I imagine that when you imagine a TV critic, you picture some hard-boiled, crusty, even heartless type. But I have always been a sensitive, delicate, please-leave-the-light-on sort of fellow.
So Halloween is a holiday I greet with mixed emotions. I am fine with its brighter expressions — candy, pumpkins, cute costumes on little children, “It’s Halloween” by the Shaggs, all that. But you can keep your haunted houses, the latest “It,” your “Scream” masks, your trouble-making teens using the cover of the holiday to terrorize a neighborhood. Even “The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror” I can find genuinely disquieting.
You will therefore find the following personal guide to Halloween viewing — some things specific to the day, some germane to the season, some featuring paranormal characters, some parodying monster movies — to be short on blood and guts (the kind worn outside the body) and long on comedy and cartoons. There is more than enough actual horror about.
More than anything, Halloween is an opportunity for me to once again steer you to the 2014 web comedy “Ghost Ghirls,” currently living its best afterlife on Vimeo. Created by stars Amanda Lund and Maria Blasucci, it comprises a dozen 10-minute episodes, which by some magic have the substance of full-blown sitcom episodes. As self-involved, childish, competitive ghost hunters-whisperers-busters, Lund and Blasucci visit various locations (a baseball field, a tax office, a middle school, a brothel, a recording studio) to help conflicted spirits move on into the light; the impeccable guest cast includes Jason Ritter, Jake Johnson, Natasha Leggero, Kumail Nanjiani, Colin Hanks, Larisa Oleynik, Paul F. Tompkins, Jason Schwartzman, Brett Gelman, Kate Micucci, Molly Shannon and, as a dead ’70s Southern-rock band fighting too much to finish their final song, Jack Black, Val Kilmer and Dave Grohl.
Helping spirits move on into the light also was the theme of the 2014 Tyler Labine comedy “Deadbeat” (Tubi), with a similarly impressive roster of guest stars. Labine was previously a regular on “Reaper” (stream on CWTV.com), in which Brett Harrison plays a slacker who, after his parents sold his soul to the devil (Ray Wise), sets to work as a kind of bounty hunter, returning the escaped damned to hell. Both these series are funny and charming and worth your attention.
Filmed in suburban New Jersey, “The Adventures of Pete and Pete,” originally on Nickelodeon, was not only the most beautifully fashioned kids show of the 1990s but a series that argues well for the very existence of television. And yet you will have to go to the wilds of YouTube to find it. In the holiday episode “Halloweenie,” little Pete (Danny Tamberelli) is out to beat a 31-year-old record for trick-or-treating 374 houses in one Halloween night, dragging along Halloween-hating older brother Big Pete (Michael C. Maronna), while avoiding the vandalizing Pumpkin Eaters. Helpful neighbor Nona (Michelle Trachtenberg, who would go on to play little sister Dawn Summers on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) pitches in. (Iggy Pop, who plays her father in a cardigan and khakis, would go on to re-form the Stooges.)
As to “Buffy” itself, vamps and demons and the occasional tragic death of a beloved character aside, the series, which debuted in 1997 and changed the nature of television teenage storytelling, is at heart a comedy, an extended metaphor for the ordinary horrors of high school. It produced several Halloween episodes, beginning with the much-loved Season 2 “Halloween” (Hulu, Disney+, Tubi), which finds enchanted Sunnydale residents becoming the characters they’re costumed as. (An idea used by “Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide,” now streaming on Paramount+, the greatest Nickelodeon kids show of the ’00s, for its own third-season Halloween episode.) The show’s legacy can be directly seen in such series as the recent, excellent “School Spirits” (Paramount+), in which a murdered teen, trapped in her high school among several generations of ghost students, attempts to find her killer, and Netflix’s “Dead Boy Detectives,” about a pair of teenage ghosts helping other specters to settle their unfinished business. (See “Ghost Ghirls,” above.)
Most network sitcoms have fielded a Halloween episode, but none more appropriately than “The Addams Family.” Creepy, kooky, mysterious, spooky, altogether ooky, they’re a peerlessly happy, hospitable family, ever welcoming to the straight-world figures who stumble into their eccentric manse. In the redundantly titled “Halloween With the Addams Family” (Freevee, YouTube) from 1964, escaping bank robbers, played by Don Rickles and Skip Homeier, are invited in as adult trick-or-treaters and made to celebrate in ways they don’t understand.
The sitcom, more than the Charles Addams cartoons that inspired it, provides the architecture upon which are built all subsequent Addams revivals and reimaginings, including, of course, “Wednesday,” the ongoing Netflix series that made an instant star of Jenna Ortega. While I absolutely recommend it, my heart lies with “Adult Wednesday Addams,” Melissa Hunter’s witty 2015 web series about the Addams daughter as a young woman making her way in the world — finding roommates, learning to drive, internet dating. You can find it on YouTube and at Hunter’s own website.
Oddly, the sitcom episode that most frightened me as a child — and still does, for all that it’s very funny — comes from “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” Not actually a Halloween episode, the 1963 “It May Look Like a Walnut” (streaming on Peacock, Prime, Filmrise and several other platforms) is a riff on “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” that finds Van Dyke’s Rob Petrie trapped in a science-fiction scenario in which walnut-loving aliens, led by a Danny Thomas look-alike, convert humans to their race, stealing their thumbs and sense of humor. Mary Tyler Moore emerging from the living room closet on an avalanche of nuts is the stuff of nightmares — and one of that series’ most replayed moments.
