Saturday Night Live could hardly have found a better host for Halloween night this year than Inde Navarrette.
Fresh off her breakout turn in Obsession, this year’s reigning scream queen arrives for her hosting debut alongside musical guest Gracie Abrams in what has become one of the show’s most eagerly anticipated episodes in recent memory—complete with custom pre-air merch, an SNL first.
Part of the excitement is the date itself. For all the Halloween material SNL has produced over 52 seasons, only four new episodes of the show have actually aired on Halloween night.
Those Halloween-night broadcasts went in very different directions, from outright horror and costume-party silliness to a 2020 show in which the real world supplied plenty of scares of its own.
The first came in 1981, when Halloween star Donald Pleasence hosted with Fear as musical guest.
It was an unusual night even by early-’80s SNL standards. John Belushi returned for what would prove to be his final appearance on the show before his death the following March. Fear, meanwhile, brought a mosh pit into Studio 8H for a musical performance whose legend has only grown in the decades since.
Among the night’s many Halloween-minded pieces, “The Vic Salukin Show” (below) went the furthest into outright horror.
Cast member Tony Rosato played the belligerent host of a call-in show who challenged viewers to frighten him. After dismissing one caller after another, Salukin finally heard from a man voiced by Pleasence who took him up on the challenge.
What began as a broad parody of late-night call-in television gradually turned into something genuinely unsettling, with the sketch committing to its horror premise all the way through its gruesome ending.
Six years later, Halloween again fell on a Saturday.
Dabney Coleman hosted the October 31, 1987 episode with The Cars as musical guest, and again the holiday was baked into much of the show.
The cold open spoofed Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous as “Lifestyles of the Rich, Famous and Scary,” complete with an appearance by Elvira. Elsewhere, “Don’t Go Down to the Basement” sent up horror-movie conventions, Jon Lovitz played Count Dracula attempting to fix a car, and “Campfire Stories” put Coleman around the fire with a group of scouts.
Rather than build toward one definitive Halloween sketch, the episode treated the whole night like a costume party.
The next Halloween-night edition arrived on October 31, 1992, with Catherine O’Hara hosting and 10,000 Maniacs as musical guest.
O’Hara opened with a Halloween-themed monologue that included an unfortunate misunderstanding involving Steve Martin’s famous arrow-through-the-head gag. Hans and Franz later offered some Halloween advice of their own.
But one of the night’s stranger Halloween pieces came at the very end of the show.
“After the Halloween Party,” which O’Hara brought to SNL and wrote herself, found her playing a woman still dressed as Marilyn Monroe opposite Kevin Nealon as a man wearing a John F. Kennedy mask. It’s an odd, unexpectedly intimate little piece—and the kind of sketch that could only have aired at 12:50 in the morning on Halloween.
Halloween then disappeared from the SNL calendar for nearly three decades.
John Mulaney hosted when the date finally lined up again in 2020, with The Strokes as musical guest. The timing was almost comically loaded: the show was operating under COVID-era restrictions, and the presidential election was three days away.
The episode opened with Jim Carrey’s Joe Biden delivering a Halloween message built around Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” while Mulaney’s monologue quickly moved from the pandemic to the election. There was still room for more conventional Halloween material, including a visit from the Headless Horseman, but the holiday had plenty of real-life horrors to compete with that year.
This Saturday could face a version of that problem, too. The midterm elections arrive three days later.
Whatever kind of Halloween show emerges from Studio 8H, it’ll have to hold us for a while. October 31 won’t fall on a Saturday again until 2037.
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