I was one of the individuals tapped to provide information for a piece on the vampire for The Salt Lake Tribune along with Joseph Laycock and James D’Arc. The article by Peggy Fletcher Stack is titlted “Christ’s evil twin? The vampire’s religious roots”. From the introductory material:
It takes more than a theological stake to the heart to kill the vampire legend.
Stories of dark-eyed seducers who prey on unsuspecting victims to suck their blood have persisted for more than five centuries. They have haunted our dreams and films, moving from place to place. And they are reborn in every generation. Today these parasites-on-the-living seemingly are everywhere.
From the television series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight books and films to the current HBO saga, “True Blood,” fascination with these so-called creatures of the night permeates contemporary life, albeit in modern forms. Thousands of living Americans even consider themselves vampires.
So why is this mythic figure so long-lived and potent?
For some answers, including some connections between Mormon history and the vampire, read the article at this link. This article was later reprinted in The Washington Post.
Every once in a while I come across great academic courses related to horror and my latest find is one presented by horror historian David J. Skal. He is presenting a graduate seminar at Trinity College Dublin based upon his book The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (Faber & Faber, 2001). Here is the lecture breakdown:
Class #1 – September 29
Lecture/Discussion: Introduction to topic. The image of the monster in western culture. Roots of modern horror in German romanticism /expressionism. Early silent films, the rise of Lon Chaney as a major horror icon, and the central importance of Universal Pictures and its connection to Germany to the legacy of mass media horror.
Screening:The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (viewed in class).
Class #2 – October 6
Lecture/Discussion: Mary Shelley and her “hideous progeny.” The literary, theatrical, cinematic and cultural implications of Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus. “Mad” science as a major twentieth-century myth. Overview of critical approaches to Shelley.
Reading: Shelley, Frankenstein; Skal, The Monster Show (“You Will Become Caligari,” “The Monsters and Mr. Liveright,” and “1931: The American Abyss”).
Screening: Frankenstein (Whale); The Frankenstein Files: How Hollywood Made a Monster (Skal documentary).
Class #3 – October 13
Lecture/Discussion: Roots of the vampire myth in Slavic folklore and English literature, and the history of Dracula from page to stage to screen. Overview of critical approaches to Stoker.
Reading: Stoker, Dracula (including Norton edition essays “Kiss Me with Those Red Lips” by Craft and “The Occidental Tourist” by Arrata); Tolstoy, “The Family of the Wurdalak” (Skal, trans.)
Screening: Nosferatu (Murnau, excerpt); Dracula (Browning); The Road to Dracula (Skal documentary, in-class viewing).
Class #4 – October 20
Lecture/Discussion: The doppelganger as a major horror motif. Second selves, stolen identities, and the recreated/revived/transformed persona. Various critical approaches to Stevenson.
Reading: Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (including Norton edition essay “Sex, Secrecy, and Self-Alienation” by Linehan).
Screening: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Mamoulian).
Class #5 – October 27
Lecture/Discussion: The emergence of cultural “decadence” as a literary/cinematic horror conceit, and the rise of the gay-monstrous.
Reading: Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray including Norton edition essay “Wilde’s Parable of the Fall” by Oates).
Screening: The Picture of Dorian Gray (Lewin); Dracula’s Daughter (Hillyer, excerpt).
Class #6 – November 3
Lecture/Discussion: Evolution, atavism and degeneration.
Reading: Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau (including Atwood introduction); Skal, The Monster Show (“Tod Browning’s America”).
Screening: The Island of Lost Souls (Kenton); Freaks (Browning); Monster by Moonlight: The Immortal Saga of the Wolf Man (Skal documentary; in-class screening).
November 8-12: Study Break
Class #7 – November 17
Lecture/Discussion: The ongoing influence of German expressionism and World War I on the horror genre, with American censorship as a shaping force.
Screening: The Black Cat (Ulmer); Bride of Frankenstein (Whale).
Reading: Skal, The Monster Show (“Angry Villagers”).
Class #8 – November 24
Lecture/Discussion: Mad science, World War II and Cold War paranoia, anxiety and alienation.
Screening: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel); The Universe According to Universal (Skal documentary, in-class screening).
Reading: Skal, The Monster Show ( “I Used to Know Your Daddy,” and “Drive-Ins Are a Ghoul’s Best Friend.”).
Class #9 – December 1
Lecture/Discussion: The monstrous-feminine as a major horror theme, with reproductive nightmares as a larger cultural subject.
Screening: Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski); The Brood (Cronenberg).
Reading: Skal, The Monster Show (“It’s Alive, I’m Afraid”).
Class #10 – December 8
Lecture/discussion: The rise of transgressive horror and gruesome special effects during and after the Vietnam era.
Screening: Night of the Living Dead (Romero); The Exorcist (Friedkin).
Reading: Skal, The Monster Show (“Scar Wars”).
Class #11 – December 15
Lecture/discussion: Two Academy Award-winning films reflect a major cultural assimilation of classic horror icons at the millennium.
