Considering just how all-pervading a hold that The Twilight Zone exerts over modern popular culture . . . and has exerted, for as long as many people can recall . . . it is instructive to look back at what it actually was.
A prime-time network television series that ran for just five seasons, more than half a century ago.
It was shot in black-and-white; the majority of the episodes were just thirty minutes long inclusive of commercials; and—considering how much of the show was rooted in sci-fi or fantasy concerns—the special effects were next to negligible.
Yes, it drew both inspiration and story lines from some of the most gifted writers in those fields: Charles Beaumont, Robert A. Heinlein, Richard Matheson, Earl Hamner Jr. and Ray Bradbury among them. But how often does the simple process of adapting a story for a television show succeed in stripping away any hint of quality or genius that established the original as worthy of adaptation in the first place? And, though each episode was littered with grandstanding guest stars, how often is that a guarantee of quality, either?
Particularly when that television show is, again, thirty minutes of prime-time black-and-white flicker, conceived in an age when sitcom married couples still slept in single beds, when cinematic aliens were generally badly disguised Communist bogeymen and computers were room-sized behemoths fired by magnetic tape, Talking Clock voices and spools the size of wagon wheels.
In terms of anything that even remotely represents what a modern audience would regard as watchable thrills and chills, The Twilight Zone is to the mid-2010s what J. Hartley Manners’s 1910 comedy Girl in Waiting was to audiences of 1960; a half-remembered, fifty-year-old flash in a now very rusty, vintage pan.
Yet it has survived. More than that, it has triumphed. Today, as much as ever before, The Twilight Zone is one of the yardsticks by which great television of all eras is measured; a rare (some might even say unique) example of what happens when all of the necessary stars align—great writing, great scripting, great casting, great direction, of course.
But also—a great premise, great promotion, great time slot, great theme music. Fill a room, or a convention hall, with a hundred different Twilight Zone fans, and ask each one to nominate a single quality that has assured the show’s continued glory. You will probably receive a hundred different responses.
Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone’s indefatigable creator and show-runner (to conjure that thoroughly modern, and utterly hateful, term for the job he undertook), described his dream child thus, in a TV Guide interview published as the series made its debut in 1959.
Here’s what The Twilight Zone is: It’s an anthology series, half-hour in length, that delves into the odd, the bizarre, the unexpected. It probes into the dimension of imagination but with a concern for taste and for an adult audience too long considered to have I.Q.s in negative figures.
The Twilight Zone is what it implies: that shadowy area of the almost-but-not-quite; the unbelievable told in terms that can be believed. It would not, on the other hand, be a monster rally or a spook show. There will be nothing formula’d [sic] in it, nothing telegraphed, nothing so nostalgically familiar that an audience can usually join actors in duets.
And it was for that audience to add all the other descriptions.
This book does not intend adding its own voice to that particular chorus. If you agree with any of Serling’s observations, you already know why you are reading this book—and if you haven’t answered it, then The Twilight Zone FAQ will hopefully set you on your way to formulating an opinion, for the inevitable moment when you are expected to have one. Which could be at a convention, could be at the movies, could be in a book store, a comic store, in any of myriad places that have been illuminated by The Twilight Zone.
For, although it certainly started life as a television show, it was never going to be limited to the cathode screen alone. As early as July 1958—that is, before even a pilot episode had been shot, while negotiations with the network were still ongoing—the Boyd Specialty Company of Columbus, Ohio, was writing to Rod Serling to ask whether he was interested in cross-marketing a game they were in the process of creating, called Twilight Zone.
He turned them down, sensibly pointing out that it was far too early to be thinking of such spin-offs. But, soon enough, there would be a board game adapted from the television series, courtesy of the Ideal Toy Corporation. There would be novels and comic books, movies and video games. Audio books and television remakes. DVD box sets, CDs and toys. Disneyland rides. Action figures. You may not require a Talky Tina Bobble Head that threatens to kill you, but someone does, and there’s one out there for them. There’s a gremlin, too, which looks a lot like Kim Fowley; a Kanamit and a Mystic Seer. Come on, admit it. You want them all.
In these days when even a first-run television series seems to be marketed out of all proportion with its popularity, while established shows are positively multimedia extravaganzas, we should not perhaps be shocked to see The Twilight Zone popping up in every conceivable marketable medium.
But take yourself back to the late 1950s, with the show on the drawing board and its future still airborne; or march ahead to the end of its five-year run, with cancellation looming and viewing figures plummeting, and look again at the show’s modern ubiquity. Yes, other shows did provoke a sea of opportunist merchandising . . . board games, books and comics abounded, and it was a sorry child indeed who did not receive at least one die-cast Monkeemobile for a mid-1960s birthday.
