Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
When sitcoms do Halloween episodes, they usually involve brightly-lit costume parties, G-rated haunted houses, and just a touch of the supernatural. If you prefer Halloween campy and/or family friendly, then seasonal sitcoms are the way to go. I’ve watched a lot of Halloween episodes (I’ve got a way-too-in-depth flowchart to prove it), and I have to tell you that I’ve never seen one like the Family Matters episode “Stevil.” It’s the Psycho of sitcoms, the Exorcist of TGIF, Child’s Play condensed into a half hour, and the answer to the question “What if David Lynch got hold of Steve Urkel?”
A few series preface their creepy chapters with an intro from a cast member warning viewers that the following half hour may be too much for kids to handle, but those warnings are usually tongue in cheek and done to set the mood. Not in “Stevil’s” case. That’s because in “Stevil,” this happens:
Depending on how much TGIF you’ve watched, that GIF is either your brand new nightmare or a repressed memory that just clawed its way out of your brain grave. So yeah, when Jaleel White’s Urkel warns that the upcoming episode is “a little scary, so you might wanna watch it with somebody brave,” he ain’t messing around.
What’s so scary about “Stevil”? As evidenced by that shimmying horror above, the episode follows a walking and talking (and dancing) ventriloquist dummy of Steve Urkel named Stevil as he systematically tortures or dismembers the Winslow family one by one. TGIF, y’all!
Parental warning aside, the episode (written by Gregory Thomas Garcia and Fred Rubin, directed by Richard Correll) starts out like any other Family Matters episode: Steve’s got a new hobby and the Winslows are painfully uninterested. Little do they know that their shrieks upon seeing Steve’s wooden doppelgänger foreshadow their truly grisly fates. After bombing hard, Steve mutters a wish that his dummy could talk. He then lays down to sleep for a hot sec and then hell incarnate is born on a Friday night.
Let me get this out of the way: obviously this episode is a dream. Family Matters (and all of TGIF, for that matter) did some pretty crazy stuff, but no show allowed a murder puppet to carve up the main cast. The fact that Family Matters was like, “Well, this Urkel dummy can’t really kill people–but he can if it’s a dream!” is still shocking. The thing is, the episode doesn’t call out the fact that it’s a dream until the end; Urkel nods off for a split second before Stevil is conjured, and there are no wavy lines or hazy filters to indicate that we’re not in reality. And when Urkel tries to tell the Winslows that his puppet is alive and has the deep voice of a hard-edged serial killer, none of them believe him.
Their grounded reactions actually plant a seed of doubt in the viewer’s brain. Maybe this insane plot isn’t a dream? After all, ghosts were proven to be real in Perfect Strangers, and these shows all share a universe. Anyway, it is a dream, but TGIF shows are so weird that you never know what is and isn’t a dream. That just adds to the unease. With the rest of the cast nonbelievers, Steve has to face off against his enemy… alone.
From that point on, we get one of the only slasher multi-cam sitcoms (shout out to Boy Meets World) I’ve ever seen, and the melding of these two disparate genres is unsettling. The content of the episode is disturbing; it’s a devil doll dressed up like a beloved, harmless character shambling, scheming, and cackling nonstop. The episode’s music is intense; instead of upbeat sitcom music or even campy surf rock horror cues, Stevil’s stalking is set to brassy stabs and shivering strings. It’s a legit horror movie score. On top of all that, there’s still an audience! With a laugh track! The cognitive dissonance between seeing an objectively creepy dummy trying to choke out Steve while the audience chuckles is so upsetting.
And not only do they chuckle, they also gasp and moan–at times, they react like they’re in the horror scenario too, getting wise to Stevil’s machinations a half second before Steve does.
I do not want to tell you what Stevil does to the Winslows. You need to see all that for yourself, because it’s bizarre and beyond where I thought a sitcom–a TGIF sitcom!–would wander. You need to be unspoiled to really experience the heightening menace as Steve runs through the Winslow house of horror like Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween. And while you watch it, let the discordant sounds of the Psycho strings and audience chuckles sink in. Listen as the audience laughs in the face of TGIF terror, a face that’s carved from wood.
