Del Toro wound up creating a mash-up love letter to all sorts of his horror/fantasy inspirations in paying tribute to The Simpsons, while taking a page from Mad magazine’s Mort Drucker, Will Elder and Harvey Kurtzman. “They would try to cram so many references in,” he says. “You as a kid could spend an afternoon on your bed with your magnifying glass going through a frame of Mad magazine and finding all these references to this and that.” Keep your eyes peeled for a Futurama nod too. (“I integrate[d] Lisa falling through the couch like Alice in Wonderland but in the dress of the girl from Pan’s Labyrinth, and instead of landing next to the giant toad in Pan’s Labyrinth, she lands next to the Hypnotoad from Futurama.) He stuffed in as many horror/fantasy masters and iconic characters as he could (from H.P. Lovecraft to Edgar Allen Poe to Stephen King to the Universal monsters), though many more had to be left on the cutting room floor. “At the last minute I wanted to put a Mexican wrestler in there,” he notes with a chuckle, “but [casting producer] Bonnie Pietila said to me, ‘We’ve got to go! We cannot keep adding and adding stuff.”

–From the EW.com piece by Dan Snierson (see below)

First of all, if you haven’t read the EW.com piece and watched the opening credits created by Guillermo Del Toro for The Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror XXIV (airing this Sunday, October 6th) check the piece AND the especially awesome (and horror homage-packed) out right here.

Seen it now? Told you it was pretty goddamned cool! The below gallery would be bigger (and we’d have some informal ‘catch the obscure horror references’ contest), but we’re having a couple technical difficulties, plus this writer has a splitting headache. We’ll add to it before Sunday if we can.

(Click on any screen-cap to enlarge) Let’s see, off the top of my (tired, aching) head, what did you spot besides the following:

• Charles Burns (the artist)
• The Shining
• Clash of The Titans
• The Day the Earth Stood Still (the original)
• Ray Bradbury
• Edgar Allen Poe
• The Illustrated Man
• Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds
• The Fly (original)
• Cronos
• The Invisible Man
• Blade
• Classic Universal Studios monsters
• Hellboy
• The Mist
• Hot Fuzz (we think)
  
• Todd Browning’s Freaks
• HP Lovecraft
• Mars Attacks! Trading cards
• Pan’s Labyrinth (you don’t need a sharp eye to spot these particular homages)
• Brian DePalma‘s Phantom of Paradise
• Ray Harryhausen
• Mexican wrestler

 

Related articles

• ‘The Simpsons’: Guillermo del Toro on creating the epic opening to ‘Treehouse of Horror XXIV’ (horrorboom.com)
• Guillermo del Toro Working on The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror XXIV! (geektyrant.com)
• Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (2011) (mrmovietimes.com)
• Chocolate and Peanut Butter, Guillermo del Toro and the Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror (themarysue.com)