Screening: Ed Wood (Burton, excerpts); Gods and Monsters (Condon); The World of Gods and Monsters (Skal documentary, in-class viewing).
An interesting debate is quietly raging on the Internet concerning science fiction and religion. The debate was launched by the website Airlock Alpha with an article by Tiffany Vogt titled “TV Watchtower: Is Religion Killing Good Sci-Fi Shows?”. As Vogt tries to make her case for answering the question of the article’s title with a resounding “yes!”, she cites Battlestar Galactica, Lost, and Caprica as examples of programs that “lost their way” by relying to heavily on the incorporation of religion. Vogt concludes:
Therefore, modern-day television writers need to remember what kind of show they are writing and who they are writing for. If they are more interested in writing about theology, then they should write those shows and not distort good science-fiction shows beyond recognition. For what purpose does it serve to pull a bait-and-switch on the very audience that provided them with tenure?
But a fellow Airlock Alpha writer provided another point of view, articulated by Dennis Rayburn in “Religion, Science Fiction: Another Point of View.” For Rayburn, religion need not be seen as an unnecessary intrusion into the alternative worlds of science fiction. Rayburn writes:
Seeking to remove religion from science-fiction, in the name or returning science to it, will return the science, but what about the fiction? The immortal words of the opening of “Star Trek” said, “… to explore new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations.” We must be brave enough to explore what those new civilizations are like and not blindly assume that they will be extremely similar to ours.
As noted at the beginning of this post, the raising of the question at Airlock Alpha has sparked a debate on the Internet, a phenomenon discussed in yet another essay in this series at the website in a piece by Michael Hinman titled “So Tell Us Honestly, Is There Too Much Religion in Sci-Fi?”. In this essay Hinman summarizes some of the controversy over the issue, and also solicits reader feedback on the question.
In my opinion, science fiction is a genre of literature, television, and film that is just as suitable for the inclusion of various elements of the human experience as any other. Why not religion? The question should not be whether religion has a place within science fiction, unless one assumes sci-fi to be atheistic, and I have yet to see a good argument made that this should be the case, but whether religion plays an appropriate role in storytelling that captures the imagination and reflects the totality of human experience, many times religions, sometimes irreligious. Let the debate continue.
Already it’s been a busy Halloween week, and with this post I share news on my interview at Strange Kids Club by Rondal Scott. From the introduction:
For the most part I like to keep things around the clubhouse light and fun. However, there’s also something to be said for taking a more intellectual viewpoint at times in order to awaken the jiggly grey matter that’s lodged between our ears and in that regard you’d be hardpressed to find a better pen pal than today’s guest: John W. Morehead.
From his own online home at TheoFantastique, John examines the culture of horror from the perspective of a childhood in search of the fantastic. With an assortment of original articles and interviews, TheoFanstique has become a hub for those seeking for a place to start their own spiritual journey into this entertainingly weird world of ours. In addition to his own site, John also contributes his insights to CineFantastique Online in addition to being a fellow member of both the League of Tana Tea Drinkers and the Fantastic Culture Preservation Society.
I hope that readers of Strange Kids Club will not find the interview too formal and tedious, but instead might find a few chestnuts that make the exploration of the strange that much more enjoyable. My thanks goes to Rondal Scott and the Strange Kids Club blog for the opportunity. See the interview at the fine SKC blog at this link.
Yesterday I was privileged to be a guest contributor for Cinefantastique Online with their Podcast 1:37. Here’s the description from the website:
Take a journey into the HEREAFTER on this week’s edition of the Cinefantastique Podcast. Special guest John W. Morehead, of Theofantastique, joins Dan Persons, Lawrence French, and Steve Biodrowski for an in-depth discussion of Clint Eastwood’s drama of people confronting the afterlife, scripted by Peter Morgan and starring Matt Damon. Is this another Oscar-worth contender from the director of UNFORGIVEN and BILLION DOLLAR BABY, or does it disappoint? Listen in and find out. As always, the Cinefantastique Podcast also includes a round-up of recent news, events, and home video releases – everything you need to know in order to be in the know.
I also stayed around for the Post-Mortem Podcast where we discussed other films dealing with the afterlife and additional topics. My thanks goes out to Steve Biodrowski, Dan Persons, and Lawrence French for the invitation and opportunity to be a guest. You can listen to the podcast here.
We continue with our series of posts by Arlen Schumer exploring The Twilight Zone. (Part 1 can be read here and Part 2 here.) In Part 3, Schumer continues his exploration of themes of the series, including “suburban nightmares,” and “science & superstition”:
SUBURBAN NIGHTMARES
“It was the ‘twilight zone’ of the American culture. It was not English or Japanese or German or anything. It’s our Twilight Zone.” —Richard Matheson, 1989
“The Twilight Zone doesn’t only belong to a brief but distinctive epoch in our recent past—it could almost provide that period with a name,” wrote Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman in 1990. “The Twilight Zone defined the shadowy transition between the Fabulous Fifties and the Psychedelic Sixties. The show’s span encompassed the birth of the Space Race, the flowering of the Civil Rights Movement, and the life and death of the New Frontier…as the aspirin-ad angst music, op art patterns and beatnik bongos of the series’ celebrated credit sequence suggest, this historical twilight zone was a time of affluence and anxiety, of suave hysteria with a continual backbeat of crisis.”
