A Holiday Icon Has A Secret Halloween Special, And It's A 25-Minute Nightmare

Published Oct 17, 2026, 4:00 AM EDT

Zach Moser has been writing for ScreenRant since 2022, covering movies, classic TV, and streaming TV. His areas of expertise cover a wide range of genres with a particular interest in horror and drama, and the conversations around the TV and film industry. When he's not covering the latest film releases or chronicling the latest season of a new show, he's writing humor pieces for McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Slackjaw, and Points In Case or working on short stories and his second novel. 

An iconic holiday character has a secret Halloween special, and it is 25 minutes of strangeness that might only appeal to spooky season completionists. Even Halloween lovers have to admit that just because a show has the aesthetics of the season doesn't mean it's automatically granted high acclaim.

Plenty of shows and movies centered on Halloween fall flat. It's not an automatic recipe for success, though it is a highly regarded ingredient. Just as department stores put out plastic pumpkins every fall and Dunkin' Donuts places orange bat sprinkles on chocolate donuts come October, so too do networks and streamers paint whatever they have with the Halloween brush.

This has been going on forever, and no beloved property is safe from a spooky wardrobe change, even a Christmas one. Everyone knows what holiday Dr. Seuss' Grinch stole back in 1966 on CBS, but did you know that same character has a Halloween special? Halloween Is Grinch Night finds the green curmudgeon bemoaning another holiday.

The 25-minute special is a prequel to How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, premiering on ABC on October 28, 1977, 11 years after the Christmas special and two decades after the publication of Dr. Seuss' children's book. You can find the special easily on YouTube, but fair warning: it's no How the Grinch Stole Christmas!

What Happens In Halloween Is Grinch Night

Halloween Is Grinch Night is one of two follow-ups to the original, the other being the even less-remarked upon The Grinch Grinches the Cat in the Hat, which premiered on ABC in 1982. Halloween Is Grinch Night is set at some indeterminate time before the events of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! which means the Grinch is still an angry, bitter loner.

The special begins with a version of Whoville not covered in snow, but in orange and yellow leaves. It's fall in Whoville (though the word is never said, nor is "Halloween" for some reason), and the Whos are busy raking and preparing for the cold months. The peaceful day turns ominous as a sour wind begins to blow, sending the Whos racing inside to batten down the hatches.

This sour wind is no anomaly, and seems to be a yearly ill for Whoville. In a series of Seussian phrases, the sour wind angers the weasel-like gree-grumps whose barks stir the waters of Punkers Pond, which awakens the Loch Ness Monster-like hakken-kraks, whose howls aggravate none other than the Grinch.

All this noise signals that tonight is Grinch Night, an annual evening of supposed mayhem. The Grinch and his beleaguered servant Max the Dog make their way down Mount Crumpett on the Grinch's Paraphernalia Wagon. Along the way, they encounter a young Who named Euchariah who has been swept up to the mountain by the powerful sour wind.

In order to save Whoville from the Grinch's machinations, Euchariah bravely stalls him at every turn, eventually resulting in the Grinch unleashing the contents of the Paraphernalia Wagon on the young boy, a so-called "spook's tour". A surreal nightmare envelops Euchariah, involving a parade of monsters and creatures in an unending, Backrooms-like space.

Euchariah endures the scares until the sour wind dies down, and the Grinch dejectedly returns home. Max, who has lamented his role in all this, goes to Whoville with Euchariah, ditching the Grinch and causing a bit of a continuity error while Whoville celebrates Euchariah's bravery.

Halloween Is Grinch Night Is A Messy Relic Of The 1970s

Halloween Is Grinch Night has some problems that you may have picked up on just by reading that synopsis. For one, the word "Halloween" is never uttered. In fact, if the special wasn't titled so, you'd have trouble guessing it was even a Halloween special until you got to the nightmare sequence toward the end. There are no pumpkins, no candy, and no costumes.

It also doesn't have much of a plot. The special is called Halloween Is Grinch Night, and we don't ever get to see what "Grinch Night" is. The Grinch never even makes it to Whoville. The "spook's tour" gives us an idea of what the holiday might have entailed, but it's strange that the whole story revolves around the Grinch's journey to put on Grinch Night rather than the actual Grinch Night itself.

The special was written by Dr. Seuss, and Thurl Ravenscroft returns to sing as the Grinch, but Boris Karloff, the original voice of the Grinch and the narrator, passed away in 1969, and he's replaced by Hans Conried, who is fine, but loses the gruff menace that Karloff was able to impart.

The nightmarish sequence of the "spook's tour" is tonally inconsistent with everything that comes before it as well. Up until that point, there hasn't been anything particularly scary, even by kids' standards, and then the special takes on a quasi-Lovecraftian bent. It's a little like the "pink elephants" sequence in Dumbo, but has none of the darkness of that film to prepare you. Far from being scary or exciting, it just feels like it's out of a different film.

Most unpleasant, though, is the music. There are a total of nine songs in the 25-minute runtime of the special. That's a song about every 2.5 minutes. For reference, How the Grinch Stole Christmas! has only four songs in 24 minutes, and not a single song in Halloween Is Grinch Night stands up to "Trim Up The Tree", the least of Christmas!'s songs.

Halloween Is Grinch Night Exemplifies Why Halloween Specials Can Be Tricky To Do Right

The Grinch is a character much better suited to Christmastime. That holiday's themes of community and redemption work better for a story about a miser becoming a better person. Halloween Is Grinch Night is a great example of why the Halloween season makes for a tricky subject.

There's not really an agreed-upon idea of what Halloween is supposed to represent. For holidays like Christmas, Valentine's Day, or Thanksgiving, you can assume everyone has a similar vision of what the holiday is or what it's about; Halloween is a bit more inscrutable.

It's about jack-o'-lanterns and candy and costumes. But it's also about scares, horror films, haunted hayrides, and lawn decorations. But it's also about fall, the coziness of the season, and the DIY, creative side of Halloween. It can encompass a variety of feelings, tones, and tropes.

Halloween specials, movies, and TV shows can miss the mark because of this. Without a clear theme to point a story towards, things can get messy. Halloween Is Grinch Night doesn't know what it wants to be, and it ends up being a whole lot of nothing and feels a little hollow for it. I do like how Euchariah calls the outhouse a "euphemism" though, as in, "I have to use the euphemism!" That's pretty clever.