Few of those opportunities were more than fleeting, however. A handful of shows from within (or just beyond) the approximate life span of The Twilight Zone . . . Star Trek, Batman and the British Doctor Who . . . were early adherents to the mass-marketing boom, and they would retain sufficient popularity and visibility to see that boom survive the passing years.
They were called lunch boxes back in the day, but this is what a Twilight Zone tin tote looks like now. And you can still carry your lunch in one.
Officially licensed product. TM & © 2015 A CBS Company. THE TWILIGHT ZONE and TELEVISION CITY and related marks are trademarks of A CBS Company. All Rights Reserved. © JLA Direct, LLC. d/b/a Bif Bang Pow!
But therein lies the difference. In one form or another, and with the odd hiatus notwithstanding, all three of those shows remained a part of our living culture. Barely a decade separated the original Star Trek television series from the first smash-hit spin-off movie, and syndication had kept it alive in between times. Doctor Who left the screens for seventeen years, but was sustained by novels and audio dramas. And Batman is Batman, the star of comic books from almost before TV was even invented, and still the star long after the networks lost interest in his BIFF ZAP KER-SPLATTTT adventuring.
The Twilight Zone, on the other hand . . . The Twilight Zone survived not because you could still see it, or read it, or throw a six to start. It survived because you remembered it, or because other people remembered and told you about it.
Long before Telly Savalas was sucking lollipops and demanding, “Who loves you, baby,” he was being menaced by a walking, talking windup doll, with murderous intent and a knack for getting what it wanted. The man was killed by his stepdaughter’s dolly; let’s see Kojak solve that one.
Three years before she learned that a twitch is worth a thousand incantations, Elizabeth Montgomery was bewitching America and Charles Bronson in a postarmageddon vision of The Twilight Zone.
And William Shatner was a long way indeed from the starship Enterprise that night he watched panic-stricken as a monstrous gremlin cavorted on the wing of an inflight airliner. Yet that image has become so much a part of our shared cultural memory that even people who have never watched an episode of The Twilight Zone in their lives know everything about it.
Based on a short Richard Matheson story (Alone by Night), directed by Richard Donner, and aired early into The Twilight Zone’s fifth and final season in 1963, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” is still routinely ranked among the most terrifying moments in television history, and that despite a half-century’s worth of shocks and horrors piling up to displace it.
For it is not only the gremlin that was so grim. It is the plight that ignites the gremlin to begin with. As Serling’s original introduction explained, thirty-seven-year-old salesman Robert Wilson was on his way home, freshly discharged from the sanitarium where he had spent the last six months recovering from a nervous breakdown. Now he was about to undergo another one. The difference is, this time he was 20,000 feet up in the air.
Think about that. Did people actually have “nervous breakdowns” on television in 1963? At least within the realm of popular entertainment? Maybe they did. But not many people remember those other ones. They often don’t recall Mr. Wilson’s either. But they do remember the gremlin. In the popular imagination, Mr. Wilson’s mental problems were all in his head. But what he saw . . . that was real.
Gremlins have their own proud history too, of course. At least as far back as the 1920s, members of the British Royal Air Force muttered darkly of supernatural beings that messed with aircraft; according to some experts, they christened them Gremlins from a conflation of Grimm’s fairy tales and the old English favorite Fremlin beer. That should tell you something about them, but few people wrote off gremlins as the fault of one beer too many. Not after they watched “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” anyway.
Neither is this single episode The Twilight Zone’s sole contribution to popular culture’s morbid memory. In 2014, the website IGN.com lined up its choice of the show’s ten most memorable episodes, and again one didn’t need even to have seen them to identify with the horrors that unspooled across them.
“Nick of Time,” with William Shatner, again, becoming obsessed with a fortune telling machine. “The Masks,” with the family of a dying millionaire being forced to don the hideous masks that their scion has prepared for them, each one reflecting the true nature of its wearer’s personality. “It’s a Good Life,” with a spoiled brat child who possesses the power to banish the people who displease him to an altogether unpleasant alternate reality. “The Hitch-Hiker,” reprising the old urban legend about the ghost who thumbs its way into a motorist’s nightmare. “Five Characters in Search of an Exit”; “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”; “Living Doll”; “The Eye of the Beholder”; “Time Enough at Last”; and “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” of course.
Other polls cite other shockers. Time magazine added “Walking Distance,” in which a businessman’s car breaks down just outside the town he grew up in. He sets out to walk to the nearest gas station, when he realizes he’s walked back not only to where he grew up, but to when he grew up as well. “The Invaders,” with a pre-Bewitched Agnes Moorehead bedazzled by a miniature flying saucer crewed by terrifying tiny aliens. More aliens, bearing with them a book titled To Serve Man. Humanity sees only one meaning to that title. The aliens, culinary adventurers that they are, have another.