Echoed Jonathan (Fortress of Solitude) Lethem, writing about Serling on the online magazine Gadfly in 1999, “Just the titles of his best episodes read like a found poem of All- American dread: Where Is Everybody? Walking Distance. People Are Alike All Over. Time Enough At Last. The Obsolete Man. The Eye of the Beholder. Nervous Man in a Four-Dollar Room. The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street…”
This acute ability by Serling to identify both primal and post-war American fears and crises, then build stories around them, set in commonplace surroundings—a psycho-American Gothic of sorts——was perhaps the single factor most responsible for the success and longevity of The Twilight Zone.
In “Third From the Sun,” Serling zeroed in on the greatest post-war fear, the threat of nuclear war. While it well-predated the October ’62 Cuban Missile Crisis, “Third…” uncannily captured the same armageddon zeitgeist in the nuclear air, as when the teenage daughter of the scientist protagonist (Fritz Weaver, who’s plotting with his test-pilot neighbor to leave the planet with their families before the bombs drop) anxiously murmurs, “Everyone I’ve talked to lately, they’ve been noticing it; that something’s wrong; that something’s in the air; that something’s going to happen—and everybody’s afraid…”
Based on Matheson’s short story, “Third…” also offered a prescient description of what the military-industrial complex would (ironically?) call M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction):
“Talk is 48 hours…48 hours, we’ll have them aloft…then whoosh, up, over and whammo! There goes the enemy! Obliterated—finished. And what are they doing in the meantime? Probably retaliating the best way they can. It’s a waste of time, let me tell you. We get the first licks, so they can’t do much…instead of losing 50 million people, we lose only 35…” The episode’s out-of-left-field twist- ending, in which the planet being emigrated to turns out to be earth, third from our sun, King noted, “…marks the point at which many occasional Twilight Zone tuners-in became addicts.”
Recurring nightmares that seem more real than awakened reality are the stuff of Serling’s “Twenty-Two” (based on an anecdote in Bennett Cerf’s Famous Ghost Stories) and Charles Beaumont’s “Perchance to Dream.”
The circus and roller coaster dream sequences in “Perchance…” (“It was the kind of place you see only in nightmares—everything warped and twisted out of shape—but it was real, too”), and the initial descent into Room #22, the hospital morgue, are among the most visceral Twilight Zone scenes ever filmed (“Twenty-Two”’s even more, as it was shot on videotape, one of six Season 2 episodes taped in a cost-cutting experiment that produced shows of somewhat negligible quality).
Both episodes feature women in peculiarly powerful, secondary roles that remain mysteriously memorable and utterly modern in tone. In “Perchance…,” Suzanne Lloyd plays the mesmerizing “Maya, the Cat-Girl,” a raven-haired, leopard-skin-clad vixen who tempts Richard Conte’s latent libido—in his nightmare—by dancing an overtly sexual tarantella (especially for ‘59 TV) at the Tunnel of Love, beckoning Conte inside with “…her dark…cat’s…eyes!” In “Twenty-Two,” Arline Sax is the morgue nurse who recites her malevolent mantra, “Room for one more, honey,” with a Mona Lisa-like smile and devilish demeanor that is both strangely alluring and utterly repellent—a true Angel of Death.
Serling’s “The Hitch-Hiker” (based on a radio play by Lucille Fletcher, of the classic “Sorry, Wrong Number”) plays on the fear of picking one up, utilizing the shopworn character device of “Mr. Death,” but with a redeeming Twilight Zone fillip, as a “drab, little nothing of a man” plays off against ‘60s beauty Inger Stevens, in the first of her two nuanced Twilight Zone performances.
The Swedish-born Stevens had “…a sadness hidden in that pretty face” (Bruce Springsteen, “Candy’s Room”), her sorrowful eyes betraying her failed suicide in 1959, while foreshadowing her unfortunate, successful attempt in 1970, giving “The Hitch-Hiker”— in which we, and Stevens’ character, come to realize she has been dead all along (shades of Shyamalan!)—a melancholy subtext, much like Douglas Trumbull’s Brainstorm had in 1983, released not long after the sudden death of star Natalie Wood.
Serling featured a startling number of independent women like Stevens in dramatic starring roles on The Twilight Zone, unheard of at a time when most women pictured on American television were either tame housewives or screwball comediennes (or, in the case of Lucille Ball, both).
