first time I saw it as a kid,” someone wrote on Reddit. “I don’t necessarily consider it creepy, but it is by far the grossest thing I’ve seen in the show,” another argued. “It still gets me, especially how the blood and viscera fly off as they’re dancing.” Someone else went even deeper: “[I] feels so much like a nightmare a kid would actually have—something horrible is happening slowly at school, it’s coming for them, and their parents just… won’t get involved? And everyone is really doomed? Great stuff.”

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Photo credit: Canva – A man with fast reflexes.

Culture, Internet

Italian man claims to be ‘human cheetah’ with lightning-fast reflexes

“I blinked and I missed it”

Mark Wales

4/29/2026

At first glance, this probably looks like a camera trick. Ken Lee, an Italian content creator, has built a massive online following by doing something that doesn’t quite feel real. Viewers refer to him as the “human cheetah” because it appears he has near-instant reflexes.

Grabbing objects out of the air with uncanny precision, flicking clothespins and lighters, and throwing a blur of punches and kicks at impossible speeds, it is easy to call him unbelievable. Half the audience thinks his viral speed videos are fake. The other half is just as convinced they are watching something incredibly rare.

Hands so fast they blur time

In the video above, a timer runs to confirm its authenticity. In what looks like half a second, he reaches out and snags the lighter from the table. To prove it is real, he does it twice.

Having amassed millions of followers on his TikTok page, the identity behind the mysterious influencer remains largely unknown. Active since around 2022, with almost 100 million accumulated likes, Lee has cultivated a fandom around his self-proclaimed “Superhero per Hobby!”

Do you believe it is real? Is this person the fastest human alive? Many followers cannot wait for the next video to be posted. Plenty of his fervent fans are Italian, so sifting through the remarks takes a bit of hunting. Here are some comments that sum up how much people enjoy the fun and the spectacle:

“Ken lee the fastest and the best”

“Most dangerous human”

“Is this what the lighter sees before my homie steals it”

“It was sped up during he grabbed the lighter, if u count up with the timer u would be off by like 0,5 seconds whenever he grabs the lighter.”

“If the flash were human”

“How is it possible to get such powers ?”

“I blinked and I missed it”

People love good entertainment

The awe of peak performance attracts people to watch elite athletes, musicians, or even dancers. There is something that deeply satisfies all of us when a human appears to push a skill to its limit. Whether it is real or fake seems to matter less than the opportunity to chime in on some good entertainment.

How far could any of us go by practicing and repeating a particular motion over and over until it is mastered? Beneath the flashy nickname and his viral speed videos, Lee’s content has a way of drawing people in. This is not a superpower. Just repetition. Focus. Obsession. And maybe some digital wizardry.

Testing the science of speed

If you wish to question the validity of Lee’s performances, maybe some basic science can help. Human reaction time is not just a reflex. A 2024 study found that the nervous system can fine-tune responses in real time. Practice can make movements appear almost automatic.

It has been well established in research that the gap between seeing something and responding has a limit. A 2025 study concluded that the most elite extremes allow for reaction times of 100 milliseconds. At that speed, the human brain can barely process that something has happened.

Science explains Lee is not necessarily moving as fast as we might perceive him to be. And therein lies all the fun of it. We cannot prove it is real, nor can we actually prove that it is fake.

Maybe Lee is the “fastest man alive” or the so-called “human cheetah.” Or maybe he is just a remarkable entertainer. Either way, he has clearly tapped into something strange and fascinating: a blend of human ability and fantasy that people do not want to miss.

To give context to Lee’s videos, watch this performance on Tú Sí Que Vales:

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Photo credit: LisaStrachan/iStock via Getty Images – Fear not: There isn’t anything that needs saving.

Culture, Media

Despite all the likes, literallys and dropped g’s, English isn’t decaying before our eyes

Why “bad” English is nothing new.

Good Partner

4/22/2026

Valerie M. Fridland

As a linguistics professor, I’m often asked why English is decaying before our eyes, whether it’s “like” being used promiscuously, t’s being dropped deleteriously or “literally” being deployed nonliterally.

While these common gripes point to eccentric speech patterns, they don’t point to grammatical annihilation. English has weathered far worse.

Let’s start with something we can all agree on: Old English, spoken from approximately A.D. 450 to 1100, is pretty unintelligible to us today. Anyone who’s had the pleasure of reading “Beowulf” in high school knows how different English back then used to sound. Word endings did a lot more grammatical work, and verbs followed more complicated patterns. Remnants of those rules fuel lingering debates today, such as when to use “whom” over “who,” and whether the past tense of “sneak” is “snuck” or “sneaked.”

The language went on to experience centuries of tumult: Viking invasions, which introduced Old Norse influence; Anglo-Norman French rule, which shifted the language of the elite to French; and 18th-Century grammarians, who dictated norms with their elocution and grammar guides.

In that time, English has lost almost all of the more complex linguistic trappings it was born with to become the language we know and – at least, sometimes – love today. And as I explain in my new book, “Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents,” it was all thanks to the way that language naturally evolves to meet the social needs of its speakers.

From dropping the ‘l’ to dropping the ‘g’

The things we tend to label as “bad” or sloppy English – for instance, the “g” that gets lost from our -ing endings or the deletion of a “t” when we say a word like “innernet” – actually reflect speech habits that are centuries old.

Take, for example, “often.” Originally spoken with the “t,” that pronunciation gradually became less favored around the 15th century, alongside that “l” in “talk” and the “k” in know. Meanwhile, the “s” now stuck on the back of verbs like “does” and “makes” began as a dialectal variant that only became popular in 16th-century London. It gradually replaced “th” whenever third persons were involved, as in “The lady doth protest too much.”

