Lost in the Twilight Zone: Lesser Known Episodes, Part Two

Host Rod Serling introduces "The Howling Man"

In Part One, I saluted Rod Serling’s classic series for still going strong nearly 60 years after its initial air date. I looked at two episodes from the first season, that, while not usually celebrated as among the best of the series, are still to my mind minor classics and exemplify the uncanny, macabre mood for which The Twilight Zone is so well known.

One of them, “Elegy,” I don’t remember ever seeing before I stumbled upon it last year while perusing Netflix’s episode menu. “Elegy’s” peculiar premise and characteristic twist ending was the work of Charles Beaumont, whose 22 Twilight Zone scripts greatly contributed to the series’ dark, eerie feel.

In Part Two, I’ve picked two more Beaumont-authored episodes from the second season. They’re not in the same fan favorite league as “Eye of the Beholder” or “The Invaders” from season two, but they are wild and bizarre and very repeat-watchable.

“The Howling Man” (1960)

This 5th episode of season 2 starts off like a conventional ghost story, with the pale, shaken protagonist, David Ellington (H.M. Wynant) speaking directly to the camera, relating what he admits is an unbelievable tale that happened to him years ago. He had been on a walking tour of central Europe shortly after WWI and had gotten caught in a fierce storm. In a neat segue, Ellington turns around to look out the window at a storm brewing outside.

In flashback, we see Ellington, soaked to the skin, stumbling toward a sprawling old hermitage. Banging on the door with his hands, he manages to summon a grim, bearded man with a long cloak and old-fashioned lantern who looks like a refugee from the set of The Ten Commandments. The man at first gruffly tells Ellington that they don’t admit visitors, but then takes pity on the distressed traveler and takes him to see the head man, Brother Jerome (John Carradine). As they walk through the corridors, Ellington is startled to hear an eerie howl, half animal and half human-sounding.

Jerome, with his long white hair and beard, shepherd’s staff and Biblical-era garments, looks like God himself. But Jerome has no mercy on the weary traveler -- when Ellington asks for shelter and food, Jerome insists that he leave immediately. Ellington, chilled and sick, turns to leave, stumbles a few paces, then falls to the floor in a faint.

The Howling Man is definitely going to trash
Jerome and his hermitage on Yelp.

After recovering from his blackout, Ellington follows the unearthly howls to a barred cell in the deep recesses of the hermitage. He’s startled to find a handsome prisoner in tattered rags who begs for Ellington’s help, claiming that Jerome and the brothers are all mad as hatters. He tells a harrowing tale of being captured by Jerome and held prisoner for simply kissing a girl in the local village square.

Ellington, not sure what to believe, confronts Jerome about the secret prisoner. At first denying he even exists, Jerome relents and tells the whole truth about the man they are holding. The story is even more fantastic than the prisoner’s. Ellington, his mind swirling, makes a fateful decision.

This Twilight Zone fairy tale has great fun with its gothic mix of lightning, thunder, weird howls, and dark, candle-lit sets. Veteran B movie actor John Carradine, with his deep, resonant voice and antique costume, is perfect as brother Jerome. He looks ready to lead the Israelites to the promised land. This was Carradine’s only appearance on the original show.

This too was H.M. Wynant’s (Ellington) only appearance on the series. His character is shaky, nervous and uncertain throughout. The camera emphasizes his chaotic state, at times in extreme close-up where we can see every drop of sweat on his forehead, and at other times in long shot, where his character seems to be swallowed up in the gloomy halls of the old hermitage. Incredibly, Wynant, who started his TV/film career in 1955 on the live Studio 57 show and has done just about every series you can think of, is still acting today, with a credit (on IMDb) for 2018!

