1 “Once Upon a Time”

The Twilight Zone and Genre

As the show’s “look” makes clear, the makers of The Twilight Zone were quite aware of classic Hollywood styles and forms. In a close analysis of three representative episodes—“Time Enough at Last,” “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” and “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”—film scholar J. P. Telotte demonstrates that the show exhibits a surprisingly “cinematic nature” (2), mobilizing a sophisticated use of the gaze as it is constructed in film for narrative purposes and the ways those “cinematic possibilities might be used” in broadcast television (15). But if The Twilight Zone was “cinematic” and popular cinema is conceived, produced, and organized largely within generic parameters (see Grant 2007, 7–9), then in what genre or genres does the show fit? Was it science fiction? Fantasy? Horror? Thriller? And why does it matter? As we shall see, the show tapped into all of these genres and others as well, creating complex generic hybrids to make its dramatic points more effectively in the tight arc of the half-hour series format.

Some critics have noted the show’s generic hybridity, but beyond such generalized observations no one has considered in detail how these mixed generic signifiers actually worked in the show. TV Guide in 1959 labeled The Twilight Zone with the vague descriptor “drama,” avoiding any finer generic distinctions. In the early days of television criticism, Horace Newcomb categorized The Twilight Zone as science fiction, which he considered as one of several forms of the adventure genre (Newcomb). More recently, Lorna Jowett and Stacey Abbott place the show as horror in their book TV Horror. One critic describes the show as overlapping “into magic realism, poetic realism, fantasy, and comedy” (Norris, 6), while yet another argues for it as a modern version of Menippean satire (Booker), a traditional literary form represented by, for example, Petronius, Swift, and Voltaire. Aiming for inclusivity, Wikipedia today describes the show as “science-fiction, fantasy, psychological-supernatural horror.”

The stories were set in a shadowy place called the “Twilight Zone,” less a geographical location than a narrative space where anything could happen. “Couldn’t happen, you say? Probably not in most places—but it did happen in the Twilight Zone,” observes Serling at the end of the early episode “One for the Angels” (1.2: October 9, 1959), a view reiterated by the Professor (Robert Emhardt) in “Static,” who replies to Ed’s claim of hearing old broadcasts on his antique radio by cautioning, “Impossible? That’s a dangerous sort of word to use nowadays.” In “A Game of Pool” (3.5: October 13, 1961) Fats Brown (Jonathan Winters) tells wannabe champion Jesse Cardiff (Jack Klugman) that nothing is impossible, some things are only less likely than others. Each week in the first season, Serling’s opening voice-over, following the theme music, described the “Twilight Zone” as “a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man . . . as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition. And it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge.” This vague and unbounded location was at once “too incredible to be real, too real to be a dream,” as Serling describes it in the opening of the episode “In His Image” (4.1: January 3, 1963).

Serling was well aware of the generic formulas at work in network television and employed them for his own purposes in The Twilight Zone. In an article he penned for the November 7, 1959, issue of TV Guide explaining why he committed himself to The Twilight Zone, he wrote, “When Gunsmoke [CBS, 1955–75] corrals an audience, the next season will see a herd of imitators varying in title and star but painfully similar. Peter Gunn goes off on a caper, and the next season fourteen other actors take out private-eye licenses, and the television audience is exposed to a diet of sameness that makes dial-switching superfluous” (Grams, 68). (In “Static” Ed Lindsay [Dean Jagger] scorns all the other seniors in the rooming house for spending their evenings watching formula television shows like the Western “Gunfire” that turn their brains into “oatmeal.”) In the article Serling then offers The Twilight Zone as a contrast to this pattern of generic cycling and sameness.

Even as it mocked genre television, The Twilight Zone embraced genre iconography and convention for its own purposes. For example, the familiar elements of the Western—the American genre par excellence (Bazin, 141), toward the end of its glorious postwar flowering when The Twilight Zone began and dominating prime-time television at the time—appear in at least seven episodes, including “A Hundred Yards over the Rim” (2.23: April 7, 1961), “Mr. Garrity and the Graves” (5.32: May 8, 1964), and the aforementioned “Dust” and “Execution.” In the comic “Showdown with Rance McGrew” (3.20: February 2, 1962) television cowboy star McGrew (Larry Blyden) finds himself suddenly transported back in time from a saloon set, where he is about to be shot in the back by a dastardly thespian Jesse James, to the actual Old West. The “real” Jesse James (Arch Johnson) explains the collective annoyance he and other famous outlaws are feeling because of the unflattering way they have been portrayed on his show. He returns to the present with McGrew, serving as a script advisor to make sure that the gunfighters of history are represented more positively in the future. Apart from its relevance today to a discussion of cultural representation and political correctness, the episode has an obvious “problem,” which Zicree notes: “The ‘real’ Old West . . . is every bit as TV-phony as the bogus Old West in the episode. The sets are identical and the look is the same” (269). One might argue, as M. Keith Booker does for the show, that this is a postmodernist gesture on the part of the episode, for we were already willing to suspend our disbelief and regard the opening action as “real” until McGrew loudly arrives late, driving down Main Street kicking up the dust in the street with the tires of his Cadillac on what is now revealed to be a set. But certainly, it underscores the show’s unwavering commitment to the shorthand of genre conventions to make its dramatic points.

