Haunted House (The Ren & Stimpy Show)

Haunted House is the 7th episode of the second season of The Ren & Stimpy Show that originally aired on Nickelodeon in the United States on 21 November 1992.

Plot
Ren and Stimpy are driving their car and stop at a sinister looking house at night. The duo enter the house, which they soon discover is haunted by a ghost who desperately wants to scare them. Ren and Stimpy decided to stay the night at the haunted house as neither finds the ghost very frightening and end up humiliating the ghost in various ways. Despondent over his failure to frighten Ren and Stimpy, the ghost admits his failure as a ghost and says he wants to commit suicide. Stimpy provides the ghost with a poison, which he drinks to commit suicide, which causes to come back to life as a naked man who steals Ren and Stimpy's car.

Cast

 * Ren-voice of John Kricfalusi
 * Stimpy-voice of Billy West
 * The fat, naked black guy-Rudolph Porter
 * The Ghost-voice of Billy West

Production
The story that became Haunted House was written for the Tiny Toon Adventures in 1990 under the title "Hi-Spirits". The story had featured Hamton Pig and Gogo Dodo visiting a haunted house where a ghost tries to scare them. The story had entered the storyboard phrase and the actor Don Messick had recorded the dialogue for the ghost. The producers of Tiny Toon Adventures rejected the story and the Spümcø studio still owned the rights to the story. John Kricfalusi, the owner of the Spümcø studio decided to turn the story into an episode of The Ren & Stimpy Show for the second season.. The drawing done in 1990 were used for the story, and the animator Richard Pursel simply inserted Ren and Stimpy in place of Hamton Pig and Gogo Dodo. Haunted House was scheduled to premiere in October 1992 close to Halloween as fitting its ghost theme, but production was so far behind that in July 1992 Kricfalusi hired Ron Hughart to take over production of Haunted House and move the story forward to meet the October deadline. Hughart stated that he took the job of directing Haunted House "to help Krcfalusi out of a spot more than anything else". Production on Haunted House picked up speed after Hughart took over, and by August 1992 the episode was shipped out the Color Key studio in Taiwan to be illustrated. After the Spümcø studio lost the contract for The Ren & Stimpy Show on 21 September 1992, the Games Animation studio added in a new scene of the ghost trying to kill Stimpy in the shower that was a homage to the shower murder in the 1960 film Psycho.

Reception
The episode has been heavily criticized by the critic Bill Gibron for the amount of censorship imposed, mostly notably the removal of the scene where the ghost places a bloody severed human head on Ren's bed. Other critics such as Stephen Wilds criticized the episode for the amount of violence involved such as the scene where the ghost uses an ax to try to behead himself.