English actor Robin Hughes, who looks like a poor man’s Errol Flynn, does a great job as the impassioned, persuasive prisoner. His job is all the harder, as he has to deliver his best lines from behind the bars of his cell. He also has a fun transformation scene towards the end that is reminiscent of Henry Hull’s in The Werewolf of London (1935). Hughes is the star of one of my favorite “forgotten” horror films of the ‘50s, The Thing That Couldn’t Die (1958) 

Underneath the High-Gothic hokiness, there is a modern psychoanalytic fable starring Ellington as humanity’s Ego, Brother Jerome as the Superego, and the prisoner as the Id. Whether in real life or in The Twilight Zone, you unleash him at your peril.

“Shadow Play” (1960)

SPOILER ALERT: This episode is difficult to discuss in much depth without revealing important plot points. Proceed with caution.

“Shadow Play” adds a vicious twist to the age-old idea that life is all a dream. In the messed up head of Adam Grant (Dennis Weaver), life is a recurring nightmare in which the world and the people around him are merely set pieces in the strange, dark drama he must go through again and again.

The episode opens with a close-up of Grant in profile, seemingly sitting by himself in the darkness. As the camera pans back, the rest of the set suddenly lights up to reveal a courtroom. The jury is just returning from their deliberations. Grant is on trial for murder, but as the jury foreman declares him guilty of first degree murder, he stares off into space, chin in hand, oblivious.

At the judge’s repeated commands to stand up for sentencing, he wearily rises. As the judge imposes the ultimate penalty of death by electrocution, he at firsts laughs, then explodes in rage: “Not again, I won’t die again!” Before the guards can rush him out of the courtroom, he yells to a press reporter: “Tell the District Attorney he’s prosecuting himself, everybody in this building, … everybody in the world!”

On death row, Grant acts as if he’s seen it all before. When an old con (William Edmondson) in an adjoining cell advises him to stop imagining what the execution is going to be like, Grant, as if in a trance, describes the final minutes in great detail, from the colors of the doors and the execution room, to the feel of the electric chair seat, to the musty smell of the hood as they pull it over his head.

In a neat bit of gallows humor, just as Grant gets to the pulling of the switch, the scene jump cuts to the District Attorney’s home, where his wife has opened up the oven to check on two steaming steaks.

Grant’s bizarre behavior has wormed its way into the heads of the reporter, Paul Carson (Wright King), and the DA, Henry Ritchie (Harry Townes). Paul shows up at Ritchie’s house on the night of the execution, liquored up and clearly weirded out. His interviews with Grant have him doubting his own reality. He convinces the reluctant Ritchie to make a last minute visit to death row to talk to Grant himself.

Upon arriving, Ritchie is surprised to find out that Grant is expecting him. Ritchie gets more and more uncomfortable as Grant seems to know what he’s going to say before he says it. Grant sticks to his mad story that he is dreaming his own execution “night after night after night.” As Ritchie leaves, a desperate Grant chillingly calls after him, “I’m telling the truth Mr. Ritchie! Please, let me live and I’ll keep you alive, I’ll dream you every night, just like this…”

When Ritchie gets home, he finds a small but unnerving change to his reality -- one that Grant had predicted -- that leaves him speechless and very spooked.

With Beaumont’s clever script, you get two tortured souls for the price of one -- Grant, caught in an endless loop of nightmares, and Ritchie, who slowly comes to the chilling realization that his own comfortable world can be wiped out in the blink of an eye.

"Last meal? Hmmm, I can't decide between the mystery
meatloaf or the Spam sandwich..."

Grant’s nightmare worlds are built from scraps of memory. Another nice touch is that, even in the depths of the nightmare, Grant is fully aware of how rickety and superficial it is: the DA is an old teacher from grammar school, the clergyman who visits him before the execution is a pastor who died years before.

And, having no real world experience with courtrooms or death houses, the particulars of his tortured dreams are filled with cliches from prison movies he’s seen. He muses, “I got tried and sentenced the same day -- it doesn’t work like that. It’s like a movie. Real death houses aren’t like that, but I’ve never been in a real death house…. That’s my impression of it.”