On a par with Steven’s “Hitch-Hiker” performance is Anne Francis’ in “The After Hours,” because her casting, as a woman who turns out to be a mannequin, is perfect—she actually looks like a human Barbie doll (which, like The Twilight Zone, debuted in 1959 and became an American pop icon overnight, acknowledged as an influence on the plethora of TZ mannequin/doll/dummy episodes by Barbie Bazaar magazine, in its June 2003 issue: “The reason that Twilight Zone still amazes us is the wonder that underlies episodes like ‘The After Hours,’ that recall childhood fantasies of dolls and toys coming to life when no one is watching.”) And childhood nightmares, too—witness the whispering of the store mannequins, en masse, “Marsha, come off it!” to a frantic Francis.
“The After Hours” is one of Serling’s most accessible Twilight Zones—for who has never been afraid of being locked in a department store at night? By tapping into such deep-seated American neuroses, Serling mirrored the anxieties and apprehensions of his audience, as this excerpt from the episode’s closing narration testifies: “Just how normal are we? Just who are the people we nod our hellos to as we pass on the street?”
SCIENCE & SUPERSTITION
Rod Serling’s attitude toward the Space Race of The Sixties was evident in The Twilight Zone’s science fiction episodes: space ships usually never reach their destinations, or crash land if they do. By failing to solve our moral and ethical problems here on earth, Serling implied in first-season episodes like “I Shot an Arrow Into the Air” and “People Are Alike All Over,” we’ll never get to where we want to go— anticipating the platform of all anti-space advocates since. The chain of compromises and human failings that led to the 1986 Challenger shuttle disaster proved the relevancy of Serling’s warnings.
Serling utilized the science fiction genre as a front for his more personal, serious themes (much as Roddenberry would later do in Star Trek) in episodes like “People…,” writing against prejudice and racism on earth/America thinly disguised as a plea for interplanetary understanding, when an astronaut, crash-landed on Mars, speaks, with his dying breath, Serling’s best poetic dialogue:
”People are alike all over/I’m sure that when God made human beings/He developed them from a fixed formula/As long as they’ve got minds and hearts/That means they have souls That makes them people And people are alike.”
His surviving astronaut partner does find out, to his chagrin, that people, whether on earth or other planets, were indeed alike, in their capacity for evil as well as good.
One of the greatest endings in modern movie history—the Statue of Liberty scene that concludes 1968’s Planet of The Apes—most are unaware of was the creation of Serling, (who co-wrote the screen adaptation), a big-screen revamp of his own Zone episode, “I Shot An Arrow In to the Air,” in which an astronaut, crash-landed on a desert planet, discovers—after murdering his two crewmen—that he’s been on earth the whole time, foreshadowed by his murdered crewman’s telephone pole-scrawl in the sand (suggested by an acquaintance of Serling’s at a cocktail party!).
1968’s other sci-fi masterpiece, Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, contained numerous Twilight Zone tropes, from the robot HAL’s autonomy (e.g., “The Lonely”) to the film’s spaceship-in-baroque penultimate scene, as surreal a juxtaposition between future and past as the second-season Twilight Zone episode, “The Invaders,” that preceded it by seven years.
Agnes Moorehead’s dialogueless, mimetic performance as a farmwoman terrorized by tiny, mysterious figures, is a tour de force; according to director Doug Heyes, she had actually studied with the legendary mime Marcel Marceau years earlier.
Writer Richard Matheson later remade the episode as “Amelia,” part of a 1975 made-for-TV movie, Trilogy of Terror, starring Karen Black (fresh from her star turn in the film sequel Airport ’75) being chased around her New York City apartment by a truly frightening, knife-wielding “Zuni fetish doll,” Matheson’s substitute for the mini-Michelin Man-like astronauts he was never happy with fourteen years earlier.
Serling’s first-season “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” details aliens’ deceptive manipulations of earthmen’s fear and greed to further their conquest, but, like most Twilight Zones, not in the way you expect them to. Following mysterious blackouts of electricity on their block, once-friendly neighbors unravel into an animalistic mob, and ast he sun falls, the episode becomes a kind of proto-Night of The Living Dead as they metaphorically eat each other alive—an equally-scabrous indictment of paranoid McCarthyism, the epitome of the “we have met the enemy and they are us” approach: “They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it’s themselves,” Serling concludes, and speaking for the invading aliens as well as the Twilight Zone viewing audience, “All we need to do is sit back and watch.”
In Part 4 of this series Schumer will continue to explore the themes of The Twilight Zone, picking up the discussion with consideration of “The Time Element,” and Obsolete Man.”
Arlen Schumer wrote and designed Visions From The Twilight Zone, the only coffee table art book about the series, and continues to present a multimedia show based on the book to universities and cultural institutions around the country, including The 2008 Rod Serling Conference at Ithaca University, and the 2009 New York Comic Convention, where he also presented his mini-marathon, “The Five Themes of The Twilight Zone.” He presented his new show, “The Twilight Zone Forever,” at The New York Times’ TimesCenter in New York on the exact 50th Anniversary of The Twilight Zone’s debut, October 2, 2009. On November 11 Schumer will make a presentation in connection with a screening the 50th anniversary of “The Eye of the Beholder” episode at the prestigious Tribeca Cinema. Tickets can be purchased here
The Twilight Zoneseason 1 & season 2 are available on Blu-ray DVD at the TheoFantastique Store.
