The "Twilight Zone": Real Fear

It seems that the really scary horror flicks nowadays are ones that are grounded in some form of realism. The ones that kind of tell you, "Hey, this can happen." Some of them are a bit old, ones that we've heard before. Like the story about the creepy neighbor next door, or the one about a creepy guy in your basement.

Or about there being no laws for twelve hours. Wait...

But you get what I'm saying. Even just some of the stories that be real are scarier than ones about ghouls and the Boogeyman (if you watched The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy as a kid you know why the Boogeyman isn't scary at all). I own a copy of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and some of the scarier ones are the ones that can happen in the real world. There's a story about a man hiding in the back of a woman's car ready to kill her. There's another about a girl who wears an old prom dress and dies because she scares herself to death. There's yet another about, again, a man hiding in a family's attic waiting to come down and get the crowd. We all have the fear of that, it's just something we can't help. Or, we can, but, that takes a while and I'd rather watch Netflix.

So, if so many of the things are real, then how come most of these movies don't make it as far as the fictional scary movies, like The Exorcist or Insidious, or dare I say, Paranormal Activity? Well, that's because most of these movies are silly. Maybe not The Exorcist, but, Paranormal Activity has a silly premise. You'll get scared the first time through but you won't be scared again, because you know what's coming. The fault here is predicability. If you can predict horror, then it's not scary, it's stupid. Some people have perfected the art of horror, like Stephen King. Why?

Because real horror is as unpredictable as human nature is. And where we do we get our thoughts and actions from? Our mind. A true horror master knows how to mess with the audience's minds. Stanley Kubrick's The Shining movie is a horror film because it is a psychological horror film. Sure, some of the scarier moments are with the twins



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but some of the real scary moments come with Jack, when he's talking to Mr. Grady and Grady is telling him that he's always been the caretaker. It makes you wonder what the heck he is talking about. Or when Jack is set free from the freezer with nobody there to unlock the door. Was it Mr. Grady? Was it Jack? Was it the will of the hotel? Or, at the very end of the movie, where we see Jack at that party of skeletons Wendy saw. Was Jack really there? Has he really been the caretaker all this time?

That's horror. Not some stupid guy in a hockey mask chasing you around. Although, I will give Freddie Kruegar props, because he goes into your dreams and that is scary. If you can enter someone's dreams you can literally destroy them for reasons I won't get into because I am no psychoanalysis and I won't pretend to be one. Take it up with Freud, kids.

But there is one show that masters the art of true horror. There is one show that will forever be scary, forever haunt us. One show that blurs the line between real and unreal. And that show is the Twilight Zone.

For those of you who are uncultured and don't watch quality television, the Twilight Zone ran from 1959-1963 under Rod Serling, then was picked up again at the turn of the century. I speak of the original run, and specifically for the first three seasons, because after that the episodes got too long and tried too hard. Plus Rod Serling kind of left, so, it wasn't really as good as it was before. And man was it scary. Maybe it's scarier to me because it's in black and white, I don't know. Maybe it's scarier because of the music.

Or maybe it's scarier because the things that happen in it are real things, are things so real that you can't help but wonder if the Twilight Zone really is a fifth dimension.

Now, of course, there are several episodes in which it is obvious that the things in the story cannot happen. The episodes with the aliens ("Third from the Sun," "To Serve Man," etc.) or the episodes where they literally cross dimensions or time-travel (I can't think of any but it's the one with a portal in the wall behind the bed) are obviously fake, but are scary nonetheless. However, there are still several episodes that make it stand out as a real, literally, horror show.

Let's look at the very first episode, titled "Where is Everybody?" What do you mean where is everybody? Everybody is...

Gone. Our protagonist is alone for pretty much all but the last two minutes of the episode. And it is pretty scary. We don't know where everyone has gone to. Why is he the only one left? Eventually we come to find out that he was in astronaut training and survived nearly two weeks in the fake realm that the space program set up for him. That is insane.

Another episode is "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street." While it turns out in the end that there are aliens on Maple St., if you were to cut out the final bit of the episode it would stand alone as a true horror story. Everything is fine on Maple St., it is a common 1950s neighborhood where the kids play baseball in the street, the men where suits and smoke cigars, and the woman talk very quickly about their husbands and their son Billy (everyone was named Billy apparently). Suddenly, in a flash of light, all the power on the street goes out. Then all the crap hits the fan.