But, in spite of the banal absurdity of it all, the horror is no less real. Or perhaps, it’s all the more horrible because it’s so absurd. Dennis Weaver’s performance is a gem. He deftly rides his character’s emotional roller-coaster from all-out panic to quiet desperation and back again.

By this point Weaver had already established some TV fame with his role of Chester on Gunsmoke, and of course would go on to even greater glory as McCloud in the 70s. But credit The Twilight Zone for really putting his talents to good use.

Weaver is ably supported by the other cast members, especially William Edmondson as Jiggs, another prison movie cliche pulled straight out of Grant’s mind. Jiggs is the grizzled death row veteran who at first tries to take the new guy under his wing, but as Grant continues to insist that the prison, the cells and everyone around him are figments of his nightmares, Jiggs snorts in derision at the madman.

Yet another plus for “Shadow Play” is the capable direction of John Brahm. The German born director was no stranger to strange films and TV. Before diving headlong into TV in the mid ‘50s, Brahm had helmed two well regarded thrillers, The Lodger (1944) and Hangover Square (1945), both starring the quietly menacing Laird Cregar. Brahm had an very productive TV career, directing episodes for all the usual suspects -- Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Thriller, The Outer Limits, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and The Man From Uncle, among others -- as well as 12 episodes of The Twilight Zone.

To my mind “Shadow Play” is the best of the Brahm lot, for its clever, mind-bending script and great performance by Dennis Weaver.

Lost in the Twilight Zone: Lesser Known Episodes, Part One

The Twilight Zone has been a staple of TV New Year’s marathons for as long as I can remember. To kick off 2019, Decades TV hosted a TZ ultra marathon, spanning 5 days starting with New Year’s Eve.

Having been a fan since childhood, I’ve seen the popular episodes multiple times. Last year, after discovering that Netflix had most of the show’s run (excepting season 4, when the show went to hour-long episodes), I started revisiting episodes I hadn’t seen in ages. I scanned the capsule descriptions and then played the ones that didn’t ring a bell or were only dimly remembered. (Amazon Prime also includes seasons 1-3 and 5.)

I was pleasantly surprised to find one that I don’t ever remember seeing, or even reading about (more on that later). It wasn’t exactly on par with finding a celebrated lost film in the attic, but it was gratifying nonetheless.

The other thing that jumped out at me as I perused the seasons was how much of the show reflected the cold war/space age anxieties of the time. The late 1950s through the early ‘60s saw the rise of the mighty hydrogen bomb, ballistic missiles, Soviet space triumphs, and in reaction, hysteria in the media and duck and cover drills in schools.

For the creator of one of the most beloved TV shows of all time, Rod Serling was an odd duck. He was a chain-smoking intellectual and inheritor of Beat generation sensibilities. He created great fantasy, but it wasn’t escapist fantasy. It’s a testimony to the times that a show that was often so downbeat, anti-materialistic, anti-technology and ultimately pessimistic about humanity’s survival could make such a successful run on a major American TV network.

The bleakest of nightmares, nuclear annihilation, kept popping up time and again. Some of the show’s fondly remembered episodes like “Time Enough at Last” and “Two” dealt with post-apocalyptic themes. Others, like “Third from the Sun” and “The Shelter” featured anxious, sometimes paranoid protagonists caught in the run-up to nuclear armageddon. Whatever else it was, this was certainly not a show for children.

Perhaps not surprisingly, another theme emerged in multiple episodes: a reaction against modern life and technology and a longing for simpler times. Sometimes, protagonists traveled back in time, or to an alternate, gentler universe (“Walking Distance,” “A Stop at Willoughby,” “Static,” “The Bewitchin’ Pool”). Sometimes, they tried throwing monkey wrenches into the remorseless technology that was grinding them up (“A Thing About Machines,” “From Agnes with Love,” “The Brain Center at Whipple’s”). While some baby boomers might look back at the Eisenhower years of the 1950s as a golden age of calm and stability, for many living back then it was a fraught, fearful time, one to escape from rather than embrace.