Our fascination with the devil in popular culture as informed by the Christian tradition continues, or at least Hollywood’s assumption that this figure is of interest to us, with the release of The Rite in January 2011. The film is “inspired by” the book of the same title by Matt Baglio. See the film’s website for a brief description of the story and further production information. The Rite is scheduled to open in theaters January 28.
Be sure to return to TheoFantastique after the film’s premiere to listen to a podcast discussion of it and the related topics of Satan in religion and popular culture, and the phenomenon of possession among our participants including Douglas Cowan, author of Sacred Terror, W. Scott Poole, author of Satan in America, and Paul Meehan, author of Cinema of the Psychic Realm.
This Friday evening I will be accomplishing two things at the same time. I will be able to enjoy dinner and a movie with my wife, and prepare for my participation in a podcast with CineFantastique Online. I have been invited as a guest by CFQ to provide some thoughts on the movie HEREAFTER, which opens this Friday, October 22. Given that the subject matter deals with psychics, near-death experiences, and the question of life after death, I have been reviewing some of the information in my research files on the paranormal. In addition, I have read a few reviews of the film online. One in particular caught my attention, and I provide a few responsive thoughts below.
The piece is titled “‘A Life that’s All About Death’: A Review of Hereafter” by Gary Westfahl that appears in Locus Online, a publication devoted to science fiction and fantasy. Westfahl states at the outset that he is a fan of these genres, which makes sense writing for a publication like Locus Online. But he then goes on to take issue with Hereafter because it does not take the idea of life after death and tease it out for its possibilities. Westfahl rightly notes that science fiction and fantasy plays with the possibilities presented by alternative worlds and constructs of reality:
Among other things, science fiction and fantasy are all about world-building, using a fantastic idea to construct a fully-realized portrait of an alternative environment and the way of life it would engender. A science fiction or fantasy writer, pondering these accounts of the afterlife, would craft answers to various questions: precisely how are the consciousnesses of deceased people transferred to this new realm? What happens to them there? What are their new lives really like?
Since Hereafter does not do this, but is instead very reserved in its depiction of the afterlife and its application to the world of the living, Westfahl sees this as a shortcoming, and as a result he is less than pleased with Hereafter. But in my thinking this is an inappropriate imposition of genre and its expectations on this film. The film’s director, Clint Eastwood, has not made science fiction or fantasy films previously. His work is in the genre of drama, and therefore it is more natural to read Hereafter as an example of that genre that incorporates common ideas related to the psychic realm and the afterlife found in popular culture.
Westfahl’s attempts at reading Hereafter in light of science fiction and fantasy with its resulting disappointment is curious in that earlier in his review he writes that “my efforts to analyze Hereafter will necessarily be unable to contextualize the film as part of [Eastwood’s] vast and often admirable oeuvre…”. Although Westfahl states that he has not seen two of Eastwood’s more notable directorial efforts that exemplify his interest in drama, he was at least aware of the types of films that he has done, even though he was not able to interact with Hereafter within a broader cinematic context for the director. This general awareness of Eastwood’s tendency toward drama should have been sufficient to read Hereafter in its dramatic rather than fantastic context. I don’t know if Hereafter is a good film or not. I’ll form my opinions after I see it on its opening night. But Westfahl’s review serves as a reminder for film critics and general audience members not to impose genre expectations on a film, but to try to interpret it on its own merits within its genre conventions.
I will share further thoughts after I’ve had a chance to view the film at week’s end, and to reflect on it prior to my participation in the Cinefantastique Podcast Sunday afternoon. I’ll post a direct link to the discussion once it is uploaded at CFQ.
One week ago saw the first of a series of posts by Arlen Schumer exploring The Twilight Zone. (Part 1 can be read here.) Here in Part 2 Schumer continues his analysis, looking at the influence of the series on television past and present, and beginning an exploration of themes of the series:
Star Trek would have simply been a glimmer in Gene Roddenberry’s eye without Serling and The Twilight Zone tackling many of the same socio-political themes Trek would become known for; its first episode was entrusted to veteran Twilight Zone sci-fi scribe George Clayton Johnson, and Roddenberry himself delivered the eulogy at Serling’s funeral (after his premature death at the age of 50 in 1975):
“No one could know Serling, or view or read his work, without recognizing his deep affection for humanity, his sympathetically enthusiastic curiosity about us, and his determination to enlarge our horizons by giving us a better understanding of ourselves. He dreamed of much for us, and demanded much of himself, perhaps more than was possible for either in this time and place. But it is that quality of dreams and demands that makes the ones like Rod Serling rare…and always irreplaceable.”