Left and right people are being proclaimed to be the one behind the blackout, even at one point one of the kids is behind it. I know that it doesn't sound scary, but, that's because nowadays we're all expected a spooky ghost to come and kill everyone. People don't have to die for things to be scary, and there doesn't have to be fake blood everywhere. To be truly scary is to be truly in your head. And that's what this episode does, it gets in your head. You don't know if there are really monsters as the cause, you don't know what the people of the neighborhood will do.

A similar, but in my opinion, better episode is "The Shelter." One fine afternoon some people in a neighborhood are gathered and having a nice get together when the President issues a possible nuclear strike headed for the United States. One of the families, our protagonists, have a shelter prepared for the possibility of such a strike, and in a race against time, pack their things.

However, there is a problem. None of the other families in the neighborhood have a shelter, and ask to use our protagonists'. But, the main family only has enough food and water and air for four people to survive two weeks (to let the radiation clear after the blast). There is no way they could fit the rest of the families, who have little children.

The rest is chaos. The three families who do not have a shelter quickly start to claw at each other for survival in horrific fashion, fighting over some little things that set them off because of fear. Every so often we are warned that the strike is getting closer and closer. Finally, the men band together and break down the door to the shelter. But, the strike is a false alarm, and thus, the crisis is averted.

However, the horror is not. Everything about the episode flows very smoothly, in rather terrifying fashion. It shows what man will do to survive. These once civilized people, once friends, begin to fight, begin to make racist and demeaning marks to each other, all in the name of their survival. The episode showed that fear can turn a human inside out to show that in humanity's darkest hour, mankind will cower in fear. That's pretty scary if you ask me.

But perhaps the scariest episode is that of "I Shot an Arrow Into the Air." A space program launches a rocket into space with hopes of...whatever...and suddenly, it vanishes. "I shot an arrow into the air, where it landed I know not where." That's where the title comes from, and essentially, where the episode comes from as well. We find that three men, apparently on a deserted planet of sand, have survived the crashing of their rocket, while two of their other crewmates are dead and a third is dying. One of them tends to the dying one with hopes that he will live. The second wants to let him die so they can conserve water. The third sides with the first, as the commander of the mission.

Well, the dying man...dies. Thus our three spacemen journey into the unknown, hoping to fight some form of either life, shelter, or water, since they are running very low on water. One of the men, the nice guy, goes out and scouts, while the second vanishes overnight. He returns alone. The commander, skeptical about his true intentions, brings him back to where he last saw the first man, who we are told is now dead. Turns out that he is not, and then, the second man kills him. The first man, still dying, draws something in the ground, trying to tell the other astronauts something.

Without giving the ending away just yet, I'll say that this alone is quite a scary tale. You've got two guys who just want to survive but have little chance and little hope that they will do so. Then you have a third wildcard, who is unarmed but dangerous. The situation is tense and as a viewer you are nervous. Who is going to make it out of this alive?

Well, giving away the ending now, in a twist of fate, the man who killed the other two climbs quite high and comes across telephone poles. That's right. They never left the Earth, that's why they were never tracked on the radar. Then, he turns around, and realizes what he has done. He has killed two men over nothing, the three of them could have easily survived together. That's a true horror story right there.

There are a couple more scary stories from the show that teeter on the edge of real vs. unreal, such as the one where a former SS soldier returns to Dachau and sees all of the Jewish men he killed that end up apparently killing him but then it turns out to all be a dream. It's scary, like I said, because there is no music in the episode and the Jewish men have like stone-cold expressions of revenge that you don't feel bad for the SS guy, obviously, but you are scared to see what is going to happen to him. Again, since those tortures really did happen, it is terrifying to see.

But that's what makes the Twilight Zone both real and scary. Because some of the things that happen here are situations we could easily place ourselves in. The characters from the show are pretty much so generic that that is what makes it scary--you can place yourself in any of the situations on the show and there's no denying that you would possibly react like many of the character portrayed do.

And despite the fact that it is old, these episodes are timeless. People, including myself, get freaked out by some of them even today, despite such old age and some dated references. It's the situations and turn of events that occur that make it a timeless classic, and arguably one of the best television series ever. There's no denying that you would probably rather watch the Twilight Zone over something dumb like Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Paranormal Activity because you know what's going to happen: everyone but the smart, suddenly attractive female is going to live and it's all going to turn out to be a hoax or they're just going to give us some weird ending that begs for a sequel.

Lame. Give me a happy couple coming across a fortune machine that predicts the future to the minute detail. That's horror. That's quality television, and good story telling.

And that's what makes the Twilight Zone real fear.

See you next time!

Link to image: http://larryfire.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/grady.jpg