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Posted on March 31, 2021

“A World of His Own” and the Replaceability of Women in The Twilight Zone

From the outset, Rod Serling’s vision for The Twilight Zone was a specifically political one. Understanding that the tropes of the science fiction genre made it the perfect vehicle to slip pointed social critique past television’s censoring bodies, Serling was long interested in using the series to push back against social norms. With a body of work exploring men escaping to worlds of their creation as a response to emasculation, Richard Matheson was the perfect writer to help execute Serling’s vision.[1] Of the 16 episodes Matheson wrote for the series, “A World of His Own” (broadcast in the first season on July 1, 1960) is the one whose framework is most readily reflected in modern dystopian narratives such as AMC’s Humans and Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale. As a reaction to the era’s shifting cultural power dynamics between men and women, this episode establishes a template for male domination over the female body, both psychologically and physically, that is still obvious in satire today.

Posted on March 25, 2021

Cosmic Slop: Before Peele Remade The Twilight Zone

Guest Post

With the rise of Jordan Peele’s Twilight Zone (2019-20) and Misha Green’s Lovecraft Country (2020), we are hopefully entering a golden age of Black horror TV, following decades in which the genre was marked by a lack of diversity. An exception appeared in 1994, however, in the three-part HBO horror/sci fi anthology, Cosmic Slop.

While Cosmic Slop was a unique example of a Black horror anthology made for TV in the nineties, it was not an isolated work of the genre. As Robin R. Means Coleman outlines, the nineties did give rise to numerous, albeit underfunded, Black horror films. Means Coleman makes the distinction between the labels “Blacks in horror” and “Black horror,” with the former indicating films about Black people but often lacking knowledge or political acuity and the latter comprising films created by Black people and that draw knowledgeably on “Black folklore, histories, and culture” while speaking to Black anxieties, aesthetics and viewpoints. Read more

Posted on April 5, 2020

Vivarium Rewrites The Twilight Zone

Dawn Keetley

Shown at festivals in 2019 and released widely in March 2020, Vivarium is the second feature by Irish director Lorcan Finnegan and writer Garret Shanley. It’s a brilliant, albeit devastatingly bleak film that also happens to echo—as so many horror films do—one of the best episodes of The Twilight Zone.

Finnegan and Shanley’s first feature, Without Name (2016), is an eerie folk horror tale about a surveyor (Alan McKenna) who travels to the woods outside Dublin in order to assess it for development. Once there, though, he meets unwelcoming locals and an equally unwelcoming forest, which seems (at first, at least) resistant to his encroachment. As I said in my review, Without Name is slow-paced and eerie, and I’ve seen few films that so expertly draw on the landscape as a real force in the drama; shot in the awe-inspiring Glendalough National Park in County Wicklow, Ireland, it is a beautiful film.

Finnegan and Shanley’s second feature, Vivarium, is completely different. It is, however, equally provocative, and it’s a film you should be equally sure to watch. Vivarium is less akin to Finnegan and Shanley’s first feature than to their earlier short film, Foxes (2012), which you can watch here, and in which a couple is trapped in a housing estate and then lured away by foxes. It’s an enigmatic film that shares Vivarium‘s setting—a soulless housing estate.

Posted on May 11, 2019

Cyclical Abuse in The Twilight Zone

Elizabeth Erwin

As an episode that redirects audience sympathy away from humans and toward a robot, “Uncle Simon” is a bit of an outlier in The Twilight Zone canon. Written by creator Rod Serling, the story focuses on Barbara (Constance Ford) as she cares for her wealthy uncle, Simon (Cedric Hardwicke). But lurking beneath this seemingly innocuous portrait of family caregiving is a dark depiction of the tolls abuse takes on a family. The antithesis of the human/robot relationship envisioned by Dr. Julie Carpenter in which robots facilitate “healthy and successful social-emotional models of communication,” this episode leverages the robot as a means of showing the cyclical nature of abuse.[i] Simon and Barbara are engaged in a dynamic where verbal abuse is an ingrained part of their communication model. It’s a pattern that not even Simon’s death can break thanks to a robot he wills to Barbara. Read more

Posted on July 19, 2018

5 Twilight Zone Episodes That Influenced Modern Horror Film

Dawn Keetley

The Twilight Zone (1959-64) is not only one of the most acclaimed TV series but also one of the most influential on artists of all kinds, but especially on the creators of horror. The list below identifies five episodes that in my view powerfully shaped some of our best modern horror films. There are undoubtedly more, but this is a beginning.