While dropping the “l” in talk may have been initially frowned upon, today it would be strange if you pronounced the letter. And the shift makes sense: It smoothed out some linguistic awkwardness for the sake of efficiency.

If people learned to look at language more like linguists, they might come around to seeing that there is more than one perspective on what good speech consists of.

And yes, that absolutely is a sentence ending with a preposition – something many modern grammar guides discourage, even though the idea only took hold after 18th-century grammarian Robert Lowth intimated it was a less elegant choice based on the model of Latin.

Though Lowth voiced no hard and fast rule against it, many a grammar maven later misconstrued his advice as an admonition. Just like that, a mere suggestion became grammatical law.

The rise of the grammar sticklers

Many of today’s ideas about what constitutes correct English are based on a singular – often mistaken – 19th-century view of the forces that govern our language.

In the late 18th century, the English-speaking world began experiencing class restructuring and higher literacy rates. As greater class mobility became possible, accent differences became class markers that separated new money from old money.

Emulation of upper-crust speech norms became popular among the nouveau riche. With literacy also on the rise, grammarians and elocutionists raced to dictate the terms of “proper” English on and off the page, which led to the rise of usage guides and dictionaries that were eager to sell a certain brand of speech.

Another example of grammarian angst reconfiguring the view of an otherwise perfectly fine form is the droppin’ of the “g.” It became so tied to slovenly speech that it was branded with an apostrophe in the 19th century to make sure no one missed its lackadaisical and nonstandard nature.

Up until the 19th century, however, no one seemed to care whether one pronounced it as “-in” or “-ing.”

Evidence suggests that -ing wasn’t even heard as the correct form. Many elocution guides from the 18th century provide rhyming word pairs like “herring/heron,” “coughing/coffin” and “jerking/jerkin,” which suggest that “-in” may have been the preferred pronunciation of words ending with “-ing.” Even writer and satirist Jonathan Swift – a frequent lobbyist for “proper” English – rhymes “brewing” with “ruin” in his 1731 poem “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, D.S.P.D..”

Embrace the change

Language has always shifted and evolved. People often bristle at changes from what they’ve known to what is new. And maybe that’s because this process often begins with speakers that society usually looks less favorably on: the young, the female, the poor, the nonwhite.

But it’s important to remember that being disliked and bad are not the same thing – that today’s speech pariahs are driven by the same linguistic and social needs as the Londoners who started going with “does” instead of “doth” or dropped the “t” in often.

So if you think the speech that comes from your lips is the “correct” version, think again. Thou, like every other English speaker, art literally the product of centuries of linguistic reinvention.

This article originally appeared on The Conversation. You can read it here.

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Photo credit: Ian Taylor Photographer – Two young children play in the grass.

Culture, Media

10 boys and 10 girls were left alone in separate houses and the different results are just wild

The premise was simple but high stakes.

Adam Albright Hanna

GOOD Staff

4/19/2026

It sounds like the plot of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. However, in the mid-2000s, it was a very real and very controversial reality television experiment.

Footage from the UK Channel 4 documentary Boys and Girls Alone is captivating audiences all over again. It offers a fascinating and chaotic look at what happens when you remove parents from the equation.

The premise was simple but high stakes. Twenty children, aged 11 and 12, were split into two groups by gender. Ten boys and ten girls were placed in separate houses and told to live without adult supervision for five days.

The Setup

While there were safety nets in place, the day-to-day living was entirely up to the kids. A camera crew was present but instructed not to intervene unless safety was at risk. The children could also ring a bell to speak to a nurse or psychiatrist.

The houses were fully stocked with food, cleaning supplies, toys, and paints. Everything they needed to survive was there. They just had to figure out how to use it.

The Boys: Instant Chaos

In the boys’ house, the unraveling was almost immediate. The newfound freedom triggered a rapid descent into high-energy anarchy.

They engaged in water pistol fights and threw cushions. In one memorable instance, a boy named Michael covered the carpet in sticky popcorn kernels just because he could.

The destruction eventually escalated to the walls. The boys covered the house in writing, drawing, and paint. But the euphoria of freedom eventually crashed into the reality of consequences.

“We never expected to be like this, but I’m really upset that we trashed it so badly,” one boy admitted in the footage. “We were trying to explore everything at once and got too carried away in ourselves.”

Their attempts to clean up were frantic and largely ineffective. Nutrition also took a hit. Despite having completed a cooking course, the boys survived mostly on cereal, sugar, and the occasional frozen pizza. By the end of the week, the house was trashed, and the group had fractured into opposing factions.

The Girls: Organized Society

The girls’ house looked like a different planet.

In stark contrast to the mayhem next door, the girls immediately established a functioning society. They organized a cooking roster, with a girl named Sherry preparing their first meal. They baked cakes. They put on a fashion show. They even drew up a scrupulous chores list to ensure the house stayed livable.

While their stay wasn’t devoid of interpersonal drama, the experiment highlighted a fascinating divergence in socialization. Left to their own devices, the girls prioritized community and maintenance. The boys tested the absolute limits of their environment until it broke.

The documentary was controversial when it aired, with critics questioning the ethics of placing children in unsupervised situations for entertainment. But what made it so enduring, and why footage keeps resurfacing years later, is what it reveals about how kids are socialized long before anyone puts them in a house together. The boys weren’t born anarchists and the girls weren’t born organizers. They arrived at those houses already shaped by years of being told, implicitly and explicitly, what boys do and what girls do. Whether that’s a nature story or a nurture story is the question the documentary keeps asking without quite answering, which is probably why people are still watching and arguing about it nearly two decades later.

This article originally appeared two years ago. It has been updated.

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