But it’s largely not for the somber, socially-conscious “message” episodes that the Twilight Zone is remembered today. The most (in)famous, best loved episodes are mostly message-free, instead emphasizing dark, disturbing settings, eccentric characters and clever twist endings. Episodes like “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” “To Serve Man,” and “It’s a Good Life” are still entertaining and bingeable to this day, and will be for years to come.

Like me, you may have seen these celebrated episodes many times. In digging around the Netflix TZ collection, I found quite a few others that, while maybe not on most people’s “best of” lists, still entertain while exemplifying the show’s dark, weird imagination. For this and follow-up posts, I’ve picked a few lesser known episodes that are typically strange and “high concept,” and deserve a look from fans who may have gorged themselves on the highly popular “classic” episodes. If you’re in the mood for a binge, any or all of these might be a good start for wandering around in the murkier shadows of the Twilight Zone.

“And When the Sky Was Opened” (1959)

This first season episode, written by Rod Serling and based on a short story by Richard Matheson, is a very good example of the show’s uncanny mix of fantasy and science fiction, and of its vague anti-technology leanings. An experimental rocket plane has crash landed after having mysteriously disappeared from radar and communication links for a portion of its flight into space. Incredibly, two surviving crew members, Lt. Colonel Forbes (Rod Taylor) and Major Gart (Jim Hutton), can’t seem to agree on how many men there were on the flight.

Col. Forbes (Rod Taylor) has an existential crisis as a concerned
Major Gart (Jim Hutton) looks on from his hospital bed.

A very spooked Forbes insists that a Colonel Harrington (Charles Aidman) was with them as well, while Gart (bedridden with injuries from the crash), is just as adamant that it was only the two of them. While all the evidence supports Gart’s story, Forbes remembers celebrating the mission with Harrington at a local bar. But the celebration turned sour when Harrington began to act strangely, dropping his beer on the floor, and muttering cryptically that “I shouldn't be here, … none of us should be here! It's as if... we shouldn't have come back from that flight at all.”

The episode’s set-up is reminiscent of The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), with Klaatu’s warning to humanity to refrain from contaminating space with its aggression and nuclear weapons, or be destroyed. Other sci-fi movies of the era -- Roger Corman’s War of the Satellites (1958) among them -- took up the theme of aliens hostile to humanity’s tentative attempts to conquer space. “And When the Sky Was Opened” is far more mystical in its play on the theme. Forget nuclear weapons -- the mere attempt to travel beyond earth’s atmosphere seems to be a transgression that has awakened forces stranger and more powerful than could ever be imagined.

Rod Taylor is particularly good as Lt. Colonel Forbes, who, back on earth, travels from vague disquiet, to sanity-doubting anxiousness, to existential despair over the course of the half hour. The Australian actor had done a fair amount of television and smaller roles in a few big movies (Giant, Raintree County) leading up to the Twilight Zone role. He also played a time-traveling astronaut stranded on a far-future earth in 1956’s World Without End. In 1960 he time traveled again in his best known role (at least to sci-fi fans) as H.G. Wells in George Pal’s The Time Machine.

With its emphasis on men trapped by forces they cannot see or understand, “And When the Sky was Opened” is emblematic of the whole series, which used fantasy and judicious (and often minimal) special effects to examine its characters’ humanity. It still sends a little shiver down my spine, and is one of my favorite episodes of the series.

“Elegy” (1960)

This episode, penned by Charles Beaumont and starring Cecil Kellaway and Jeff Morrow, is one that I “discovered” last year, having no memory of ever having seen it as a kid or as an adult in the show’s many reruns. This too features a trio of astronauts caught up in a strange mystery that they struggle to understand.