Other favorites. A feature on CBS News’s website recalled being haunted by “The Lonely” and also by “Twenty-Two,” a small-town woman’s recurring dream of a long walk down a corridor to the morgue, where a sinister nurse speaks just five words: “Room for one more, honey.”
To which we might add . . . “Person or Persons Unknown,” in which a normal guy wakes up on a normal day, to discover that none of his friends or family members recognize him, or even recall his existence. “The After Hours,” on a department store floor that doesn’t actually exist; “In Praise of Pip,” revisiting a favorite old amusement park within a pioneering questioning of the Vietnam War; “The Odyssey of Flight 33,” in which an airliner travels back in time; “Long Distance Call,” with a dead grandmother who is just a phone call away; and all of these begotten by the single story on which the entire Twilight Zone dynasty was founded, the still captivating series pilot, “Where Is Everybody?”
Again, however, we stalk subjective vistas. Those are the greatest Twilight Zone episodes in someone else’s opinion. But you and I might well have our own ideas, our own notions of what the stuff of nightmares truly comprises, and our own fear-filled fragments of adrenalined astonishment. And therein lies another facet of The Twilight Zone’s modern ubiquity. The fact not only that its very name has become synonymous with any inexplicable happenstance, but that story lines from other shows . . . and, lest we forget, The Twilight Zone is simply one in a long line of television chillers . . . are often misremembered as being perched among the outer limits of Rod Serling’s so vivaciously vivid night gallery.
DVD box sets allow us to revisit some of those other shows today and thrill to some of their stories, too. It’s an instructive exercise. Not because it detracts from the purity of The Twilight Zone’s own imagery and madness, but because it amplifies it. It places the show within the cultural context that it demands, and it illustrates its lofty haunt in the hierarchy of American horror. There have been a lot of shows like The Twilight Zone. But there has never been one that surpasses it.
“The Twilight Zone is damn near immortal,” declared author Stephen King in 1981’s Danse Macabre—assuredly one of the finest, if most delightfully idiosyncratic, studies of science fiction, fantasy, and horror fiction ever published. “Here, for once, was something Completely New and Different,” he continued. “For me and those of my generation . . . [it] was like a thunderclap of revelation, opening a million entrancing possibilities.”
Merely by adhering to the genre that first brought him fame, King has never tired of repaying his early debt to The Twilight Zone, and he is not alone in doing so, both within his own generation and among all of those that have followed. J. J. Abrams, creator of the postmillennial thriller Lost, admitted that his show, and in particular its finale, was intentionally created to feel like something Serling might have served up to his audience—and more than a handful of TV historians stepped forward to point out that he had, in fact, already done it, in 1969’s The New People. A series about the survivors of an air disaster finding themselves marooned on a mysterious desert island.
An index of the television shows that have homaged The Twilight Zone in the course of their own tales could devour a small town’s telephone directory. (For those of us old enough to actually remember such things.)
The Simpsons, whose Tree House of Horror felt sometimes as though it was peopled only by refugees from The Twilight Zone. Hannibal mentioned the show in an episode of The A-Team; it was invoked in an installment of B.J. and the Bear; and again in The Muppet Babies: The Next Generation.
The South Park story “The Simpsons Already Did It” could as easily have been titled “And The Twilight Zone Did It Before Them,” as it looks back to the episode “The Little People.” Moonlighting, The Wonder Years, Freaks and Geeks, Northern Exposure, All in the Family, ALF (okay, no surprise there), Frasier, Seinfeld, Weird Science, Family Guy . . . Futurama, that madcap animation in which an entire “show within a show,” The Scary Door, is an unapologetic parody of The Twilight Zone.
Perhaps even dedicated fans and collectors can live without hunting down the September 2005 edition of the BBC’s Eastenders soap opera, in which Gary Hobbs is heard to declare, “For crying out loud, we’re back in the twilight zone!”
But The Gilmore Girls the following year placed poor Lorelai into a looming wedding that felt like an episode of the show; and the year after that, in the Canadian vampire series Blood Ties, we hear the truly unforgettable plea, “Oh dear Mother of God, say this is not gonna be another trip into the twilight zone.”
These examples alone (and there are many more) are evidence enough that The Twilight Zone is rightfully ranked among the most important, and the most influential, television shows ever broadcast in the United States—and in many other countries too—and that influence is certainly one of this book’s guiding beacons.
More than that, however, The Twilight Zone FAQ is about a vision, a genius, and a set of often-unrelated circumstances that came together with such alchemical energy that there really can be only one explanation for all that happened next; one phrase that thoroughly embraces every nuance.
Do you want to know where The Twilight Zone came from?
It came out of the twilight zone.