Here’s How Stoopid Buddy Gave ‘The Simpsons’ A ‘Nightmare Before Christmas’ Makeover

Four episodes into its 38th season, The Simpsons makes its annual pit stop for Halloween with “Treehouse of Horror XXXVII,” which aired October 25 on Fox and is streaming on Hulu.

Co-showrunner Tim Long took the lead in producing this year’s special, which opens with a bespoke stop-motion homage to The Nightmare Before Christmas before proceeding with three traditionally animated stories: “Bride’s Shed Revisited,” “Dog Boy Afternoon,” and “Vehicular Dad Slaughter.”

Cartoon Brew spoke with Long and the opening’s director, John Harvatine of Burbank, California-based Stoopid Buddy Stoodios, about bringing the episode to life with veteran director David Silverman (The Simpsons Movie).

With almost 30 years at The Simpsons, this year’s “Treehouse” is not Long’s first time up to the Halloween plate. However, there’s a quality bar that Long said rattles all of the producers. “It’s a little daunting because there is this incredible tradition that we have to uphold, and it’s always a very prominent episode in our schedule,” Long explained. “Apparently, it gets way more viewers than almost any other episode, so you’ve got to bring the goods. Plus, there’s also this tradition now that we want to do something different animation-wise.”

For the episode’s opening, Long said he was thinking about classic Disney Halloween films and realized they had never done a stop-motion riff on Henry Selick’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. “It has become such a perennial classic, and I love the animation style,” he explained. “We figured the [characters] are going to look great in that style. Plus, we had a preexisting relationship with Stoopid Buddy, so it felt like a no-brainer.”

Joining him to write “Treehouse of Horror XXXVII” were staff writers Joel H. Cohen and Jessica Conrad. Long said of their stories, “I’m always a little wary of just doing a parody of the latest horror movie. And the ground is pretty well stripped of the classics of horror. So, like a lot of things on The Simpsons, the ideas came up organically.”

Long said his segment, “Vehicular Dad Slaughter,” was inspired by classic driver’s education films featuring violent car-crash footage meant to terrify high school kids and new drivers. “I thought it was a funny idea, and it sort of led naturally to the idea of Patty and Selma — who work at the DMV — being the villains,” he explained. “We realized that after all these years, Patty and Selma had never been the villains in a ‘Treehouse of Horror,’ which struck me as a really funny omission.”

Conrad’s “Dog Boy Afternoon” came out of a Matt Groening mandate to “get back to the days when the Halloween episodes are genuinely scary.” Long said Conrad created a gnarly Pet Sematary-style story involving Santa’s Little Helper. “I made sure that when Homer swings the shovel and hits Bart in the head, that you really are like, ‘Wow, look at that. You don’t see that every day.’ Or when the dogs disembowel Homer, we wanted it to be super fast but really funny.”

Cohen’s “Bride’s Shed Revisited” is a twist on Holly Gramazio’s novel The Husbands, in which Marge discovers that the family’s new shed is a portal to different realities where she’s married to everyone except Homer. One of those husbands is Survivor host Jeff Probst, who Long said was enthusiastic about joining the fun. “We didn’t want to just go with a super hunk du jour,” he explained. “But someone who Marge would be really into.”

The Simpsons Before Christmas

The opening sequence combines two kinds of animation: stop-motion puppetry paired with Simpsons parody lyrics for “This Is Halloween,” and claymation titles.

Harvatine told Cartoon Brew that Matt Selman first floated the idea for a Nightmare homage in 2024, after Stoopid Buddy completed its stop-motion work on the “Treehouse of Horror” segment “Denim.”

“It was such early stages that he wasn’t sure if it was gonna happen,” Harvatine recalled. “So, we didn’t really talk about it in classic The Simpsons fashion until three months ago. They were like, ‘We want to talk about the opening for this.’ They talked about Nightmare, and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s amazing!’”

Silverman worked on-site with Harvatine and his team. “We sat with him, and I thought it would take a while to figure out how to get all these characters right,” Harvatine said. “But pretty quickly, he had his little sketch pad and would throw ideas out and did it pretty fast.”

The team immediately began fabricating 16 individual puppets, including doubles. “The real challenge was, how do we make puppets that we can do in a short amount of time, but make them feel worthy of Nightmare?” Harvatine said. “It was a real challenge for the puppet department. But the team really excelled and rose to the challenge. Right off the bat, they just started turning out these really beautiful sculpts and beautiful puppets. And then all of the costumes were hand-sewn. There were probably five or six different artists, and multiple sculpts going at the same time to make this happen. We had to have multiples of each puppet, so it was the longest process of everything, but once they started moving, it started working out all right.”

Long and his writers provided the song parody and a rough animatic of the sequence, which the Stoopid Buddy team used to develop the set and lighting. Stoopid Buddy also created a claymation title screen featuring letters made of worms, which Harvatine said almost didn’t happen. “We were hoping we could do it in clay, but that was a lot to do,” he explained. “Our backup was gonna be making a mold and spit them out the old-fashioned way. But we were doing pretty good on time, so we were able to hand-sculpt all those [worms].

“We saved time at the end, and we kept an animator on so we could have that really elaborate splat ending,” he continued. “What’s really fun too, if you freeze-frame on when they’re flying out, there are Simpsons Easter eggs in there. The animator had a lot of fun with it. And it’s always rewarding to find a way to put [claymation] into a project. I love the imperfection and the fingerprints and just the rawness of it.”

From the hand-stitched costumes to the quality of the animated performances, Harvatine said he’s proud that his team rose to the occasion to honor Selick and Tim Burton’s film. “We talked to the animators and were like, ‘Go big, go bold. Don’t worry about the little little feet, just really bring the performance,’” he said of several puppets that didn’t have tie-downs. “And I’m really proud of the animation team for how much they pushed things with what they had.”