Happy Halloween, everyone! Holiday specials are a tradition in the television world, and it wouldn’t be wrong to say the biggest hitter (next to Christmas) is the Halloween Special. Between all the candy, costumes, and annual viewings of Hocus Pocus and…er…Halloween, our favorite TV shows will occasionally (sometimes yearly) throw out something completely different to celebrate, too. Sometimes before, sometimes after, sometimes not even close to the holiday, but it’s all in the same spirit, nevertheless.
While Christmas specials usually bring out the warm and fuzzies, Halloween is where the real fun happens. The characters are dressed in wacky costumes, or sometimes turn into those costumes, the show gets to toy with the horror or thriller genre and be extra dark, and in a lot of cases, the entire world of the show is put on hold just to make things weird and crazy for a week. When else could Community make a semi-legitimate scientific reason for a zombie outbreak on a college campus set to an Abba soundrack? Or could Family Matters have a ventriloquist dummy Urkle lookalike come to life and murder the entire Winslow family? Or could Punky Brewster have its title child character terrorized by demonic spirits that kill and torture all her friends? Or could Smallville have an episode about a vampire sorority so disliked that the showrunners actually did a DVD commentary to apologize for it? We could go on and on…
Just take a gander at the list of Halloween specials on Wikipedia. Spoiler alert: there’s too many of them to count, and it’s entirely possible that it’s not even a complete list. As a result, putting together anything close to the “best” Halloween specials of all time is close to impossible (though many sites have certainly tried.)
Instead, some of us at KSiteTV reminisced about the Halloween specials that have stuck with us the most over the years. These aren’t necessarily the best or the most culturally renowned–most are downright obscure–but they’re the ones that resonated with us, for one reason or another.
Feel free to share which Halloween Specials stuck with you in the comments, and enjoy the picks from Webmaster Craig Byrne, and Staff Writers Stephanie Hall and Derek B. Gayle!
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