The series’ impact is felt more obliquely in the edgier, darker works of directors like David Lynch, whose 1977 debut film, the “undergroundy,” black and white Eraserhead, his revealing of the seedy underbelly of suburbia in ‘86’s Blue Velvet, and his meditation on dreams and reality in his 2001 masterpiece Mulholland Drive, all reveal his own private Twilight Zone.
M. Night Shyamalan’s entire career (and Tim Burton’s, to a lesser degree) can be seen as an ongoing homage to The Twilight Zone; the smash hit that made him, 1999’s The Sixth Sense (also the name of a short-lived 1972 supernatural TV knockoff of The Twilight Zone), is a derivation (and conflation) of two classic first-season Zone episodes, “A Passage for Trumpet” and “The Hitch-Hiker.”
Chris Carter’s The X-Files? ‘Nuff said. JJ Abrams’ Lost? Serling had a brief (17 episode) post-Twilight Zone series in the Fall of ’69 called The New People, about a group of young people…survivors of an airplane crash…on a deserted island! Abrams’ new hit Fringe is as much Twilight Zone redux as X-Files, as he said so himself in Rollingstone, which presented its 2009 “Most Shocking Season Finale” award to Fringe, enthusing “Not since The Twilight Zone has a twist ending inspired so many goosebumps,” to which Abrams responded, “It felt exactly like the kind of thing Rod Serling would have done.”
The Twilight Zone is a legacy that continues to teach, entertain, and inspire; it is a measure of that legacy that Rod Serling was able to surmount the obstacles inherent in a commercial medium like television to touch more peoples’ imaginations with more ideas of lasting impact than any American (television?) writer of our time.
Serling and Company’s twenty-three-minute meditations on a wide spectrum of philosophic concerns, from the political to the metaphysical, core concepts and pop philosophies that are the zeitgeist of The Twilight Zone, have so penetrated the mass culture that now, over fifty years since its debut (October 2, 1959), “the twilight zone,” the concept, has become a psychological buzzword, unearthing automatic associations of the existential and the surreal in the commonplace. Its totality and cohesiveness make it Serling’s magnum opus, an oeuvre that communicated to entire generations.
“Rod had some sort of common touch,” remembered producer Buck Houghton, when interviewed in 1988, “whereby a sympathy for the common man and the problems that he dealt with and faced and won and lost was communicated to an awful lot of people.
“His pattern was not only communicable to the people who made his pictures, it was communicable to other writers,” chief among them the aforementioned Matheson, Beaumont and Johnson, along with renowned television writers of the time like E. Jack Neuman (Dr. Kildaire, later Police Story) and up-and-comers like Earl Hamner, Jr. (who went on to create The Waltons). They shared a flair for poetic dialogue that was most dominant in Serling’s writing—actor Dan Duryea commented that he couldn’t remember the last time he had recited poetry without feeling self-conscious about it. Ayn Rand, a writer of stylized dialogue herself, praised Serling at the time, remarking that he wrote “…some of the most beautiful dialogue that has ever issued forth from the mouths of TV characters.”
That dialogue spoke of a humanism, compassion, and respect for man’s potential (to be both good and evil), and can be compared to that of Frank Capra’s (the half-hour fantasy sequence in It’s a Wonderful Life, in which Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey witnesses his life had he not been born, isn’t so much a throwback to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol as it is a proto-Twilight Zone episode). Both men tried to raise the consciousness of their audiences through commercial mediums, and were chided by critics (“Capracorn”), then and now, for lapsing into sentimental moralizing and soapbox reform.
But if Serling was the Capra of TV, he was also the medium’s Orson Welles, for he exercised a Wellesian control over all creative facets of The Twilight Zone, making him the first dramatic television auteur; though crafted by many writers, directors and actors of different sensibilities, The Twilight Zone was ultimately united under one—Serling’s—vision. From the personal notes of producer Houghton, used as a guide for script purchases:
“The Twilight Zone is a world that allows for things to happen that do not happen in real life: fantasies operate, wishes are fulfilled, life’s loose ends are tied up, frustrations are resolved, discontents are played out, dreams come true, magic asked for is delivered. Unbridled imagination, working to the benefit—or destruction—of commonplace people…the writer is free to pose almost any ‘What if…?’ and proceed with it to some conclusion unfettered by the need to mirror real life; but he can never treat far-outness as an end in itself—the conclusion reached must ultimately appeal to our sense of truth, justice, or irony. It must have a crackling resonance in common human experience.”
Indeed, all the other Twilight Zone writers’ works fall under a set of recurring themes of Serling’s, “The Five Themes of The Twilight Zone,” a syllabus of the greatest episodes (selected from Seasons 1 & 2), and herein “submitted for your approval…”
A QUESTION OF IDENTITY
“The place is here…the time is now…and the journey into the shadows that we’re about to watch could be our journey…”
—Rod Serling’s opening narration to The Twilight Zone’s pilot episode, “Where is Everybody?,” October 2, 1959
The first words spoken by Rod Serling at the beginning of The Twilight Zone’s first episode not only introduced the concept to an unsuspecting 1959 television audience, but ushered them into what would become “The Sixties,” a question of identity for America itself. Lethem, again: “What Serling created, above all else, was a homegrown vernacular of alienation, identity slippage and paranoia, and he did it right when it most needed doing, when his audience was starved for a vocabulary to express their uneasiness—and he did it on weekly television.”