Thus, for example, in the episode “The Four of Us Are Dying” (1.13: January 1, 1960) Arch Hammer (Harry Townes), who can change his face at will to take on the appearance of someone else, “assumes a series of identities (a trumpet player, a gangster, a boxer) that reads like a roll call of typical film noir characters” (Booker, 55). Similarly, in “Shadow Play” (2.26: May 5, 1961) Adam Grant (Dennis Weaver), who insists he is dreaming the world in which he is about to be executed for murder, explains twice—correctly—that the stereotyped characters and melodramatic look of the jail and execution chamber have been conjured from some bad movies he has seen. “A Nice Place to Visit” (1.28: April 15, 1960) features Larry Blyden as Rocky Valentine, a two-bit gangster who is depicted with all the conventions of the gangster film, including loud clothes and molls draped over his arms. Zicree criticizes Blyden’s performance as “a third-rate composite impression of James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, and George Raft” (114)—quite to the point for an intended warning that bad life decisions will doom you to dwell for eternity in “the other place.”

“Mr. Denton on Doomsday” (1.3: October 16, 1959) illustrates how The Twilight Zone uses genre to deliberate effect. The episode stars Dan Duryea (an actor who had appeared earlier in several Westerns including Anthony Mann’s Winchester ’73 [1950]) as former gunslinger and now town drunk Al Denton, who briefly regains his speed and accuracy with a gun that materializes out of thin air seemingly because of a pointed glance by Henry J. Fate (Malcolm Atterbury), a traveling peddler passing through town. With the gun, Denton is able to defeat the bully Hotaling (Martin Landau) with some remarkable shooting. However, as a result, Denton gains a reputation, and immediately another young hotshot, Pete Grant (Doug McClure), rides into town to challenge him. The desperate Denton relies on a magic potion from Fate that will give him deadly accuracy for ten seconds. But when the young gunfighter enters the saloon for the showdown and Denton gulps the contents of his vial—he sees his opponent doing the same thing! The two men shoot the guns out of each other’s hands at the same time, both being injured so that, according to the town doctor’s immediate prognosis, neither will ever be able to handle a gun again. The episode concludes with Denton philosophizing that they both have received a blessing in disguise because they are now relieved of the burden of having constantly to kill in defense of their reputations.

While the episode is one of the few in which fate works benignly and the protagonists end up better off, it does make use of familiar elements of the Western—the settings, the costumes, the code of the gunfight—but mixes in a fantastical aspect, well before the development of the hybrid genre of “the weird Western.” Most obviously, it makes use of the Western’s most basic visual opposition: Denton wears a white cowboy hat, while both Hotaling and Grant wear black hats and are dressed in black. The Western genre also provides the stock characters that populate the episode’s town: the bartender, the sympathetic saloon girl, the impetuous young gun. In one of the earliest academic studies of the Western as a genre, published during the show’s run in 1961, Peter Homans described the typical town of Westerns at the time as consisting of “Jerry-built, slapped-together buildings, with false fronts lined awkwardly along a road that is forever thick with dust or mud” (135)—exactly like the unnamed town in the episode. Further, of the town’s few buildings, the saloon is the most important because “it is the only place in the entire story where people can be seen together time after time. It thereby performs the function of a meeting-house, social center, church, and so on” and is also the space where the climax plays out (136)—again, exactly the case in “Mr. Denton on Doomsday.” (The same convention is played upon in a different way in the later “Mr. Garrity and the Graves.”) Even the men in the bar and the henchmen of the two young guns are exactly as Homans describes them: “The boys,” as he calls them, “those drinking, bearded, grimy people who are always ‘just there,’ drinking and gambling in the saloon, without any apparent interest in anyone or anything,” necessary only as an audience for the confrontation (138).

Some of the scenes in the episode are standard in Western films. Denton’s amazing gunplay, his shot through the chain holding the chandelier and sending it down, knocking the gun from Hotaling’s hand, is like the trick shooting on display by the heroes of so many Westerns (compare, for example, the gunplay performed by Dean Martin’s Dude in Rio Bravo [1959], also in a saloon among the boys, released in the same year as “Denton” was broadcast). The scene where Denton practices shooting with cans on a fence similarly recalls any number of Westerns when, say, the Easterner learns to handle a gun, as in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1964). When Denton regains his self-respect, he goes to the barber for a shave, the “civilizing” sense of the scene recalling Wyatt Earp’s tonsorial visit in Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946)—but in this case Fate’s visage is reflected in the barber’s window, underscoring the show’s fantastic aspect. Denton’s potential future of forever facing challenges from impetuous youths is exactly the dilemma that confronts such protagonists of “adult Westerns” as Johnny Ringo (Gregory Peck) in The Gunfighter (1950). While Ringo deliberately passes on his reputation as a burden to the youngster who shoots him in the back as revenge, in “Doomsday” Denton—and his adversary—are redeemed (the saloon as “church”) because they can no longer shoot. This is a rare upbeat ending for the show, a more pacifistic message and a stark reversal of the tragic dimension of the adult psychological Western as represented by The Gunfighter, but one consistent with Serling’s hope for peace among men.

