I absolutely love the Halloween episodes of television shows. I always have. When I was a kid, it was the perfect thing to watch during October because I knew it would be slightly scary, but nothing I couldn’t handle. In some cases I still did have nightmares (*ahem Stevil from Family Matters*), but in most cases it was a level of horror that was digestible for a young me. It was finally something horror-adjacent that I could watch with my older brothers and they wouldn’t think it was beneath them.
My parents didn’t exactly monitor what we viewed, so I could’ve watched actually scary movies but I think I was self-aware enough (ie. a terrified coward) to know that I absolutely could not handle Friday the 13th at age 9. I was genuinely fearful of what I might see in a regular horror movie so I stayed away. I was 12 when I stole my brother’s VHS of Scream and watched it in his room in the basement standing up the entire time incase anyone came in and caught me. I didn’t sleep for a month. It was equal parts 1) the coolest thing I’d ever seen and 2) a horrifying, full blown possibility of choosing the wrong boyfriend one day. I loved how scared it made me but knew that I wasn’t really ready for more.
Halloween sitcoms were my sweet spot between actual horror and lighthearted sitcoms. They remain perfect in my eyes, especially the ones from the 90s. They seemed almost more magical than scary. And in some cases, human logic could be suspended just for one episode, just for fun and no one questioned it. It was a Halloween episode after all - nothing to take too seriously. I don’t know that that still happens in modern day TV shows and I’m not sure why. The TGIF lineup on the Friday before Halloween was the best Friday of the entire year for me. You could also argue that nostalgia definitely clouds my thinking here, but I’m comfortable with that. Of course a lot of them are getting watched this week - sometimes it’s nice to remember how it felt seeing them for the first time.
There are so many great episodes out there, but here’s a list of my very favourites.
Part Four - Sabrina, the Teenage Witch