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Writer of Weirdness

Earl Hamner Jr. ranked among Rod Serling’s oldest acquaintances in the world of professional scriptwriting. A fellow victor in that long ago Dr. Christian writing competition, he was also the departing staff writer who gave Serling his break at WKRC-TV in Cincinnati.

He reminisced further in an interview with Ted Allrich, for the 1977 edition of Writer’s Yearbook.

I had known Rod Serling slightly in New York. One day I called Rod and said I would like to submit some stories for his Twilight Zone series. He said that it was an awfully hard market to crack, but to give it a try. He promised that all the right people would read my ideas. His producer called back a few days after I submitted some, a nice guy named Buck Houghton. Buck had read the stories and liked them. But he also said, “I understand you don’t write film. Would you like to write these up as little plays?” I said, “No. I’d like to write them up as little television shows.” And I did, and I have not been out of work since.

“The Hunt” (First broadcast: January 26, 1962)

The first script Hamner ever submitted to The Twilight Zone (and, he said, his favorite) was the story of an old man and his dog, a hound named Rip, as they headed off for an evening hunting raccoon. What they don’t realize, of course, is that they’re both dead. They died the previous evening, which is why they’re returning home empty-handed, and why they suddenly find themselves standing at a gate that had never been there before.

Neither can they simply pass through it. The gatekeeper is adamant. The old man is welcome, but Rip . . . not so much. Like the sign says, “No Dogs Allowed.”

The old man’s not having that. Neither’s Rip, for that matter, who doesn’t seem to want to enter anyway. But if Rip isn’t welcome, then there’s no way his master wants to, and so the pair set off in another direction—and it’s just as well that they did.

For the gate that they passed by was the entrance to Hell, where naturally no one is allowed to enjoy themselves, not even in the company of an animal. Keep going, though, and they will soon reach the gates to Heaven—where dogs are welcomed and raccoons can be hunted wherever you like.

Suggesting it’s not much of a heaven for raccoons, but no matter.

Perhaps bafflingly, at least to laymen, several religiously minded viewers took great exception to this story, and in particular to its assumption that, just because the old man was good hearted, loved his dog and hunted coon, he would automatically be welcomed into Heaven. When, of course, there were far stricter regulations than that. It was suggested that Serling reread Luke 18:18–24:

18. A certain ruler asked him, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

19. “Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good—except God alone.

20. You know the commandments: ‘You shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, honor your father and mother.’”

21. “All these I have kept since I was a boy,” he said.

22. When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

23. When he heard this, he became very sad, because he was very wealthy.

24. Jesus looked at him and said, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!”

“A Piano in the House” (First broadcast: February 16, 1962)

Earl Hamner Jr. was behind this salutary lesson in the perils of theatrical criticism—the kind of story, one might expect, that any number of playwrights and authors might dream of writing (or even stage-managing) after one bad review too many.

He wields a vicious pen, does Fitzgerald Fortune. A theater critic of veteran status, he is the kind of self-important blowhard who would never write a pleasant review when a bad one is so much easier to compose, and far more likely to garner attention. Tonight, though, he is displaying his more charming side, as he heads to a local junk store to purchase a self-playing piano for his young wife Esther’s birthday.

Of course, this being The Twilight Zone, the instrument is not what it seems to be. Play certain of the music rolls with which it is supplied, and it reveals people’s most fervent desires. The bitter old store-owner who is a closet romantic. The young man at Esther’s birthday party, who has the serious hots for his hostess. The fat woman who wishes she was skinny.

And, oops! The belligerent theater critic who is terrified of the dark, and whose contemptuous attitude toward the plays that he reviews is rooted not in genuine critical thought, but in jealousy for the talents that those other writers have, while he simply has the gift of negativity. In other words, a man, as Serling’s closing puts it, “who went searching for concealed persons, and found himself . . . in the Twilight Zone.”

“Jess-Belle” (First broadcast: February 14, 1963)

A rarity in the twilight zone—a story in which Rod Serling delivered no closing narration. His opener, however, was compensation enough.

The Twilight Zone has existed in many lands, in many times. It has its roots in history, in something that happened long, long ago and got told about and handed down from one generation of folk to the other. In the telling, the story gets added to and embroidered on, so that what might have happened in the time of the Druids is told as if it took place yesterday in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Such stories are best told by an elderly grandfather on a cold winter’s night by the fireside . . . in the southern hills . . . of the Twilight Zone.

A thoughtful tale of jealousy, love and good old-fashioned witchery, it tells of young Jess-Belle running to Granny Hart in a state of some distress. She has just heard that her sweetheart, Billy-Ben Turner, has become engaged to Ellwyn Glover, and her heart is close to breaking. So close that she begs Granny Hart for a potion that will cause the young man to realize the error of his ways and declare his love for her instead.

Granny agrees, but there is a price. Every night now, Jess-Belle finds herself transformed into a mountain lion; and a new danger looms, as hunters set their sights on the beast.

Desperately, fearfully, Jess-Belle’s mother locks the girl away at night. But Jess-Belle inevitably escapes and, equally inevitably, she is killed.

Or is she?

Billy-Ben, shaking off the effects of the potion, is reunited with Ellwyn, but a visit from Jess-Belle’s mother lets them know that the girl did not die. She merely changed into something else. It takes another bout of witchcraft, supplied by the ever-obliging Granny Hart, to finish off the unfortunate Jess-Belle for good.

“Ring-a-Ding Girl” (First broadcast: December 27, 1963)

Hamner was responsible for another of The Twilight Zone’s occasional excursions into the world of stardom; and, with genuine class, one of its most successful ghost stories, too. It is the story of Barbara “Bunny” Blake, the “Ring-a-Ding Girl,” and one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, as she returns to her Howardville hometown as a special guest of the annual Founder’s Day celebrations.