As the presence of Duryea in the episode also suggests, the show also frequently relied on the iconography and mise-en-scène of film noir (Duryea also appeared in several noirs including Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window [1944] and Scarlet Street [1945]). Hollywood veteran George T. Clemens shot the majority of Twilight Zone episodes (117 of 156), but no matter who was behind the camera, when a character on the show succumbed to emotional duress—as they often did—there promptly would appear images of blinking neon with canted angles, streets wet with pools of water and light, all evoking, as in noir, a fallen world of corruption and evil or the madness of the protagonist. Such imagery is prominent right from the pilot episode, “Where Is Everybody?” (1.1: October 2, 1959): in the opening stinger before Serling’s introduction, every shot features a canted angle, sometimes the camera even tilting as it moves.

The episode “Execution” mentioned earlier makes use of both film noir and the Western with a science-fiction premise in its story of a cowboy outlaw, Joe Caswell, who is plucked from the Wild West of the past and teleported through time to a modern city where he becomes, as the scientist responsible puts it, “a nineteenth-century primitive in a twentieth-century jungle.” In the opening scene the murderous Caswell is about to be hanged by a lynch mob in what the sheriff describes as a civic service, but Caswell mocks his executioners’ belief in justice. The set, with its clearly painted backdrop of a sky against which hangs the noose, recalls the eerie artificiality of The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), which, like this episode, raises questions about justice and retribution within the context of lynching and vigilantism (a theme that Serling already had explored in his earlier teleplays, as discussed previously). Once he disappears from the noose and reappears in the scientist’s lab, the story seems to switch from Western to science fiction, but then, when Caswell kills Manion and goes out into the city night, the world becomes, from his perspective, a noirish jumble of urban horror. Even before, as soon as Caswell states his desire to see “that world out there,” suddenly the mise-en-scène shifts to the excess expressionism characteristic of film noir as lights begin to flash on and off outside through the window curtains. When Caswell goes outside, the shots shift to canted and dramatic low angles, and the pace of the editing, which had been relatively leisurely to this point, picks up considerably—techniques inherited from classic Hollywood cinema that the show employed frequently at such moments. Glaring lights from a generic “The Joint” and the ironically named “Jim Henry’s Paradise,” along with the inevitable jukebox blaring some pseudomodernist jazz, intrude on Caswell, who describes this “urban jungle”—the space of noir—as “carriages without horses, and those lights going on and off all the time, and the noise.”

The hall of mirrors in “What You Need” (1.12: December 25, 1959) specifically evokes the climax of Orson Welles’s classic noir The Lady from Shanghai (1947), while “In Praise of Pip” (5.1: September 27, 1963) features a supernatural meeting between a father and his dying son in a timeless carnival of the imagination, the images evocative of and undoubtedly influenced by such noirs as Nightmare Alley (1947) and Gun Crazy (1950), which also feature scenes in carnivals.1 In their book on The Twilight Zone Don Presnell and Marty McGee rightly describe the episode “Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room” (2.3: October 14, 1960) as “really a half-hour film noir” (72). “Perchance to Dream” (1.9: November 27, 1959), directed by Robert Florey, responsible for numerous atmospheric B-films, also mobilizes many elements of noir, here stylized to obvious excess because the images are framed as part of one character’s Freudian nightmare. The presence of Richard Conte (featured in such notable noirs as Call Northside 777 [1948], The Blue Gardenia [1953], and The Big Combo [1955]) as besieged protagonist Edward Hall helps establish the noir atmosphere, and the undulating Suzanne Lloyd as Maya, the femme fatale luring him to his doom, is wholly archetypal, lacking any actual characterization.

A number of the show’s writers and directors had experience making film noir. Robert Florey, a Hollywood stalwart whose credits include the horror thrillers Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) and The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), directed three episodes of The Twilight Zone, as did Mitchell Leisen, who had made many melodramas for Paramount, including the fantasy Death Takes a Holiday (1934). Martin M. Goldsmith, writer of the episodes “The Encounter” (5.31: May 1, 1964) and “What’s in the Box” (5.24: March 13, 1964), also wrote several noirs, including the screenplay of Detour (1945) and story for The Narrow Margin (1952). Jacques Tourneur, responsible for classics of both noir (Out of the Past [1947]) and atmospheric horror (Cat People [1942], I Walked with a Zombie [1943]), appropriately directed the moody episode “Night Call” (5.19: February 7, 1964), about a woman who is terrified by a voice on her telephone that turns out to be her dead husband’s. Don Siegel, responsible for two episodes (“Uncle Simon” [5.8: November 15, 1963] and “The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross” [5.17: January 17, 1964]), had directed The Big Steal (1949), Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954), Private Hell 36 (1954), and the noir-infused horror classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). And John Brahm, who directed twelve episodes (among them, “Time Enough at Last”)—more than any other director—had made the fine noirs The Lodger (1944), Hangover Square (1945), and The Locket (1946) as well as The Undying Monster (1942), a generic blend of mystery and horror.

Serling himself clearly admired genre fiction and often sought to emulate the punchy style of the pulps. His prologue for “Mr. Dingle, the Strong” (2.19: March 3, 1961), for example, could be mistaken for the tough prose of Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler, hard-boiled writers whose work was a major influence on the development of film noir:

Uniquely American institution known as the neighborhood bar. Reading left to right are Mr. Anthony O’Toole, proprietor, who waters his drinks like geraniums but who stands foursquare for peace and quiet and for booths for ladies. This is Mr. Joseph J. Callahan, an unregistered bookie, whose entire life is any sporting event with two sides and a set of odds. His idea of a meeting at the summit is any dialogue between a catcher and a pitcher with more than one man on base. And this animated citizen is every anonymous bettor who ever dropped rent money on a race horse, a prize fight, or a floating crap game, and who took out his frustrations and his insolvency on any vulnerable fellow barstool companion within arm’s and fist’s reach. And this is Mr. Luther Dingle, a vacuum-cleaner salesman whose volume of business is roughly that of a valet at a hobo convention.

