The staff here at Nerds and Beyond are carving fandom-themed pumpkins and looking back at some of our favorite series’ Halloween themed episodes. This scare-tacular episode from Community titled “Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps” mixes comedy with concern when it is discovered that one of their study group members could be a psychopath.
This spooky story takes place in Study Room F. It is a typical pre-Halloween day. The group of friends all gathers there, and we see them dressed up in various costumes. But this is a setup.
Britta (Gillian Jacobs), who currently wants to be a psychologist, gave the study group a personality test, but someone’s test indicates that they are disturbed and homicidal. With the test being anonymous, there is no way to figure out who. Instead of asking who did what test, she comes up with a solution to tell a horror story and see how they react. Foolproof, right?
They each begin to tell a scary story that takes place at a cabin in the woods. First up is Abed (Danny Pudi). In the isolated cabin in the woods, he and Britta are there to get away. Abed is prepared with a radio. On the radio, there is an announcement that an escaped psychopath is on the loose. So Abed and Britta stand back to back, holding knives and waiting. Sounds safe and logical to me.
Annie (Alison Brie) is an innocent schoolteacher, and Jeff (Joel McHale) is a vampire. She tries to domesticate him, but he turns on her and goes to kill her. But surprise, surprise vampire Jeff, Annie is a werewolf who brutally kills Jeff. In very vivid details.
That brings us to Troy (Donald Glover). He and Abed are Top Gun pilots and find themselves at a cabin after crashing and encounter a mad doctor Pierce (Chevy Chase). Pierce sews them together, but that has a side effect of giving Troy and Abed psychokinetic powers. They knock out Pierce and put his feet on his hands and hands on his feet, and his butt on his chest.
Unfortunately, it is time for Pierce’s story. He has seductive Annie, Britta, and Shirley around him. Troy and Abed break into the cabin through the front door as stereotypical gangsters and are easily defeated by Pierce.
A rapture happens in Shirley’s (Yvette Nicole Brown) story as it happens the group that is drinking and doing drugs at the cabin not paying attention. Then The Devil, who looks a lot like Dean Pelton (Jim Rash), comes to get their souls. Before he can get Shirley’s, she goes to Heaven, leaving the others to be tortured.
But wait. What about Jeff’s story? Well, he tells the story of a hook man that is terrorizing the group. But the hook man turns out to be Chang (Ken Jeong), who wants a hug.
Having enough, they try to leave, so Britta stops them by saying that she got the test results back and that one of them could eventually snap and kill them. Wanting to believe the best in each other, they don’t believe Britta. Britta goes into amazing detail about what will happen, kind of making herself seem like the psychopath. They find out that Jeff just did his test randomly, because of course he did. Annie then tells Britta that she scanned the tests upside down.
Once they get rescanned, the results are the other way around. There is only one of them that is sane. Which makes more sense, to be honest. Not wanting to know who the sane one is, they leave it. We do find out that the sanest of the study group is none other than Abed. And I accept that. Happy Halloween.
Make sure you stay tuned for the final fang-tastic installment of our series!