We’ve been watching the annual Twilight Zone marathon on the Sci-Fi Channel all day, and it got me to thinking once again how brilliant the show is. How does it manage to scare the living daylights out of us with so few special effects?
Oh sure, there’s the creepy “normal” people in “Eye of the Beholder” and the chilling gremlin on the airplane wing in “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” But for the most part, the show doesn’t use a lot of the stuff you’d find at Industrial Light and Magic. Mainly because it just didn’t exist back then.
So why then is The Twilight Zone so darn scary? I’ve narrowed it down to one central theme: it plays on our deepest human fears, many of which revolve around loss of some sort. A few examples:
Loss of time. We expect time to move forward in an orderly fashion, but in “The Odyssey of Flight 33,” an airliner full of people inadvertently passes through the sound barrier and travels back in time. Don’t tell me this idea has never entered your mind while flying in an airplane. You know it has, even if you didn’t really know it.
Loss of a child. “Little Girl Lost” finds parents searching frantically for their daughter, whom they can hear screaming in her bedroom, but can’t see. Turns out the girl has entered into another dimension through a wall of her room. As a parent, I can’t imagine anything more frightening than hearing my child screaming for help, but not being able to reach her.
Loss of life. In “The Hitchhiker,” a woman traveling cross-country sees the same hitchhiker in every town, but no one else can see him. Turns out she actually died in an accident in Pennsylvania, and the hitchhiker — presumably an angel or worse — is there to accompany her to “the other side.” Can you imagine being dead and realizing that you’ll never again be able to go back to your former self and the people you love?! Yikes!
Loss of reality. Oh, this is a big one, featured in many episodes. The one that springs to mind is “Stopover in a Quiet Town.” After having too much to drink, a young couple leaves a party and wake up to find themselves in Centerville, a small town where no one lives: where the houses are empty, the trees are props, the food is plastic … and the only train comes right back to Centerville. Nope, you can’t always go home again. That would be scary.
Loss of human connection. In “Where is Everybody?,” a man finds himself in a town devoid of people with no memory of who he is. Turns out the military was running a simulator experiment, confining him in a box for 400+ hours to simulate the alone-time a person would endure on a space journey. Guess we need people to talk to now and then.
Loss of comfort. In “The Midnight Sun,” two women deal with oppressive heat in an abandoned city after the Earth falls out of orbit. I think most of us can identify with being horribly cold or horribly warm, and not being able to do a thing about it.
Aside from the obvious terror involved in each of these episodes — and Rod Serling popping up in peoples’ homes and cars — they also play on our control issues. I firmly believe that most humans tend to be control freaks in one way or another, so losing control of our lives is akin to losing everything. It’s the stuff out of our worst nightmares. Next stop: the Twilight Zone!
What about you? Why do you think The Twilight Zone is scary? Any theories to share? Any favorite episodes or experiences? My husband can’t watch “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” after seeing it as a child.
Clacked by Jane Boursaw 
on Jan 01, 2009 @ 00:33 EST5EDT
This post frightened me.
Exact reason why I don’t watch Twilight Zone. I always start rationalizing why this and that isn’t possible and why it all isn’t real just not to be scared but some of the things you mentioned can’t be argued with. Some stuff could happen and I am really not interested in nightmares *shivers*
Jane, “The Twilight Zone” is one of those shows that offers indisputable proof that excellent writing and superior acting will always withstand the test of time. That show was great because it led the viewer into so many different avenues of possibillities. Rod Serling was a genious with that mixture of plot depth, suspense, and irony….all within a half hour program. One of my favorite episodes was….(I believe the title was) “I shot an Arrow”.
Jane, your reasoning is excellent, and Tim-1, you are spot on with the writing aspect. Writers of today’s horror should take a look…hopefully they are all watching the marathon right along with the rest of us.
Somehow, jumping at sounds and gross-out horror has become the only “scary” recognized by writers. I can’t think of a recent movie that hit that formula. The unknown, the inability to understand what is going on around you, no one to ask; it’s so simple, and yet so powerful.
Additionally, something The Twilight Zone did without fail was to tell the ending it wanted to tell, and not the one we would like to see to make us feel better. No happy ending, no waking up to realize it was all a dream. In most episodes, what you see is what you get – and that made it all the more unsettling.
Long Live the Twilight Zone!
The scares in the Twilight Zone serve a purpose. They are there to draw the viewer in to an exploration of human nature. More often than not, the episodes exploring fear deal with what cannot be seen and/or controlled.
It’s worth mentioning that TZ excels at converying more than just fear. As has been mentioned, the strength is in the writing and in the acting. Not every episode is a winner, but a great percetentage of the large number produced still continue to shine.