![]() ![]() TWILIGHT ZONE INTRO SCRIPT TVThus, "20,000 Feet" is perhaps the only stone-cold classic that every TV fan knows from that last batch of episodes. There were other very good-to-great episodes of the show in its final season, but Serling had stepped back his involvement in the project over the final two years, and quality became more hit and miss. And there's a refreshing ambiguity for much of the episode's run - is the true villain here the man locked up, or the man who holds the key? "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" (season 5, episode 3) "The Howling Man" (season 2, episode 5)Ī traveler in Europe happens upon a castle where a monk claims to have locked up the devil himself - in the form of a man who endlessly howls, his cries haunting the surrounding countryside.Ĭharles Beamont's script relies perhaps too heavily on a pat conclusion, but the depiction of the titular fellow here is one of the most downright disturbing things the show has ever done. "The After Hours" is a perfect version of that. So many of the best horror-skewing Zones involve characters who struggle to avoid a horrible - or even not so horrible - fate, then grudgingly realize they have to accept it. A woman becomes trapped in a department store after closing, and the atmosphere of unease slowly builds all around her, until she finally has a dreadful realization. This brilliantly eerie episode plays off of the unsettling feeling one gets when alone in a public place after dark. There's a kind of grim acceptance here - as she slowly becomes aware of what kind of story she's trapped in - that only gives the episode more potency. ![]() ![]() But the show was just as good at playing around with the tropes of fantastical horror, of the urban legend.Ĭonsider this rough spin on the old phantom hitch-hiker ghost story, with a woman on a road trip who becomes aware of a presence along the side of the road. Many of its episodes play around with the tropes of that genre, including space travel, time travel, and alien civilizations. The Twilight Zone is primarily remembered as a science-fiction series, and for good reason. Unsettling and eerie, the episode perfectly taps into that all-too-human sense of alienation from everybody you know. When they return to Earth, they begin to feel as if they no longer belong - and some force may be trying to erase them from existence. The episode centers on a trio of astronauts whose experimental spacecraft briefly blips off the radar during a flight. Serling's adaptation of a short story by Richard Matheson (himself a frequent writer for the show) actually improves upon the printed version by adding extra malevolence. "And When the Sky Was Opened" (season 1, episode 11) ![]() So if you need some appropriately eerie viewing this evening, hope for howling winds, and consider one of these five classics. (The rights to the fourth season - which consists of hour-long episodes - vary from package to package.) If you have a subscription to a streaming service, you have access to at least some of the show's run. Zone has many episodes that function in this manner.Įven better - the whole thing is readily available via online streaming and DVD. Oftentimes, the best horror works by building a thick fog of dread that settles over the viewer. No one's going to mistake the more atmospheric scares of The Twilight Zone for the jumpier shocks of The Walking Dead or American Horror Story, but that's also the point. Every episode is its own story, and that story can be thoughtful or provocative or goofy. But The Twilight Zone doesn't have that problem. Good horror is hard to do on television, because good horror is all about build-up leading to a climax, and TV is mostly concerned with endless build-up, over an untold number of seasons. TWILIGHT ZONE INTRO SCRIPT SERIESRod Serling's classic, which ran from 1959 to 1964, is one of the best TV series ever made - and also one of the scariest. What are you to do?Ĭonsider The Twilight Zone. You want something scary, but you don't want to spend a whole evening on it. It happens every year around late October. ![]()
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