But then Serling drops in the science-fiction line: “And these two unseen gentlemen are visitors from outer space.”

As Booker observes, the show’s evocation of film noir was “no doubt largely because the hundreds of films noir made during the 1940s and 1950s had already demonstrated that dim lighting and exaggerated shadow effects could produce precisely the air of mystery and foreboding that The Twilight Zone was striving for” (55). (It does not matter that “film noir” was not an operative generic term in the United States at the time but was applied retrospectively later on; the gangster and detective films, mysteries, thrillers, and crime movies that comprise noir were still regarded in generic terms.) But, as well, by evoking traditional genres the show could connect simultaneously to adult viewers already trained in the traditions of classic Hollywood and to a younger demographic growing up in the atomic era that was more appreciative of science fiction and horror, which, like film noir, also relied heavily on expressionist techniques.

Variety’s contemporary review of the show said it was “generic in its appeal” yet avoided “the current westerns and private eyes” (Grams, 66), failing to note how it nevertheless used elements of them. Stephen King is more appreciative of the show’s unusual generic hybridity: “It was not a western or a cop show (although some of the stories had western formats or featured cops ’n’ robbers); it was not really a science-fiction show (although The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows categorizes it as such); not a sitcom (although some of the episodes were funny); not really occult (although it did occult stories frequently—in its own peculiar fashion), not really supernatural. It was its own thing.” (King, 229). The atmospheric “Jess-Belle” (4.7: February 14, 1963), written by Earl Hamner Jr., serves as a good example. Set in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the atmospheric story tells of an engaged couple, Billy-Ben Turner (James Best) and Elly Glover (Laura Devon), and the jealous former girlfriend Jess-Belle (Anne Francis) who wants Billy-Ben for her own. She drinks a magic potion given to her by the witch Granny Hart (Jeannette Nolan) in order to get him, which she does but with unintended consequences. Presnell and McGee rightly describe the moody episode as “a smorgasbord of literary and film genres: folktale, ghost story, love story, and Southern Gothic” (145).

For film scholar Rick Worland, regardless of the generic trappings of a given episode, The Twilight Zone was “generally intended to frighten” (Worland, 104). In their book on the show, Presnell and McGee provide an appendix that groups episodes according to “genres, themes, and plot devices,” with the grouping for “fear and paranoia” being three times as long as any other (242–52). A few episodes such as “The Hitch-Hiker” (1.16: January 22, 1960), “The Grave” (3.7: October 27, 1961), and “Spur of the Moment” (5.21: February 21, 1964) are clearly exercises in horror, employing, like many other episodes, familiar horror tropes—darkness and shadows, eerie stretches of silence, a sense of helplessness and fear of the unknown—along with a heavily expressionist look to provide a sense of terror and suspense. These horror elements dominate several episodes, including “The Howling Man” (2.5: November 4, 1960), a Gothic chiller written by Charles Beaumont and directed by stalwart television director Douglas Heyes, also responsible for eight other episodes including “The After Hours” and “Eye of the Beholder.” The Gothic has rarely appeared in network television series, and when it has, it has tended to be treated as camp (Dark Shadows [ABC, 1966–71]) or comedy (The Addams Family [ABC, 1964–66]), but not on The Twilight Zone.

“The Howling Man” begins with a shot of a violent thunderstorm and flashing lightning as the camera tracks back to reveal a man (H. M. Wynant) who, with clear urgency and distress, talks directly to the camera—in a canted-angle shot, already—exhorting us to believe, because “we must,” the bizarre story he is about to tell. A dissolve introduces a flashback that brings us to another storm, sometime after World War I, when the man, whose name is Ellington, loses his way during a walking trip in central Europe. Feverish and in need of shelter, he comes upon an old mansion that looms up forebodingly in the darkness like Manderley in Rebecca (1940). The camera tilts to one side or the other as it tracks to follow Ellington, matching his feverishness. In the mansion Ellington discovers what seems to be a group of mad monks led by Brother Jerome (John Carradine) who have imprisoned a man in a cell. The mise-en-scène of the mansion is replete with signifiers of Gothic menace, and the casting of Carradine as Jerome lends the episode the patina of a B-movie thriller, making us wonder whether Jerome is insane.

The man in the cell (Robin Hughes) claims to be an innocent victim of a self-righteous sect and begs to be released. Ellington demands an explanation of Brother Jerome, who reluctantly reveals that it is no man they have captured but the Devil himself, contained in his cell through the power of a wooden pole he calls “the staff of Truth” that bars the door and can only be removed by a human. Ellington pretends to believe Jerome, but when alone he takes the opportunity to remove the staff from the door and release the prisoner, who promptly transforms into the Devil, complete with goatee, cape, and proverbial horns. Shortly thereafter, World War II erupts. As the flashback ends, we learn that Ellington, realizing what he has done, has devoted his life to recapturing the Devil, a goal that he has now at long last succeeded in achieving. His story is being told to his housekeeper as Ellington is about to leaves his quarters to arrange for the transportation of his prisoner back to the hermitage. But despite his explicit instructions to her, she lifts the piece of wood straddling the door, which swings open ominously . . .