There, she visits with old friends and family; she catches up with everyone who was left behind as she soared for the stars; and she is even persuaded to put on a one-woman show at the high school auditorium. It clashes, sadly, with the Founder’s Day picnic in the park, but that is a tiny price to pay for the privilege of Bunny Blake in the flesh.

As showtime approaches, almost the entire town is gathered in the auditorium, which means the park is all but deserted—and thankfully so. For a transcontinental airliner has just crashed into it, killing everybody on board the plane, but precious few from the town. Just one question remains—where is Bunny? She appears to have vanished without a trace. At least until her body is pulled from the wreckage of the plane, on which she had been a passenger.

So who . . . or what . . . had walked the streets of Howardville all day?

“You Drive” (First broadcast: January 3, 1964)

Hamner’s second fifth-season story in succession, “You Drive” not only introduces us to a particularly ruthless hit-and-run driver, one Oliver Pope. It also gives us a glimpse into the roots of Stephen King’s immortal killer car Christine, in the form of a vehicle that has a job to do, and will make certain that it is done.

In this case, the car, a 1956 Ford, is a benevolent beast, outraged by its owner’s callous disregard for the delivery boy he hit on his way home from work one evening.

With the police calling for witnesses, and the boy’s parents grief-stricken as their son dies from his injuries, Oliver resolves to remain silent. His car, on the other hand, is determined to force him to confess. The horn blares, the lights flash, the engine stalls; and when Oliver realizes what is going on, he all but rips the vehicle to pieces.

The following morning he walks to work—and the car chases him, coming perilously close to running him over before he finally climbs aboard and allows the vehicle to drive him to the police station. His confession naturally follows.

Among The Twilight Zone’s greatest cheerleaders and fans, horror author Stephen King.

Everett Collection/Shutterstock.com

“Black Leather Jackets” (First broadcast: January 31, 1964)

Hamner takes a look into what was fast becoming one of the era’s most menacing cults—the black leather–jacketed motorcyclists who, since the early 1950s, had seemed irrevocably dedicated to giving teenagers a bad name. Bikers, greasers, Hells Angels, call them what you will. They were a violent, disrespectful menace, and with miscreants like these on the prowl, who can blame society for responding the way it does?

Even worse than the noise and the drinking and the pounding music, however, is the fact that the bikers’ arrival in one particular neighborhood coincides with both television and radio reception going absolutely haywire. And, as Elvis Presley didn’t quite put it, “you can do anything that you wanna do, but don’t mess with my shows.”

For Mr. and Mrs. Tillman, watching as the peace of their little slice of suburbia is disrupted by the newly moved-in youths, fear and loathing are the only natural responses. For their teenage daughter Ellen (realized in true delinquent style by Shelley Fabares), on the other hand, fascination and friendship develop, particularly after she misses the bus to the library one day and one of the youths, Scott, offers her a ride.

Their friendship develops, and blossoms toward love. Scott can keep his secret no longer. The three bikers are not what they seem (they never are! Even the Shangri-Las’ “Leader of the Pack” had a heart of gold). In fact, they’re not even human. They are aliens, a scouting party sizing up the Earth for possible colonization, and in just twenty-four hours, the entire population will be wiped out when a deadly bacteria is released into the water supply.

Scott is having second thoughts, though. His people believed that humanity deserved to die because all they saw was hatred, racism and war. Ellen has proved that humans are capable of love and affection too, and while the shocked girl makes her way home, he tries to contact his masters to call off the invasion.

He is too late. Ellen tells her father what she learned, and he calls the police. Scott is taken away before he can make that fateful call—and then we discover that the three bikers were not the only aliens on the planet. The police had been infiltrated long before. The invasion will proceed as planned.

“Stopover in a Quiet Town” (First broadcast: April 24, 1964)

Hamner penned this tale of the ultimate alien abduction—a pair of regular young New Yorkers returning home from a party and awakening in a strange house, surrounded by the strangest things.

Flimsy furniture, plastic food, telephones that are not wired to the walls, drawers that do not open. Outside, the bountiful trees and animals are all fake. Cars do not have engines, and the train just seems to run around the town in one great circle.

Why? Because they are now the toys of a little girl . . . who is not, in fact, so little. A race of aliens, many times our size, visited our planet last night, and Bob and Millie were swept up by their craft and taken home to people a toy town. Every so often they can even hear their captor giggle.

“The Bewitchin’ Pool” (First broadcast: June 19, 1964)

Viewers impatiently awaiting the final episode of The Twilight Zone had two long weeks in which to cool their heels, between the broadcast of the penultimate “The Fear” and the climactic “The Bewitchin’ Pool.”

Finally, however, it was time for Hamner to write The Twilight Zone into the history books with a tale that fell proudly into that tradition set by C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies and L. Frank Baum’s Oz saga. Except the magical universe unencumbered by parents lies not on the other side of an old piece of furniture, or at the far end of a storm, but at the bottom of an ordinary backyard swimming pool.

That’s where young Jeb and Sport Sherwood discover the mysterious entranceway to a happy land where kind old ladies serve delicious chocolate cake, and the children who come there are often so happy that they never want to leave. In a chilling echo of Peter Pan, where the terrified Mrs. Darling screams for Pan to return her children, they can’t even hear their parents calling for them.

Jeb and Sport return home, their minds still filled with the pleasures of that mysterious land, but aware that they belong at home with their family. Just a few days later, however, their parents call them together and explain that that family is shattering after years of constant fighting. The children have to decide which parent they want to live with—mommy or daddy?

Or, perhaps, neither. Rushing back to the pool, they dive into the water, and return to the arms of Aunt T, the kindly old lady with all the chocolate cake. And, sure enough, soon enough, they can’t even hear their parents calling them.