Given my predilections, it’s not surprising that there are a lot of cartoons on this list.
“It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” (Apple TV+) is the second-greatest Peanuts special, and the only other one I’d call required viewing. In its gorgeous, glorious evocation of autumn days and, especially, nights, its Vince Guaraldi score and Bill Melendez animation, it takes Schulz’s art somewhere new without betraying it; perhaps most important, Cathy Steinberg is back from “A Charlie Brown Christmas” as the voice of Sally Brown, the series’ secret star. (And you thought it was Snoopy.) Linus’ unique belief in the Great Pumpkin takes some heat off Charlie Brown, who nevertheless remains the victim of his friends, random neighbors and the universe. But that’s the “Peanuts” spirit, deep and troubling but endlessly relatable.
“Toy Story of Terror” from 2013, originally produced at the corporate nexus of Disney, Pixar and ABC, offers a delightful meta take on horror tropes — rainy night, roadside motel, characters imprudently wandering off. With the hedgehog Pricklepants (Timothy Dalton) offering commentary the whole time, it’s “Scream” without the murders, but not without its own brand of tension. The supergroup big-screen cast (Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Rickles, Wallace Shawn, Kristen Schaal) are abetted by Kate McKinnon, Ken Marino and Carl Weathers, with Stephen Tobolowsky as the villain (a desk clerk, like Norman Bates). As a bonus, and in the spirit of Jamie Lee Curtis, it’s cowgirl Jessie (Cusack) who takes the lead here.
New this year is the special “SpongeBob SquarePants: Kreepaway Kamp” (Paramount+), in which practically the whole of Bikini Bottom is invited to a reunion at Kamp Koral, where a dark figure lurks and one by one the campers disappear — a moth-eaten premise immeasurably improved by its cast of cartoon sea creatures (and a squirrel). From 2019 comes “The Spooky Tale of Captain Underpants: Hack-a-ween” (Netflix), a delicious mix of animation, puppetry and photograph, in which elementary-school pranksters George and Harold fight a movement to cancel the holiday, with the help of their personal superhero, a hypnotized version of their principal and nemesis.
Some classic Halloween shorts can be found on Disney+ at most any season, and are worth your attention by virtue of being drawn and animated by hand — still the best way to make cartoons. In “Lonesome Ghosts” (first released on Christmas Eve 1937, of all days), Mickey, Goofy and Donald are unemployed ghostbusters called to a creaky old house by the bored specters themselves — derby-wearing, cigar-smoking — for their own slapstick entertainment. In “Trick or Treat,” from 1952, Donald pranks his nephews with firecrackers in their candy bags and dumps water on their heads; friendly Witch Hazel, passing by, helps them get revenge. Not on Disney+ but easy to find online is the 1933 Mickey Mouse short “The Mad Doctor,” in which Pluto is abducted by a scientist planning on putting the pup’s head on a chicken’s body. The black-and-white light and shadow effects are quite beautiful. Although Disney has become synonymous with a certain gentleness, these cartoons are sort of violent. (Though, as I like to say, it’s cartoon violence.)
Through its corporate owner Warner Bros., Max has a trove of golden-age Looney Tunes cartoons gathered into nonchronological “seasons,” where you can find at least a couple of monster-themed classics. Directed by Friz Freleng, “Hyde and Hare” (Season 20, Episode 2), from 1955, drops Bugs Bunny into a Jekyll-and-Hyde situation that includes an addiction metaphor and a Liberace joke. In “Hair-Raising Hare” (Season 11, Episode 6), Bugs is lured to the castle of an evil scientist — a neon sign flashes “Evil Scientist,” so you know — as lunch for his pet monster, the giant orange hairball in tennis shoes later known as Gossamer. You get some excellent fourth-wall-breaking and a finish that prefigures “Some Like It Hot.” And in “Scaredy Cat,” (Season 13, Episode 16), from 1948, also directed by Jones, Porky and Sylvester move into a house populated by murderous mice. Sylvester is panicked, Porky oblivious.
Of all classic cartoon characters, the most involved with the supernatural and the surreal was Fleischer Studios’ Betty Boop, whose jazzy adventures with spooks and demons can be easily found on YouTube. “Snow White,” from 1933 (voted the 19th greatest cartoon of all time in a 1994 survey of a thousand animators), features skeletons, a wicked witch who becomes a dragon and Betty’s pup pal, Bimbo, transformed into a ghost, rotoscoped over Cab Calloway singing “St. James Infirmary Blues.” In “Betty Boop’s Halloween Party,” also from 1933, a nasty gorilla interrupts Betty’s happy soiree, attended by a variety of woodland and jungle animals, and in “Red Hot Mama,” from 1934, Betty dreams herself in hell, where she dances with devils and anthropomorphic flames. When Satan tries to get fresh, she gives him the cold shoulder (literally, metaphorically).
And finally, neither TV series nor cartoon, is humorist Jean Shepherd‘s Oct. 31, 1972, broadcast of his nightly New York City radio show, preserved on YouTube. Shepherd, of course, is best known for a different holiday, as the author and voice of “A Christmas Story,” but he sinks his fangs deep into Halloween, with reminiscences, readings and meditations on the dark. Of everything listed here, this may be the most existentially disturbing, so listen with the lights on. Or don’t — but don’t say I didn’t warn you.
