Halloween, by Guillermo del Toro

Everyone has a cutoff year for when The Simpsons stopped being funny. Mine is somewhere around season twelve, which seems to be the median. The show has been running on institutional memory and cultural inertia for so long that it’s become more landmark than comedy—something you acknowledge rather than watch.

And then Guillermo del Toro directed the couch gag for the 2013 Treehouse of Horror, and for two and a half minutes the show was exactly what it once was: alive, strange, and made by someone who genuinely loved what they were doing.

The sequence is a catalog of horror—not just references but an act of curation. The Pale Man from Pan’s Labyrinth. Characters from Hellboy. Hitchcock’s birds descending on Springfield. The hedge maze from The Shining. Nosferatu’s shadow climbing the stairs. Cthulhu in the harbor. It runs fast enough that you miss things on the first pass, which is the point—del Toro designed it to reward rewatching, the same way his films do.

What strikes me is the sincerity. Del Toro doesn’t do irony about the things he loves. When he puts a monster in the frame it’s because he actually loves that monster, has loved it since childhood, and wants you to love it too. The couch gag has the feeling of a devotional object—a small chapel to everything dark and beautiful that he’s spent his career trying to rescue from camp.

It came out on a Friday. I watched it four times before I went to sleep.