"Dancing With the Stars" leaned all the way into Halloween for Season 35's horror-themed episode, and the ballroom floor delivered on the drama: a rare double elimination sent two couples packing in a single night, according to Deadline's recap of the episode.

Jackson Olson and his partner Emma Slater were the first couple eliminated, followed by Tyler Cameron and Sharna Burgess in the same results segment — a gut-punch sequence for a season that had already thinned out the field considerably by Week 7. Double eliminations on "Dancing With the Stars" are reserved for moments producers want to feel like genuine television events, and a horror-themed Halloween episode is exactly the kind of hook the show tends to save them for.

A different kind of scare backstage

The night's drama wasn't confined to the judges' table. Paralympic track star Ezra Frech, one of the season's most closely watched competitors, dealt with issues involving his prosthetic leg that disrupted practice in the days leading up to the live show, according to the same report. For a competitor whose routines already require him to adapt choreography built for the show's standard format, an equipment problem in the final stretch before a live broadcast raises the stakes of an already difficult balancing act between performance and physical reality.

A SCARE ON THE FLOOR, A SCARE BACKSTAGE

Frech has been one of the season's breakout storylines specifically because of how he's navigated that balancing act, and the production has leaned into his story as part of the show's broader push toward visibly inclusive casting in recent seasons. How the prosthetic issue affected his actual performance in the Halloween episode wasn't detailed beyond the practice disruption, but the timing — mere days before a live, heavily promoted theme night — added an extra layer of tension to a week the show had already built up as one of its biggest of the season.

With the field narrowed further by the double elimination, the remaining couples now head toward the back half of Season 35 with noticeably less room for error. The show's next themed week, Disney Night, is scheduled for early November, giving surviving contestants only days to pivot from horror routines to family-friendly choreography.