“There Is No Such Thing”: Del Toro’s Metafictional Monster Rally

The October 2013 edition of the annual The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror boasted a credit sequence conceived and guest-directed by Guillermo del Toro. The opening “couch gag” of Matt Groening’s long-running series has often displayed the show’s irreverent brand of intertextuality, but del Toro’s contribution was a three-minute master class in playful pastiche, quotation, and self-reference. Del Toro’s fans could spot cartoon versions of Prince Nuada and the forest god from Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008), a gargantuan monster and robot fight in the style of Pacific Rim (2013), Marge in the shape of a monstrous cockroach from Mimic (1997), Homer’s face erupting gruesomely into that of a Reaper from Blade II (2002), the Cronos (1993) device, Mr. Burns reconfigured as the Pale Man from El laberinto del fauno/Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), and Lisa Simpson dressed as Ofelia (from El laberinto), falling down the 1951 Disney version of Alice’s rabbit hole and confronting the Hypnotoad from Groening’s Futurama series. Creature feature aficionados could revel in shared genre knowledge by sighting—among many others—intertextual references to Ray Harryhausen’s skeletons from Jason and the Argonauts (Don Chaffey 1963), Elsa Lanchester as the bride from The Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale 1935), The Car (Elliott Silverstein 1977), several incarnations of The Phantom of the Opera and The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise 1951), The Creature from the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold 1954), The Shining (Stanley Kubrick 1980), Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau 1922), The Fly (Kurt Neumann 1958), Alien (Ridley Scott 1989), and Freaks (Tod Browning 1932).