After narrowly avoiding a meteor storm and getting lost in space, the crew of an interplanetary geological expedition manage to land on a large asteroid hundreds of millions of miles from earth. With no fuel left and no communication with earth, the three realize that this will be their permanent home. To their delight, the ship’s instruments indicate breathable air and gravity identical to earth’s.

When they disembark to explore, they’re startled to find an environment almost identical to earth, complete with vegetation, trees, streams, farmhouses and a town seemingly lifted out of early 20th century America and plopped down on the asteroid. Stranger still, the town is populated with people (and dogs) who seem to the touch to be alive, but are frozen in place like waxwork statues.

One eerie tableaux that they stop to gawk at is an old-fashioned town hall crammed with exuberant, yet frozen supporters bearing signs and banners celebrating their new mayor, who, also frozen, is waving to them from the top of a staircase. Thoroughly mystified, they trade theories about what could be going on, from traveling back in time/space, to aliens setting up earth-like conditions to make them feel more at home (a la The Martian Chronicles), to encountering a civilization for whom time has slowed down to a crawl compared to the earthmen. One by one, they dismiss the theories.

The trio of spooked astronauts (Don Dubbins, Jeff Morrow and Kevin Hagen)
are wondering what sucked all the life out of the party.

When they do finally meet a living, breathing inhabitant in the form of a gregarious old man (Kellaway), the explanation is mind-blowingly strange.

“Elegy” writer Charles Beaumont was an enormous contributor to and influence on the Twilight Zone, penning twenty-two episodes through the series’ six year run. (I will be looking at a couple more of his contributions in future posts.) His episodes were some of the more imaginative and less preachy of the series. Some were just plain macabre, and some darkly humorous. “Elegy” fits into the latter category, especially with the Kellaway character, whose folksy geniality masks a very surprising purpose (and a very menacing one as far as the astronauts are concerned).

There are some social messages in “Elegy,” but they complement rather than detract from the script’s weird atmosphere. One is the absurd lengths to which the fabulously wealthy will go to celebrate themselves. The other, more overarching one is voiced by the old man: “And while there are men, there can be no peace.”

Beaumont wrote quite a few television scripts in the ‘50s and ‘60s, including such series as One Step Beyond, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Thriller. He also wrote adaptations for some of the more interesting horror films of the early ‘60s, including several of Roger Corman’s Poe-inspired films (Premature Burial, 1962; The Haunted Palace, 1963; and The Masque of the Red Death, 1964), as well as for the very creepy and underrated Burn, Witch, Burn (1962). Tragically, Beaumont died of complications from early-onset Alzheimer’s at the age of 38.

“Elegy’s” other gift to fans of B sci-fi movies are the recognizable faces of Kellaway and Jeff Morrow as one of the astronauts. Kellaway will forever be remembered as the endearing Prof. Elson in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953). Jeff Morrow lent his staid, serious demeanor to such ‘50s sci-fi classics as This Island Earth (1955), The Creature Walks Among Us (1956), Kronos (1957), and the unintentionally hilarious The Giant Claw (1957).

So how did I manage to miss this episode for all those years? It's not as if it's one of the handful of TZ "lost" episodes that didn't make it into syndication packages for legal reasons. I can't shake the uncanny feeling that in true Twilight Zone fashion, "Elegy" just blinked into existence the moment I clicked on the Netflix episode menu. Whatever the explanation, I’m glad I discovered it after all this time.

Next in Part 2, more Charles Beaumont weirdness from season two.

Extra Special Holiday Message From Beyond the Time Barrier: Godzilla Edition

Godzilla and King Kong fight over a Black Friday deal at Dollhouses R Us

Godzilla has trouble putting up his Christmas lights

Rodan finds a great parking space on the last shopping day before Christmas

Santa regrets replacing Rudolph with Ghidorah when he realizes that the heads can't agree on which direction to go

Godzilla, expecting a new iPhone, discovers that Santa brought him a train set instead