Browsing Tag

Twilight Zone

Posted on February 23, 2026

Death and “A Livin’ Man”: Ambrose Bierce, The Twilight Zone, and Jazz Icon Kenny Clarke

Guest Post

Linda Ganus

A little over 60 years ago, an episode produced for the legendary science fiction TV show, The Twilight Zone, aired on February 28, 1964. It’s surprisingly apt that this anniversary falls during Black History Month; here’s why.

The episode, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, was a short French film adaption (La rivière du hibou) of Ambrose Bierce’s widely anthologized short story of the same name about a Confederate soldier facing death during the Civil War. The director, Robert Enrico, while faithfully hewing to the text of the original story published in the San Francisco Examiner in 1890, boldly added filmic elements that gave the naturalist narrative a modern 20th-century perspective. The film eventually won awards at the Cannes Film Festival and was one of the first television episodes to win an Oscar for Best Short Subject in 1964. An uncredited performance on the film by African-American musician and jazz master, Kenny Clarke, fiercely transformed the meaning of the story by immersing the viewer in an auditory sound world imagined from enslaved Black Americans’ viewpoints. Clarke amplified their voices, left unheard in Bierce’s original.

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Posted on March 14, 2025

In the Twilight Zone: The After Hours in Severance

Dawn Keetley

In Severance’s latest episode, “The After Hours” (season 2, ep. 9), the show makes its most direct reference yet to another television series. Could it be more appropriate that it’s The Twilight Zone? Specifically, the thirty-fourth episode in season one, “The After Hours,” which aired on June 10, 1960. For those of us who like to look for hidden references, this one isn’t much of a challenge (“The After Hours” = “The After Hours”). The directness of the reference continues near the end of Severance’s episode when Harmony Cobel and Devon are smuggling Mark into the Damona Birthing Retreat, and Harmony seems to be giving some kind of password to the guard: “Marsha White. Ninth floor,” she says, adding “Specialty Department. I’m looking for a gold thimble.” The Twilight Zone’s “The After Hours” begins with Marsha White taking the elevator to the ninth floor – the Specialities Department – looking for a gold thimble.

Now that Severance has directly evoked The Twilight Zone’s “The After Hours,” the similarities are striking and many. The ninth floor of the department store to which Marsha White is whisked does not – as far as the “normal” world is concerned – actually exist. We see multiple shops of the elevator indicator going up only to the eighth floor and then the roof. As several characters say to a bewildered Marsha White who leaves the ninth floor and then tries to get back to it, “There is no ninth floor.”

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Posted on April 5, 2021

Nightmare Normal: Lockdown Horror

Guest Post

When it comes to creating horror scenarios, statesmen and -women have always out-classed the creators of fiction. Now they’ve done it once again. As in some clichéd movie script, you go to bed one night to find the next day that the world has irreparably changed. Human rights are now “privileges.” People are not considered fellow human individuals but state-owned virus-transmitters. Soon a new passport could reconstruct and reshape an underclass defined by lack of an immunity which scientists can’t even confirm. Lockdown may well last forever. At least for those disadvantaged by one of the most momentous accelerators of systemic injustice ever. No matter how much you love horror, you don’t want to live it. Still, there are examples of filmic horror conveying some of the radically changed parameters of an utterly frightening reality. Their often perplexing plots, themes and systemic critique can help reassess an unhinged present, providing reflections on and analogues for the mechanisms of a new “normal” which is anything but.

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