The Twilight Zone: this Halloween, try the spooky supernatural series that changed pop culture forever

The Twilight Zone: this Halloween, try the spooky supernatural series that changed pop culture forever

There are ghouls, gremlins and the grotesque but through its five seasons the anthology show really focuses on the human condition

A man with a stern expression and a shock of slick black hair, wearing a crisp black suit, cigarette in hand, approaches the camera. In his clipped, precise patter, he’s about to welcome you … to The Twilight Zone.

This is how each episode of The Twilight Zone typically began, with its creator, Rod Serling, delivering a brief, cryptic opening monologue before throwing to a stand-alone story.

Running for five scintillating seasons from 1959 to 1964, the show told stories about the human condition in a world much like this one, but running on a parallel track. The supernatural often – but not always – played a role but, as we learned each week, human nature was the unnatural interloper, the cause of The Twilight Zone’s many trademark ironic twists.

There were no season-long, overarching plots, no recurring characters. Each week viewers were treated to a single unsettling tale. In this way, writers were able to go wild in a cordoned-off playground, with an incredible level of freedom to experiment.

Before The Twilight Zone, Serling –a passionate political thinker – had been turning out plays to great acclaim But he had big ideas. He kept running up against network censorship, not to mention TV’s increasing reliance on advertisers.

He said it was hard to make good television “when every 12 minutes one is interrupted by 12 dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper”. He realised he was going to have to think laterally if he was going to write about the big issues. He’d need a Trojan horse.

In the third episode of the fifth season, Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, William Shatner plays Robert Wilson, a man flying home after spending six months in a sanatorium due to a nervous breakdown. Already fragile and harried, Robert, mid-flight, sees something on the wing of the plane. Something terrifying. The episode is a brilliant portrait of fear, mania and a (potentially) unreliable narrator. Today’s audiences may recognise its hilarious Treehouse of Horror parody, too, from The Simpsons.

The British Film Institute once highlighted The Twilight Zone’s yen for tackling “the cruel indifference and implacability of fate, and the irony of poetic justice”. In Time Enough at Last, an avid reader, Henry Bemis (Burgess Meredith), has a wife who hounds him and a job he hates. All Henry wants is time to read his books in peace. Fate, Henry soon finds out, is not without a sense of irony.

But The Twilight Zone wasn’t nihilistic – it could be sentimental, too. The Changing of the Guard, for example, follows an elderly teacher, Prof Fowler (Donald Pleasance), forced to retire from a prestigious boys school after 51 years. Returning to the school at night and at the end of his wits, the professor is confronted with the ghosts of his past. The episode gives viewers, and Fowler, an emotional payoff reminiscent of Dead Poets Society.

One for the Angels further proves that The Twilight Zone hums with an undercurrent of profound optimism. A salesman, Lou Bookman (Ed Wynn), encounters Mr Death (Murray Hamilton). Lou, who could sell ice cubes in a snowstorm, robs Death of his prize with a compelling sales pitch. But Death isn’t having it. It’s the kind of premise that would have made a brilliant feature film but no film could have pulled it off as deftly.

Serling, who was Jewish and a decorated paratrooper in the second world war, wasn’t afraid to mine his personal traumas. In The Purple Testament a lieutenant fighting in the Philippines finds out he’s gained a strange, unearthly power: he knows which of his men will live and which of them will die.

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This impulse to speak truth to power was always on the cards for Serling. In 1955, a 14-year-old black child, Emmett Till, was tortured and murdered. His body was dumped in a river. Serling wanted to tell this story. To avoid censorship, he changed key details, pitching a version showing the lynching of a Jewish pawnbroker for the critically acclaimed anthology series The United States Steel Hour, and it was approved.

But years later, once The Twilight Zone was up and running, Serling dispensed with any vagaries. In I Am the Night – Color Me Black, he told the story in its most fearless iteration.

Throughout its five seasons, The Twilight Zone was never afraid to challenge and confront. “The writer’s role is to be a menacer of the public’s conscience, he must have a position, a point of view,” Serling once said. “He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus on the issues of his time.”

For a generation of TV viewers, their first exposure of The Twilight Zone was probablyreferenced, parodied and outright copied. But when it debuted, nothing like it had been seen before and, despite its litany of imitators, nothing like it has been seen since. Black Mirror tried but it simply can’t match The Twilight Zone’s peerless cinematic artistry. Nor could Jordan Peele, whose 2020 reboot failed to take off

Perhaps there was something on the wing.

• The Twilight Zone is available to rent or buydations of what to stream in Australia here

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