2x20 The Shut-In!

[7.7/10] I’m a longtime fan of The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episodes. So Amphibia doing its own spooktacular anthology, replete with scary tales that bend and break the show’s usual canon, are alright in my book!

Each of the stories here is the right mix of comical and genuinely scary for my tastes. Anne’s story is a fun riff on The Ring. There’s an inherent novelty to seeing the residents of Wartwood interpreted as human characters. Mixing The Ring’s “If you watch this video you’ll soon perish” conceit with cute internet videos is inspired. The design work on the phone monster is clever, cut, and monstrous in equal measure. And while the metaphor gets pretty jumbled at various points, Anne defeating it through dislikes and mean comments is an amusingly poetic way to bring the monster down. They even do the ol’ last minute fright/sequel tease!

(As an aside, I didn’t actually watch The Ring until this year, and thought that a modern remake would substitute phones for televisions as the medium of destruction. Nice to see Amphibia pick up that baton!)

Hop Pop’s tale goes for a more moody atmospheric horror, which is something I enjoy. The riff on the whole “Phantom Hitchhiker” story, or chance meeting with Death genre is a good fit for Hop Pop’s general vibe. George Takei is a great get for the role of the Frog Reaper (hello fans of Star Trek and Ricardio the Heart Guy!). And while the hair theft ending is pretty goofy stuff, the steady suspense of Hop Pop and his passenger making his way to house after house with terrible things happening just beyond eyeshot brings the scares nicely.

Sprig’s story is probably the best of the three main tales, but they’re all good! The third scary story is certainly the most frightening, picking up on traditional slasher tropes. The character design and voicework on The Seamstress is tremendous, from the grotesque, patched together look of the villain, to the groaning voicework from the actor. The story invokes the Ed Gein-inspired subgenre of horror (a la Texas Chainsaw Massacre) well, ratcheting everything down for a younger audience. And I particularly appreciate that there’s a legitimate theme there, with Ivy’s self-consciousness about her hair mirroring the glass frog’s self-consciousness about its appearance. Plus, the fact that Ivy comes back to scare them in the frame story is great stuff.

The frame story itself is tons of fun! I love Polly trying to come up with a story, only to recount spooky events from the Plantars’ recent past that the rest of the crew was all there for. The gags about the different family members’ names for their stories got a laugh out of me. And the button, with Polly turning into a werewolf so that she’ll have a scary story to tell, makes for a solid dose of humorous escalation.

Overall, I like format-benders like this one, especially for a Halloween special, and Amphibia has tons of fun with the format and the chance to cut loose from canon and plotting progress for an episode.