Inside Homer Simpson’s Pants: How ‘The Simpsons’ Writers Pulled Off Last Night’s ‘Venom’ Parody

For 35 years now, The Simpsons has been turning out bangers each and every Halloween, and last night was no exception. 

“Treehouse of Horror XXXV” opened with a wild couch gag from guest animator Jorge R. Gutierrez before going into its first story, “The Information Rage,” which served as a commentary on our current political climate as seen through the lens of a Pacific Rim movie. Then came a genuinely scary story set in Victorian-era Springfield with Mr. Burns at its center. Finally, the biggest swing of the night was “Denim,” a Venom parody done entirely in stop-motion animation where Homer gets into a symbiotic relationship with a pair of jeans.

The episode was overseen by co-showrunner Rob LaZebnik, who jumped on the phone with me last week to discuss how the writers determined which Simpsons characters were Democrats and which were Republicans, the difficulty with animating jump-scares and what it’s like to get into Homer’s pants. 

First things first: Tell me about the couch gag.

It was done by Jorge Gutierrez, an amazing animation director — he did the movie The Book of Life a few years ago. We’ve been wanting him to do something on the show for a while. Every now and then we’ll have a guest artist come in and do a couch gag, and this was essentially a Halloween couch gag. 

We really just gave him the keys to the kingdom. We told him he had about a minute, and we’d love to see what he’d do with it. He came up with this bonkers concept, and I love it. There are so many characters in it. It’ll be fun to freeze-frame later.

What about “The Information Rage,” the segment you wrote?

We don’t like to get super political, but I thought it’d be interesting to do something about all the rage and anxiety that social media and cable news create, especially since we knew this would come out close to the election. I pitched that idea to (showrunner) Matt Selman, and he took that pretty quickly to kaiju monsters. That brought us to Pacific Rim. It always amused me in Pacific Rim that it took two people to work those giant robots, which very conveniently leads to those people having to work through some emotional issues, so we thought it’d be fun to put Bart and Lisa together.

I hope there are somewhat salient observations about what social media and cable news does to all of our brains in there. 

There are characters who are pretty clearly revealed to be Republicans and Democrats. Was it tough to decide who would belong on what side?

Our universe of characters is constantly shifting. Those red shirts and blue shirts could easily be on the opposite people the next time around. We were really just looking down the list of characters, and we needed some people to be cheering on the blue one or the red one. We were thoughtful about it, but there was no hard-and-fast rule that this character would be this political orientation.

I’m guessing Homer and Marge were purposefully excluded from both sides.

Yeah. While Lisa is often a voice of progress, we like to keep the family more fungible. Homer, especially, is a great mouthpiece for so many different, crazy things.

What can you tell me about “The Fall of the House of Monty”?

Dan Vebber, who wrote it, is a big fan of those 1950s Hammer Studios old-time horror movies, so it really started there. We had written this for the “Treehouse” Thanksgiving episode from a few years ago, but that episode was so long we had to put this story on hold. We all loved it, though, so it fit nicely into this one. 

We focused a lot on trying to do jump-scares, which is tricky in animation. I think we pulled off a few scary moments in there, though. We looked at a lot of YouTube reels of famous jump-scares to help us design those. 

Are jump-scares hard in animation because it takes time and quiet that you don’t have?

That’s a big part of it. It’s also something about 2D and not quite being able to connect in the same way you do with real humans — the sweat on their brow, the terrified facial acting. It’s something that’s hard to replicate.

We had a couple genuine shrieks though when we first watched it in the writers’ room. One of those shrieks might have been mine.

How did the idea for “Denim” originate?

The genesis of “Denim” was Selman in the writers’ room one day a couple of years ago out of the blue saying, “We should do a parody of the Venom movies called Denim, and it’s Homer’s pants that are the alien life force.” That immediately went on a card for ideas we don’t want to forget. Then it came together after the writers’ strike. We had to put the show together a little faster than usual to catch up. 

I loved it from the beginning. Pants are inherently funny, and the idea of Homer being manipulated and motored around by these alien pants sounded so funny.

Selman also had the big-swing idea of animating the pants in stop-motion to make them have that really visceral denim feel. At first, I wasn’t sure. I worried it might look weird when layered over our 2D animation. But when we started getting back the first versions of it, I thought it looked so funny. The company Stoopid Buddy Stoodios, who do Robot Chicken, did it. Our animators did an animatic of the whole show, then Stoopid Buddy went in and created 20 pairs of real, little pants sewed from real denim and animated them frame-by-frame.

Did you have to lock in jokes sooner because of that?

Yes. We could change little things here and there, but we knew we had this train coming out of the station that wasn’t going to be able to stop, so we had to tend to it a little earlier.

How did you find the look of the jeans?

They gave us literal swatches of denim, and we went with something darker because we thought that’d be scarier and more intimidating. 

Was the story always a love story between Homer and Marge?

Yes, but also a love story between Homer and his pants. It’s a love triangle. We thought of it as a rom-com between Homer and his pants.