“The Invaders” (2.15: January 27, 1961) is similarly infused with an atmosphere of Gothic horror, here enhanced by the absence of dialogue (although there are occasional cries, whimpers, and grunts) until very near the end. An unnamed woman (Agnes Moorehead) living in a remote country shack “untouched by human progress,” as Serling vaguely tells us in his introduction, hears a strange sound coming from above. Going to investigate, she discovers a tiny flying saucer in the rafters, out of which two little humanoid figures in protective suits emerge. For virtually the entire episode, the woman plays a cat-and-mouse game with the two creatures, who pop up in various places around the cabin as she tries to kill them with whatever she has at hand. In the end, when the woman returns to the attic and smashes the saucer with an axe, we glimpse a “US Air Force: Space Probe 1” logo on it and hear the voice of one of the little “creatures” calling “Central Control” on the ship’s radio and shouting a warning to stay away from this planet with its race of overpowering giants. In addition to its Gothic atmosphere, the production design of the episode may seem sparse, but it brilliantly presents a rough pioneer look, a perception encouraged by Serling’s opening comments, that at the same time appears sufficiently indistinct so as not to suggest a specific period of American history, thus making the twist more effectively surprising.

Of course, other episodes employed other modes of the fantastic and were quite different in tone. “The Fugitive” (3.25: March 9, 1962) serves as a good example. In the story, old Ben (J. Pat O’Malley) befriends his neighbor Jenny (Susan Gordon), a young girl with a leg brace. Ben confides to Jenny that he is an alien fleeing from two men (also aliens) who want to return him to his home world against his will. John Sayles later used a similar premise in The Brother from Another Planet (1984), giving it a racial theme, but Charles Beaumont’s script here is much more upbeat: as it turns out, Ben is not an escaped prisoner or slave but a revered king whom the people want to return. Ben finally agrees and contrives a way to take Jenny with him. Serling then comes on to explain that Ben actually looks like a handsome young man, and that although her humorless aunt (Nancy Kulp) will find her missing, Jenny “will grow up to be an honest-to-goodness queen—somewhere in the Twilight Zone.” The episode thus combines the science-fiction premise of a shape-shifting alien with the Cinderella fairy tale of a little girl who lives happily ever after with her Prince Charming.

Fairy tales are also invoked by the title of the episode “Once upon a Time” (3.13: December 15, 1961), a whimsical vehicle for Buster Keaton, and by the opening of “The Mighty Casey” (1.35: June 17, 1960), in which Serling uses the phrase twice, the second time saying that “since this is strictly a story of make-believe, it has to start this way: Once upon a time, in Hoboken, New Jersey . . .” Fantasy narratives are based neither in the natural world of science fiction nor in the supernatural world of horror but in an alternate reality. As science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein has noted, “Science fiction and fantasy are as different as Karl Marx and Groucho Marx. Fantasy is constructed either by denying the real world in toto or at least by making a prime basis of the story one or more admittedly false premises—fairies, talking mules, trips through a looking glass, vampires, seacoast Bohemia, Mickey Mouse” (Heinlein, 8). As different as these genres are for some critics, however, The Twilight Zone employed them all, mixing them like little Anthony Freemont’s hybridized creatures in “It’s a Good Life.” “Once Upon a Time,” for example, places a science-fiction robot in a whimsical sports fantasy.

Serling himself sometimes addressed the distinctions between the fantastic genres in his remarks to the audience. He begins his opening monologue for “The Fugitive” by discussing the difference between science fiction and fantasy, describing the former as making the probable possible and the latter as rendering the impossible probable, and then suggesting that tonight’s tale shows what happens when you put those two things together. He introduces the episode “The Obsolete Man” (2.29: June 2, 1961), set in an Orwellian future, by remarking that the tale isn’t a story of “a future that will be, but what might be”—in other words, it is fictional extrapolation rather than scientific prognostication. As Serling goes on to observe, “This is not a new world but simply an extension of what began in the old one,” an explicit statement about the workings of science fiction set in the future, whether utopian or dystopian. Similarly, he concludes the story of “The Old Man in the Cave” (5.7: November 8, 1963), about a group of atomic war survivors whose society is regulated by an unseen computer, by observing that the episode is “not a prediction of what is to be, just a projection of what could be.”

In “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?,” about a group of travelers stranded in a diner during a snowstorm, one of whom might be an alien, character actor Jack Elam delightedly exclaims, “She’s just like a science fiction, that’s what she is! A regular Ray Bradbury!” (According to Zicree, Bradbury, along with Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, were Serling’s favorite science-fiction writers, and references to Bradbury appear in at least two other episodes—the name of the character Dr. Bradbury in “Walking Distance” and the “Bradbury account” in “A Stop at Willoughby” [Zicree 273].) But ultimately The Twilight Zone, because of its generic hybridity, might best be categorized more broadly as speculative fiction. Narrative theorist Robert Scholes argues that, rather than striving for a mimetic rendering of the world as realist fiction does, speculative narrative instead “offers us a world clearly and radically discontinuous from the one we know yet returns to confront that known world in some cognitive way” (Scholes, 29). Although Scholes’s focus was science-fiction literature, this is a perfect description of the viewing experience in the case of The Twilight Zone, for each episode aimed to do precisely that. The show’s distinctive twist endings, discussed further in chapter 4, function to this end, making us rethink all we had seen previously in the episode and consequently our moral, social, and philosophical assumptions. Carl Plantinga refers to these endings as “frame shifters,” endings that challenge “conformist frames of reference” (54).

