Simpsons producer explains Homer's disturbing self-cannibalism in 'Treehouse of Horror'

We’ve known that Homer Simpson can be extremely self-consumed, but Sunday night’s “Treehouse of Horror XXVIII” took that idea to horrifying new heights.

One of the writers’ goals this year with THOH was to turn up the horror factor a notch. “We want to surprise people,” executive producer Al Jean tells EW. “We really heard a lot of people saying they wanted something that was scary — and this one’s scary. There definitely have been comments online where a number of people have said we want the horror back in ‘Treehouse of Horror.’ So that was a thought. And then for the idea for the segment, Joel Cohen [who pitched the idea], said, ‘Homer eats himself because he’s so delicious.’”

Although the concept was somewhat in the same vein (sorry) of Stephen King’s Survivor Type — and certainly the show has borrowed from him in the past; see THOH V’s “The Shinning” — that short story was not something that Cohen or Jean had read or were thinking of during the brainstorm. “This was really just: How would Homer proceed if he sliced off a finger and ate it?,” says Jean. “He’d go crazy on himself. (And with the other two segments of the show sending up The Exorcist and Coralina, he was in the market for something scary and non-parodical for the third act.)

Were the producers of this long-running animated comedy worried that a self-cannibalism segment was going too far? “I’ve been worried at every stage that was it was going too far,” deadpans Jean. “The big hurdle was when we read the script [at rehearsal]. [But] it played great and [executive producer] Jim Brooks was really happy with it, so I thought, ‘Okay,’” he says. “My direction to Tim Bailey, who was the director of the episode, was to avoid actually showing anything gruesome. When things are severed, they’re clean. … There’s a really funny scene that’s done to music from the movie Chef where he’s taking parts out of his body and [cooking] them, but they look very colorful and not real. When he’s cooking his leg in a fry pan, you really don’t see much. The funniest scene is when you see him in clothes with missing areas, but you don’t actually see what’s been cut off. It could have been much, much scarier. And in the end, he’s back in heaven. He’s fine.” Jean sums up the mission of the segment like this: “If we’ve succeeded, it’ll make you hungry for Homer.”

It sounds like the man who voices Homer, Dan Castellaneta, gave it a non-severed thumbs-up. “He thought it was ‘in character,’” chuckles Jean, who believes that this is the scariest segment since THOH IX’s “Hell Toupee” or even the inside-out fog at the end of THOH V’s “Nightmare Cafeteria.” Fox didn’t have any notes that were problematic, he reports, something he partially attributes to TV’s goalposts of gore being moved over the last few decades. “If you looked at the first ‘Treehouse’ now, it’s much less scary than at that time,” he says. “We had a warning from Marge — both the first and second years — because we were so concerned about what people would think relative to television at that date,. But if you think about the human centipede of South Park, people have been exposed to a lot more in animation now than they were 28 years ago.”

In fact, the only problem that the producers encountered was not being able to secure the rights to use Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” which was to be sung by Lisa. “They did not want to be associated with people eating their father,” says Jean, laughing. Instead, they opted to riff on a more classical religious hymn. “We have the original ‘Hallelujah,’ which nobody owns.”

That’s perhaps fitting, as this was one “Treehouse” segment that had everyone shouting, “Oh, God!”