The Twilight Zone excelled in telling tales of terror, exploring the darkest aspects of human existence in myriad ways. To celebrate the Halloween season, we’re counting down the 31 most frightening and unsettling moments from The Twilight Zone, one for each day of October. We’ll be revisiting some of the episodes we’ve already covered and looking ahead to episodes from the final three seasons of the series. -JP
#19 - Vanished, from “And When the Sky Was Opened,” season one,
episode 11
Written
by Rod Serling, based on “Disappearing Act” by Richard Matheson, directed by
Douglas Heyes, starring Rod Taylor, James Hutton, Charles Aidman
Rod Serling took Richard Matheson’s
haunting short story “Disappearing Act” and crafted from it an equally haunting
story of three astronauts who discover that their existence is slowly being
erased due to contact with some unknown force in outer space. Though Serling
kept very little of Matheson’s original story, so little in fact that it’s a
wonder Matheson received credit for the story at all, the episode remains a
highly engaging exercise in the type of science fiction horror story that soon
became the idiosyncratic trademark of the series. Serling likely made changes
to the story in order to bring it in line with the type of science fiction
program he’d sold to CBS and the series sponsors. Matheson’s story is a tale of
domestic terror in which the individual aspects of a man’s life slowly begin to
disappear until the man himself vanishes at the counter of a café, leaving
behind only a notebook filled with his terrifying narrative. The combination of
Matheson’s original imagination and Serling’s talent for dramatic narrative produces
an underrated masterwork of existential terror. The episode boasts a talented
cast, especially Rod Taylor, who gives a striking performance as the last
survivor of the party of astronauts. The direction, from Twilight Zone stalwart Douglas Heyes, is excellent as always and
the episode holds up surprising well. The episode finds tension in the form of
a ticking clock, as the audience, wise to the inevitability of the astronauts’
plight, are helpless but to watch the nightmare unfold to its conclusion.
Trivia:
-Matheson’s original story,
“Disappearing Act,” is one of his finest. It was originally published in the
March, 1953 issue of The Magazine of
Fantasy and Science Fiction.
-Charles Aidman, who plays Ed
Harrington, one of the doomed astronauts, also starred in the third season
episode “Little Girl Lost” and narrated the first two seasons of the Twilight Zone revival series which, in
total, aired from 1985-1989.
Read our full coverage of “And When the
Sky Was Opened” here.
A very good episode, one I always think of as "the one with Ellery Queen"!
ReplyDeleteEasily one of my favorites and one of the series' most terrifying episodes. How do you begin to process the idea that you will eventually be swallowed up by a great, invisible maw? Well, I suppose that goes for all of us, but this story speeds up the timeline some!
ReplyDelete