Guillermo del Toro will even direct the couch gag on this year's Simpsons Halloween episode

As the most important part of any Simpsons episode is having a truly epic couch gag, let’s say for argument’s sake, the show has continued the recent trend of outsourcing those opening sequences to guest directors by bringing in Guillermo del Toro for this year’s Halloween episode. On the very spooky night of October 6—when all the ghosts and goblins come out to an early dinner, before saying they should probably get home soon—Del Toro will kick off Treehouse Of Horror MMXCVIII (or whatever we’re on now) with his tribute to “monsters and classic characters from horror films throughout history,” though primarily those horror films made after the early 1900s.

While that sounds a little too traditionally Halloween to be a latter-day Simpsons Halloween episode, the trend abates somewhat with a segment where Homer is seen “wreaking havoc in a rhyming take on a popular children’s tale,” and a Freaks parody where the Simpsons are 1930s circus performers. (There’s also “Dead And Shoulders,” a segment where Bart is decapitated and has his head sewn onto Lisa’s body, because Treehouse Of Horror II was 22 goddamn years ago.) Anyway, Del Toro is expected to spend the next several weeks working on the couch gag, until he abandons the project to focus on something else.