TV Recap / Review - Trick Or Treat with the Griffins in the "Family Guy" 2025 Halloween Special - "A Little Fright Music"

For the second year in a row, the long-running animated sitcom Family Guy, which is currently between seasons on FOX, has given us a Hulu-exclusive Halloween episode. Below you’ll find my recap and thoughts on this special release.

The title of this year’s Family Guy Halloween special is “A Little Fright Music" (an unusually highbrow reference to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s 1787 composition “Eine kleine Nachmusik," which translates from the original German to “A Little Night Music" in English), and it begins with a Griffin Family trip to the Quahog pumpkin patch, where Lois (voiced, as always, by Alex Borstein) observes that pumpkins somehow cost way more at Halloween season than they do at any other time of year. Then we get a conversation between Brian the dog and Stewie the baby of the family (both voiced by Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane), in which Stewie observes that there’s really only one Halloween song– “The Monster Mash."

Despite Brian listing off a number of Halloween-appropriate songs including Michael Jackson’s “Thriller" (“That one’s scary, but for the wrong reason," muses Stewie), none of these are deemed acceptable by the talking baby. So this leads us to the first of two major plotlines in this episode– Stewie and Brian trying to pen a new song for the spooky holiday. Back at home, they get to work while Chris Griffin (Seth Green) tries on some Halloween costumes, including one from Grimsburg, which nobody recognizes despite that Jon Hamm-starring animated series still running on FOX.

Our second main storyline begins when Lois tells Chris that he can’t go out trick-or-treating because he has to stay at home and hand out candy to kids. But the patriarch of the family Peter (also MacFarlane) has a different idea– defying Lois’s wishes, he takes Chris to the Drunken Clam bar, where we learn that all of his friends have told their wives they’re going to watch the big game that night. Instead, Peter, Cleveland Brown (Arif Zahir), Joe Swanson (Patrick Warburton), and Glenn Quagmire (MacFarlane again)-- the latter of which, without a wife, was forced to lie to his Amazon Alexa– all plan to go trick-or-treating together as the cast of Sister Act (they really wanted to be Ben Affleck’s The Town, but couldn’t find old nun masks to go with their habits), dragging Chris along with them.

Back at home, Lois– with the help of Bonnie Swanson (Jennifer Tilly) and Cleveland’s wife Donna Tubbs (Sanaa Lathan)-- figures out what’s really going on, while the Stewie-and-Brian songwriting storyline devolves into a tired parody of The Beatles’ career. There’s even a gag involving a Yoko-like tagalong Asian girlfriend that Stewie brings into the recording studio, which, yes, The Simpsons did more than 30 years ago in “Homer’s Barbershop Quartet." Later, while they’re out driving around to the next trick-or-treat location, Peter, Chris, and friends suddenly get run off the road by two maniacs in frightening costumes.

After being chased through the woods by the same two maniacs wielding chainsaws (Peter has to help one of them get their chainsaw started by priming it and making sure the safety trigger is activated), the gang find themselves begging for help at the dilapidated home of a woman in another scary costume. By this point in the episode, it was very obvious to me what was actually going on, which is why I expected a switcheroo at the end so we might see something moderately clever, but no– it’s revealed that the maniacs are indeed Lois, Bonnie, and Donna scaring their husbands straight. Quagmire makes a semi-funny observation about how nobody had the right to be upset with him, and that’s where that narrative ends.

But we still have to wrap up the Halloween song part of the episode, so cue Brian and Stewie arriving at the last second to perform their composition with the rest of the family. Having abandoned any pretense of a story (which– let’s be honest– has never been Family Guy’s strong suit) this freewheeling finale is the most entertaining part of the special. While it could have been funnier overall, I’m glad that Family Guy is getting in the habit of dropping these holiday specials between regular seasons on Hulu. It’s a nice little bonus for being a subscriber, and if FOX is only choosing to air new episodes of the animated sitcom in the spring, as seems to be the case, it seems to me that Disney / 20th Television Animation doesn’t have much of a choice.

The Family Guy 2025 Halloween special “A Little Fright Music" is now available to stream on Hulu, or the Disney+ with Hulu bundle.