Watch The Simpsons’ Halloween Parody of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and The Shining

For the past 25 years, the high­light of every sea­son of The Simp­sons has been its Tree­house of Hor­ror Hal­loween spe­cial – an omnibus episode filled with mor­bid, and fre­quent­ly hilar­i­ous, hor­ror spoofs. It’s the one time of the year when the cre­ators of the long run­ning series feel com­fort­able with dis­em­bow­el­ing Homer, flay­ing Marge, and let­ting Mag­gie wield an axe. Arguably the best one of these seg­ments was its 1994 par­o­dy of Stan­ley Kubrick’s The Shin­ing – called “The Shin­ning”. This year, The Simp­sons return to riff­ing on Kubrick in a seg­ment called “A Clock­work Yel­low.” You can watch a sec­tion of it above.

The episode cen­ters on can­ker­ous bar­tender Moe Szys­lak as the bowler-bedecked Alex who, along with Lenny, Carl and Homer (play­ing Dim, of course), spouts non­sense Nad­sat and ter­ror­izes Lon­don. When they decide to break into a house, Moe and the gang end up crash­ing an Eyes Wide Shut-style orgy host­ed by Mr. Burns. From there, the Kubrick ref­er­ences start fly­ing thick and fast, with nods to Full Met­al Jack­et, 2001: A Space Odyssey and even Bar­ry Lyn­don (“Even I for­get what this is in ref­er­ence to”). And then a scene cuts to a Simp­son­fied ver­sion of Kubrick, watch­ing the seg­ment from an edit­ing bay. “Let’s burn this,” he bel­lows at an assis­tant. “Let’s rewrite every­thing. And let’s start all over.”

The full episode is avail­able on Hulu Plus, if you have a sub­scrip­tion. If not, you can watch it for free after Octo­ber 27th. And you can watch a por­tion of “The Shin­ning” below.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Fear and Desire: Stan­ley Kubrick’s First and Least-Seen Fea­ture Film (1953)

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Daugh­ter Shares Pho­tos of Her­self Grow­ing Up on Her Father’s Film Sets

Stan­ley Kubrick’s List of Top 10 Films (The First and Only List He Ever Cre­at­ed)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.