An Ode To ‘9-1-1’s Utterly Ridiculous Halloween Episodes

With Netflix dropping Monster: The Jeffery Dahmer Story and The Watcher this fall, American Horror Story returning for Season 11, and the October release of Mr. Harrigan’s Phone, Ryan Murphy is running Spooky Season.

If you’ve sped through the creator’s latest on-screen horror creations and are looking to keep your Murphyverse Marathon going — or if you simply want to take a break from spine-tinging horror in favor of some spooky WTF watches — 9-1-1’s Halloween episodes are waiting for you.

The first responder procedural drama — created by Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Tim Minear — has been one of TV’s most bonkers shows since its 2018 premiere. Now in its sixth season, the Fox drama follows a group of 911 dispatchers and a team of Los Angeles firefighters, paramedics, and police officers who respond to their calls. In true Ryan Murphy fashion, many of the show’s emergencies are so bizarre and over-the-top you’ll assume they’re the product of a sleep-deprived (or incredibly high) writer’s room. But a number of chaotic 9-1-1 storylines are based on real events, which makes the show’s Halloween episodes even wilder.

From a man eating someone’s face in the park to a blissfully unaware woman driving around with a body embedded in her car’s windshield, it’s never a dull moment when 9-1-1 tackles terror. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll scream, and you’ll double check you’ve locked your doors. But most of all, you’ll be thankful that a show as wonderfully weird as 9-1-1 made it to TV.

In “Ghost Stories,” the show’s least eventful Halloween episode, the 118, led by Captain Bobby Nash (Peter Krause), searches for a man who called 911 from the ground after being buried alive. Yes, this is the series’ least eventful contribution to Spooky Season. Season 2 takes a stab at the holiday with “Haunted,” which shows the team rescuing a man who got sucked underground while digging a cemetery plot. Their next emergency convinces them a ghost called 911, then they respond to a stampede at a Halloween parade and reports of flying, flaming bats attacking people at a haunted house. Casual!

In Season 3’s “Monsters,” 9-1-1 raises the stakes. We not only get a reenactment of Alfred Hitchcock’s Birds when a murder of crows terrorize two kids on a Harvest Festival field trip, but a woman crashes her car into a man, then drives away with his bloody body protruding from her windshield as if nothing happened. (Yes, this was inspired by a real-life event. And no, I didn’t believe it either.) The next day, the woman gets back in her car and drives around town with the crash victim still wedged in the glass of her midsize Sedan until Buck (Oliver Stark) chases her down and saves the day. As if those storylines weren’t haunting enough, 9-1-1 also introduces a ghostly pale girl wandering around the streets who leads Sergeant Grant (Angela Bassett) to a tragic discovery in the basement of an abandoned home.

9-1-1 depicts all sorts of scary crimes throughout its six seasons, which means there are a number of non-Halloween centric episodes that can quench your seasonal thirst, including Season 1’s “Heartbreaker,” a Valentine’s Day episode so horrifying and absurd it’ll get the Spooky Season job done. But my annual 9-1-1 Halloween watch isn’t complete without the Season 1 episode, “Full Moon (Creepy AF).” Yes, that’s the real episode name.

As you may have guessed, the episode plays up out-of-character behavior believed to take place during a full moon. It goes from zero (kid getting stuck in a crane machine) to 100 (a prowler, three women simultaneously going into labor in prenatal yoga, a face eater, and a seven-foot tapeworm) within the hour, and it’s utterly unhinged in the best possible way.

Though 9-1-1’s Halloween episodes deliver the traditional parties, trick-or-treating, and costumes we long to see this time of year, they also successfully conjure the type of spooky, logic-suspending haywire you need to see to believe. As you watch mini mysteries unfold during each episode, you wonder how hellish this unruly holiday — with all its costumes, decorations, stunts, and fake blood — can be for real first responders. But as is the 9-1-1 way, Murphy and the 118 is sure to provide comedic respite along the way. Here’s hoping we haven’t seen our last 9-1-1 Halloween treat.

New episodes of 9-1-1 air on FOX Mondays at 8 p.m. ET/7 p.m. CT and are available for next-day streaming on Hulu.