In “Where is Everybody?,” an amnesiac played by Earl Holliman wanders through a strangely deserted town and decries, “I’ve looked and I haven’t seen anybody around…maybe they’re all asleep or something, but literally, there hasn’t been a soul,” Serling himself observing the sleeping giant that was America in the Cold War conformity of the Eisenhower Fifties?
Holliman turns out to be an astronaut in training (torn from the day’s headlines, following the April ’59 naming of the Mercury Seven astronauts by NASA) who, following 484 hours in an isolation tank to prepare him for solo space travel to the moon (three years before JFK’s moon speech), cracked from loneliness and began to hallucinate what we, the audience, thought was the “reality” of the episode—the first Twilight Zone twist ending and still one of its metaphysically best, upending the tacit agreement between storyteller and audience that what you’re being shown is “real,” and endlessly imitated ever since (as in Leonardo Dicaprio’s two most recent films, Shutter Island and Inception).
A true pilot episode (and the greatest in the history of television) in that it included virtually all the existential and surreal motifs that would become associated with The Twilight Zone—isolation, fear, confusion with mannequins, hallucinogenic delusions that seem all too real—“Where is Everybody?” is finally a harrowing visualization of one man’s alienation from reality, indeed from one’s self, which would prove to be the defining, existential crisis facing man in the second half of the 20th Century, a time when the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge—the atomic bomb—first coexisted.
A few episodes after “Where is Everybody?” aired, Serling’s adaptation of a Richard Matheson story, “And When the Sky Was Opened,” also used the space race as a vehicle to explore the nature of identity—conflating the loss of it with the loss of one’s actual, corporeal self. Following a crash landing back on earth, we watch as, one by one, the three surviving astronauts literally disappear into thin air.
Originally, lead actor Rod Taylor’s disappearing scene “was written as a very painful experience, but I decided to make it a very euphoric experience,” recalled director Douglas Heyes in Marc Zicree’s Twilight Zone Companion. “Instead of playing it for terror or agony—everything had been fear up till then, fear of disappearing, fear of the unknown and so forth—I said to Rod Taylor, ‘Let’s play this as if this is the most marvelous thing that’s ever happened.’” Taylor’s ability to fulfill Heyes’ direction so convincingly is just one example of what became a standard on The Twilight Zone: performances so intense and driven that you can see the belief of the unbelievable on actors’ faces, from the sweat naturally beading on their brows to the absolutely crazed look in their eyes.
An actor who believes he is the man he plays discovers, in Matheson’s “A World of Difference,” “How thin a line separates that which we assume to be real with that manufactured inside of a mind?,” presaging the later-Sixties psychedelic reaction to life being like a movie, while raising age-old questions about destiny and pre-destiny, about man’s free will in a benevolent or malevolent universe. An ur-Twilight Zone episode, with actor Howard Duff giving one of those stark-ravingly believable performances.
The enigmatic Australian director Peter Weir, whose first breakthrough films, ‘75’s Picnic at Hanging Rock and ‘77’s The Last Wave, are like beautifully filmed, full-color, down under Twilight Zone episodes, directed 1998’s The Truman Show, about a man (Jim Carrey) who comes to find that his life, his reality, is a massive fabrication for television—a big screen blowup of Matheson’s television original.
Though convicted murderer Dennis Weaver (in one of the epitomes of these tense Twilight Zone performances) tries to share his recurring nightmare of electrocution to his fellow death-row inmates in the aptly-titled “Shadow Play” (the second of Beaumont’s two definitive Twilight Zone episodes about the nature of dreams; the first, Season 1’s “Perchance to Dream,” is in the following theme “Suburban Nightmares”), beseeching anyone who’ll listen that they, too, are all part of his dream, it is to no avail—he is condemned to walk the last mile every night.
Writer/Director Cameron Crowe was so beholden to “Shadow Play” that he had it playing on the Jumbotron in a totally deserted Times Square (save for a panicked Tom Cruise) during the opening scene of his 2001 film Vanilla Sky (itself a remake of a ’97 Spanish film, Open Your Eyes), which deals with similar themes acted out in the twilight zone between dream and reality, as Beaumont concluded: “We exist, of course, but how? In what way? As we believe, as flesh and blood human beings?”
In “A World of His Own,” Matheson’s lighter-hearted sister episode to his own “A World of Difference,” a writer brings his characters to flesh and blood life, exclaiming to his disbelieving wife, “Fictional characters come alive! They come alive so vividly that they make decisions of their own! A playwright may have worked out some kind of move for them, but they refuse to do it! They become so strong that sometimes they take over the whole story!” The last episode of the landmark first season, “A World…” was based on Serling himself, who similarly dictated his scripts into a tape recorder, and featured his first on-screen Twilight Zone appearance—but at the end of the episode (Serling’s now iconically-familiar on-screen introductions began with The Twilight Zone’s second season in the fall of ‘60).