Other critics have made similar arguments to Scholes’s regarding the potentially subversive and liberating qualities of the different forms of speculative narrative. In her influential analysis of fantasy texts, for example, Rosemary Jackson argues that all fantasy narratives necessarily express some form of desire, for wanting something that is lacking. Thus, as Jackson writes, fantasy’s “excursion into disorder can only begin from a base within the dominant cultural order,” so that fantasy always has the potential to be “a telling index of the limits of that order. Its introduction of the ‘unreal’ is set against the category of the ‘real’—a category which the fantastic interrogates by its difference” (4). Jackson’s claim that any given work of fantasy will either “tell of, manifest, or show desire” or “expel” desire when it disturbs the “dominant social order” (4) is similar to Robin Wood’s pioneering theorization of the radical or subversive potential in horror. Wood sees horror as articulating the Freudian notion of the return of the repressed, those wishes and desires we secretly harbor but guiltily try to deny. For him, the fundamental subject of horror is “the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses.” In every horror text this “monstrousness” is set against normality, again providing the possibility of examining the monster or expelling it (9–11). Conservative or, in Wood’s terms, “reactionary” horror films tend toward the latter, seeing the monster merely as other and a threat to be destroyed, while “progressive” horror movies position the monster more sympathetically, as the result of a repressive society. Many Twilight Zone episodes are easily read as psychological horror tales with the fantastic element explicable as the outward projection of the protagonist’s guilt, desire, or fear: “Perchance to Dream,” “The Fever” (1.17: January 29, 1960), “Nightmare as a Child,” “A Stop at Willoughby,” “Static,” “The Mirror” (3.6: October 20, 1961), and “Sounds and Silences” (5.27: April 3, 1964) just a few among them. Exactly how subversive The Twilight Zone in fact was is discussed later, but certainly the intent of the show was to critique multiple aspects of contemporary society.

Serling’s explicit invocation of the “dimension of imagination” is of a piece with that philosophical openness described as “a sense of wonder” that some early critics of science fiction, writing contemporaneously with Serling, saw as fundamental to the genre. Damon Knight famously regarded this sense of wonder as “some widening of the mind’s horizons, no matter in what direction,” and said it “is what science fiction is all about” (13). Sam Moskowitz, writing slightly later, similarly defined it as a heightened awareness and open attitude to new ideas or alternative possibilities (211). In the world of The Twilight Zone, those who have “more temper than imagination,” like Jenny’s dour aunt in “The Fugitive,” or who refuse to think young and “kick the can,” are forever constrained by the here and now. It is precisely because boxer Bolie Jackson (Ivan Dixon) is unable to accept the possibility of magic in “The Big Tall Wish” that he finds himself remaining the loser rather than the winner of his big bout.

Although the show’s famous opening changed several times during its initial run, common to each version, like variations of a theme, is the idea that the place called “the Twilight Zone” is that potentially unbounded space limited only by the “imagination.” Significantly, it is when Serling says this word in the first-season opening that the camera seems to tilt up to reveal the sky and the familiar twinkling stars of the show’s graphic logo, as if the image were opening outward to embrace the limitless possibilities of the universe—in other words, the sense of wonder. In the last version of the opening, a number of objects traverse the screen relating to Serling’s monologue, including an opening door (Aldous Huxley’s “doors of perception”) and a rotating spiral that could be seen by the viewer as swirling in or out, depending on one’s perception (“imagination”). It may be that the show’s various openings reveal “a motif of transition, of the movement between positions” that “prepares the viewer for the sudden switches and juxtapositions the show uses to make its points” (Mortenson, 61), but perhaps more importantly, such an open frame of mind called for in the opening was regarded as essential for appreciating stories of the fantastic.

Whether individual episodes mobilized elements of fantasy, science fiction, or horror, The Twilight Zone’s approach was decidedly more “soft” than “hard,” that is, less concerned with the science and technology of its premises than with their cultural and psychological implications. In “On Thursday We Leave for Home” (4.16: May 2, 1963), about the rescue of a desperate group of colonists on a parched planet after thirty years, the commander of the rescue ship (Tim O’Connor) tells “Captain” William Benteen (James Whitmore), who has been responsible for maintaining the group’s morale all those years, that his community is a false one because it’s like a “test tube”—“antiseptic and germ free. And also sterile,” isolated from the actual complexities of the world—not unlike the way the show itself used various generic contexts to contain its moral fables. As mentioned, the fantastic element of many of the episodes can be “explained” as psychological trauma—“Nightmare as a Child,” in which the strange little girl that Helen Foley meets turns out to be herself as a child and who helps her to remember the repressed memories of her mother’s murder, serves as a perfect model. But how, for example, does a scientist invent a time machine? How does a camera come to record the future? Where does the extraordinary timepiece in “A Kind of Stopwatch” (5.4: October 18, 1963) come from? Such questions frequently go unanswered on the show, and for many purists this is the reason why The Twilight Zone cannot be considered science fiction. Witchcraft, magic, necromancy, alchemy, and the simply unexplained provide the premise for Twilight Zone episodes as often as aliens and technology. “Death is relative and there may not be an end”—that is all the explanation for his resurrection the ghost of Shakespeare provides in “The Bard” (4.18: May 23, 1963).

Science Fiction Theatre (syndication, 1955–57) began each episode with the camera panning slowly across the various pieces of high-tech equipment in a lab, emphasizing that show’s technological emphasis from the outset, even before host Truman Bradley appeared to welcome viewers and offer an illustrative experiment. By contrast, Serling’s introductory narrations more often than not focused on people rather than props: “You’re about to meet a hypochondriac. Witness Mr. Walter Bedeker . . .” (“Escape Clause” [1.6: November 6, 1959]); “Portrait of a bush-league fuehrer named Peter Vollmer, a sparse little man who feeds off his self-delusions and finds himself perpetually hungry for want of greatness in his diet” (“He’s Alive” [4.4: January 24, 1963]); “Portrait of a man at work . . .” (“A Nice Place to Visit”); “Portrait of a nervous man . . .” (“You Drive” [5.14: January 3, 1964]); and so on. Tellingly, when Serling adapted the science-fiction story “What You Need” by “Lewis Padgett” (pseudonym of Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore) for the show, he eliminated the premise of a scientist who invents a machine that allows him to see the future of other people and instead bestows the inexplicable ability of prognostication upon his protagonist, a kindly street peddler (Ernest Truex) who gives people apparently mundane things that eventually prove important. For Serling, the focus is always on the man, not the machine. Even while working on The Twilight Zone, Serling was selling another series concept, this one for a Western (dominating the airwaves at the time with shows such as Gunsmoke, Wagon Train [NBC, 1957–65], Bonanza, Have Gun—Will Travel [CBS, 1957–63], and Wanted Dead or Alive [CBS, 1958–61], some of them among the most popular shows ever) called The Loner [CBS, 1965–66] that would focus on character rather than action. (Starring Lloyd Bridges, it failed to survive one full season.)

The show’s minimal reliance on special effects follows from its soft approach to the fantastic. In the visual media speculative stories have relied heavily on special effects since George Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon (1902), a reliance that has become even more intense since the development of the science-fiction blockbuster with Star Wars in 1977 and Superman in 1978 and then computer-generated imagery (CGI) in films such as Jurassic Park (1993). Indeed, these effects in turn constitute one of the special pleasures of the genre. They show us exciting things that are in fact impossible or at least as yet unrealized in the real world; we marvel at special-effects images at once for their fantastic content and for the power of their realization, paradoxically enjoying them precisely because we know they are unreal, but we suspend our disbelief anyway and allow ourselves to be convinced of them. (“You’ll believe a man can fly” promised the promotional copy for the 1978 Superman). And so for many viewers, nothing destroys the pleasure of a science-fiction movie more than seeing the seams in a matte shot or glimpsing the zipper on a monster’s bodysuit.

Jason Mittell argues that recent “complex” television series encourage an “operational aesthetic” in viewers whereby they “simultaneously care about the story and marvel at its telling” (2015, 46), offering special effects (“moments of spectacle”) as especially intense instances of the operational aesthetic at work. But, as Lester H. Hunt notes, while fantasy and science fiction are associated with visual effects, “It is really remarkable how many of the episodes [of The Twilight Zone] consist mainly of two or three characters talking to each other” (7). Although the average budget per episode was approximately $55,000 (the pilot cost an impressive $75,000), which was slightly higher than that of other programs that debuted on CBS that season such as The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959–63: $40,000), Johnny Ringo (1959–60: $45,000), and The Betty Hutton Show (1959: $50,000) (Grams, 64; see also Presnell and McGee, 14), extensive special effects were still largely prohibitive for a television series and were often avoided. The episode “The Odyssey of Flight 33” (2.18: February 24, 1961), about a commercial airliner that travels back in time when it is caught in a strange jet stream, features a shot of a stop-motion dinosaur animation that, at $2,500, was the most expensive special effect ever used in the show (Presnell and McGee, 87).

Because cost has always been a significant issue for science-fiction and fantasy television series, especially before the use of CGI, The Twilight Zone featured surprisingly few special effects. In “The Fear” (5.35: May 29, 1964), something of a reversal of “The Invaders,” there is a matte shot of a giant one-eyed alien towering over the landscape. This shot offers a particularly interesting twist, as at first it looks like a poorly done special effect, but eventually the narrative reveals that this is precisely what it is, for it turns out to be a not very convincing giant balloon belonging to diminutive aliens who, much smaller than humans, are afraid of being overpowered and crushed by the Terran giants and so in effect have used cheap special effects to create the illusion of being large to scare people off. We might read this as a reflexive joke about the show’s limitations regarding special effects, just as the aliens in “Mr. Dingle, the Strong”—a Martian with two heads in a single suit and two short and shuffling Venusians with moustaches—might be understood as “poking fun at low-budget sci-fi from the period” rather than just “silly” (Presnell and McGee, 88).

To create the effect of the nuclear blast in “Time Enough at Last,” the bank vault set in which Bemis is sitting when it detonates was built on springs, allowing the set and the camera to shake together (Zicree, 69). But such relatively elaborate mechanical special-effects shots were rare for The Twilight Zone. Many of the show’s special effects tended to be ingeniously simple and low tech, like an empty mirror frame allowing the face of Arch Hammer to seem to change to that of Foster (Ross Martin) in one shot as the camera pans from Hammer shaving to the “mirror” in “The Four of Us Are Dying” (Zicree, 87). The tiny human “aliens” of “The Invaders” were merely little puppets animated by the director’s fingers inserted into their backs (Zicree, 172–75). In “Black Leather Jackets” (5.18: January 31, 1964) the aliens just wear said article of clothing and ride motorcycles, sort of extraterrestrial Wild Ones that also recall the very low-budget aliens who wear sunglasses and business suits in Roger Corman’s Not of this Earth (1957). Relatively simple optical effects like freeze-frame photography are central to the episode “A Kind of a Stopwatch,” in which a man (Richard Erdmann) discovers a timepiece that has the power to stop the world in its tracks. (Earlier, in the episode “Elegy,” where three astronauts land on a remote asteroid and discover familiar tableaux of small-town Americana, the actors simply stood still in position, a strategy, alas, periodically noticeable.) The switch of Bolie Jackson and his opponent Joey Consiglio in the ring in “The Big Tall Wish” is also achieved simply by a series of freeze frames.

The Twilight Zone also saved money by recycling existing footage. The final shot of aliens departing Earth in “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” was actually taken from MGM’s science-fiction film Forbidden Planet (1956) and run upside down and backward (Zicree, 92). Props from that classic science-fiction movie pop up periodically in the show, from the model spaceship in “The Invaders” to the interiors of the spaceship cabins in “People Are Alike All Over,” “Third from the Sun,” “Elegy,” and “Death Ship” (4.6: February 7, 1963) to the appearance of Robby the Robot in “Uncle Simon” and “The Brain Center at Whipple’s” (5.33: May 15, 1964). A diminutive Robby also makes an appearance in the first shot of “One for the Angels”: when the camera pans down from the opening twilight sky, the first thing we see is a windup toy Robby, one of the items being sold by pitchman Lew Bookman (Ed Wynn). Production space for The Twilight Zone was rented at MGM, allowing the show’s makers access to the studio’s back lot and sets as well as props from other films in addition to Forbidden Planet. Sets from The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1959), for example, were used for the filming of the episode “Judgment Night” (1.10: December 4, 1959), and houses built for the Smith family’s street in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) were used in the nostalgic “Walking Distance” (Presnell and McGee, 42).

Each week The Twilight Zone offered a different take on established genres, the show displaying no uniform generic consistency from episode to episode. The same might be said of any given episode’s affective tone. One episode might be a grimly ironic cautionary tale about nuclear holocaust, like “Time Enough at Last” or “The Shelter”; another a slapstick comedy or a thriller about time travel like “Once upon a Time” and “Back There” (2.13: January 13, 1961) respectively; and yet another a sentimental, Runyonesque fantasy like “Night of the Meek” (2.11: December 23, 1960), with Art Carney as a drunken department-store Santa who finds the real Santa’s toy sack and consequently a purpose in life. While genre has always been crucial to television, and television shows routinely mix genres (Mittell 2004: xii–xiii), The Twilight Zone was the only weekly series that blended genres differently from episode to episode rather than simply as a hybridized premise for a continuing narrative. Viewers never knew what generic stew a new episode would offer and consequently, what emotions it might elicit—suspense, humor, fear, or wonder. This unpredictability was an essential part of the show’s appeal even as it left viewers uncertain about what was to come in a given episode. Thus, the “operational aesthetic” was at work in The Twilight Zone not just with the ending of episodes and their frequent narrative twists and the summary observations by Serling but even before an episode began as viewers wondered what kind of story they were going to be seeing.

In 1961 broadcasting historian Eric Barnouw bemoaned the generic nature of television, specifically referring to Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone. After praising the writers of “Golden Age” television drama, he said that “The author of Requiem for a Heavyweight now writes formula mysteries of the supernatural and even wins prizes for them: a symptom of the low estate to which television drama has fallen, in just a few short years” (qtd. in Boddy 1990, 193). However, it is important to remember that auteurs—those artists who work within collaborative mass media but nevertheless maintain a personal vision—of necessity make use of generic material. As Lawrence Alloway noted regarding cinema, “The personal contribution of many directors can only be seen fully after typical iconographic elements have been identified” (41). Genre, in other words, provides the background against which the author’s personal vision may be seen—a point no less true for television than it is for cinema. How Rod Serling, television’s “first auteur” (Brode and Serling, 233–34), used genres in The Twilight Zone, is explored further in the following chapter.

1 The show also made striking expressionist use of sound. Clearly, the production crew were aware of the expressive possibilities of the soundtrack: the muffled sound of the human voices in the enormous model showroom—a touch worthy of Orson Welles—beautifully expresses the overwhelming emotions of Mr. and Mrs. Holt as they try to absorb the possibilities of the services offered by the New Life Corporation in “The Trade-Ins.” “The Fever,” for example, features the manipulated recorded sound of clinking coins to give chilling voice to a slot machine; “The Mighty Casey” adds comic sound effects to accentuate its sight gags; and “Sounds and Silences” offers an extended use of subjective sound to convey the growing madness of the protagonist (John McGiver). “King Nine Will Not Return” and “The Hitch-Hiker” rely on close-ups combined with subjective voice-overs rather than conventional dialogue. And in “The Invaders” Agnes Moorehead has no dialogue at all, the fear and tension in the episode driven instead by periods of silence punctuated only by her groans and cries.