Trick, Treat, Transgress:

The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror as popular-culture History of the Digital Age

The Simpsons is not only the most famous television family in the world; The Simpsons is also one of the longest running animated TV series in American television history. Over the course of more than thirty years, the yellow five from Springfield have grown into a worldwide phenomenon that turns academics into fans and fans into academics. This dissertation in cultural and media studies deals with a part of the series that has so far been ignored by researchers, the Halloween series Treehouse of Horror. It was the aim of this project to subject the Halloween special to close scrutiny as a subversive descendant of The Simpsons. Treehouse is a serial anthology cycle that has developed its own independent form of complex seriality and narration in thirty episodes since 1990. A basic assumption of this thesis is that The Simpsons has revolutionised the way we look at US culture and society through television today. The author also assumes that Treehouse of Horror has a decisive influence on how we look back on Western popular culture of horror and in what form we remember it.