Dummies, doppelgangers, duplicates—The Twilight Zone was rife with them. Serling’s “Mirror Image” is concerned with “…different planes of existence, about two parallel worlds that exist side by side; and each of us has a counterpart in this world, and sometimes…this counterpart comes into our world…” Taking place in a nondescript bus station, peopled by drab figures immobile in the stark Americana like an Edward Hopper painting brought to life, “Mirror Image” is the most Hitchkockian of Twilight Zones— the suspense as palpable as the rain that beats down throughout the episode.
Vera Miles, who would go on to co-star in Hitchcock’s Psycho, gives the female equivalent of the intense Twilight Zone performance, dominated by male leads in this essay, her eyes glazing over as she unravels before our eyes to co-star Martin Milner (who would gain ‘60s TV fame as one-half of the Adam 12 duo in 1968.
Inger Stevens’ dawning acceptance of her own true nature in Serling’s “The Lateness of the Hour,” the second of Stevens’ two superb Twilight Zone appearances (her first, “The Hitch-Hiker,” follows in “Suburban Nightmares”), was the first TZ episode of six to be videotaped in a cost-cutting measure during Season 2. Though uneven in quality, “The Lateness…,” due to Stevens’ compelling presence and performance, manages to rise above it.
“The Lonely,” by Serling, is Jack Warden, a convict serving his life sentence in solitary on a remote prison planet, who, in a gesture of compassion by the authorities, is given a female robotic companion, played by Jean Marsh (later of the British TV hit Upstairs, Downstairs). Though Warden loses himself in her lifelikeness, in the end, he is left alone, bitterly questioning his own—human—identity: “Reality’s what I need because what is there left that I can believe in? The desert and the wind? The silence? Or myself?”
In Part 3 of this series Schumer will continue to explore the themes of The Twilight Zone, picking up the discussion with consideration of “Suburban Nightmares.”
Arlen Schumer wrote and designed Visions From The Twilight Zone, the only coffee table art book about the series, and continues to present a multimedia show based on the book to universities and cultural institutions around the country, including The 2008 Rod Serling Conference at Ithaca University, and the 2009 New York Comic Convention, where he also presented his mini-marathon, “The Five Themes of The Twilight Zone.” He presented his new show, “The Twilight Zone Forever,” at The New York Times’ TimesCenter in New York on the exact 50th Anniversary of The Twilight Zone’s debut, October 2, 2009. On November 11 Schumer will make a presentation in connection with a screening the 50th anniversary of “The Eye of the Beholder” episode at the prestigious Tribeca Cinema. Tickets can be purchased here
The Twilight Zoneseason 1 & season 2 are available on Blu-ray DVD at the TheoFantastique Store.
Paranormal America provides the definitive portrait of Americans who believe in or have experienced such phenomena as ghosts, Bigfoot, UFOs, psychic phenomena, astrology, and the power of mediums. However, unlike many books on the paranormal, this volume does not focus on proving or disproving the paranormal, but rather on understanding the people who believe and how those beliefs shape their lives.
Drawing on the Baylor Religion Survey, a multi-year national random sample of American religious values, practices, and behaviors, as well as extensive fieldwork including joining hunts for Bigfoot and spending the night in a haunted house, authors Christopher Bader, F. Carson Mencken, and Joseph Baker shed light on what the various types of paranormal experiences, beliefs, and activities claimed by Americans are; whether holding an unconventional belief, such as believing in Bigfoot, means that one is unconventional in other attitudes and behaviors; who has such experiences and beliefs and how they differ from other Americans; and if we can expect major religions to emerge from the paranormal.
Brimming with engaging personal stories and provocative findings, Paranormal America is an entertaining yet authoritative look at a growing segment of American religious culture.
And a couple of endorsement statements/reviews:
“An essential text for our ongoing consideration of the esoteric realm… This work assembles in a very accessible and readable form all the sociological data currently available on the public’s acceptance of experiences of unusual psychic experiences, our growing toleration of some extraordinary claims about the existence of UFOs, mysterious animal species, and ghostly apparitions, and our quiet dabbling in things occult. This volume has created a foundation for all future inquires.”
“Paranormal America is an authoritative but extremely readable analysis of an important but often ignored subculture. This fine book explains how many people seek personally-relevant meaning in a chaotic and often alienating world. In these pages we learn much not only about believers in ESP, Bigfoot, and astrology, but also about the general ways in which all human minds make sense of our perplexing position in the universe.”
I was one of the individuals tapped to provide information for a piece on the vampire for The Salt Lake Tribune along with Joseph Laycock and James D’Arc. The article by Peggy Fletcher Stack is titlted “Christ’s evil twin? The vampire’s religious roots”. From the introductory material:
