The Twilight Zone Vortex 2016 Halloween Countdown #25: "Elegy"

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

#25 - New Additions to the Collection, from “Elegy,” season one, episode 20

Written by Charles Beaumont, directed by Douglas Heyes, starring Cecil Kellaway, Kevin Hagen, Don Dubbins, Jeff Morrow

Charles Beaumont’s “Elegy” is an appealing combination of the whimsical and the macabre, leading the viewer through a place of familiarity only to pull the rug out from beneath them at the end. Beaumont's original short story appeared in the February, 1953 issue of Imagination. The story was reprinted by Beaumont's close friend William F. Nolan in the SF anthology A Sea of Space (Bantam, 1970). Nolan expounds on the origins of the story and its relationship to Ray Bradbury: 

"Elegy, by the late Charles Beaumont, was completed when Chuck was still under the influence of Ray Bradbury. It appeared in 1952, but was written much earlier, one of Beaumont's first science fiction stories. 'Ray used to look over my stuff in the beginning,' Chuck once told me. 'He worked over a rough version of Elegy, so there may be a few Bradbury lines still buried in it.'" 

The Bradbury story which immediately comes to mind when reading or viewing "Elegy" is "Mars Is Heaven!" This tale, included in The Martian Chronicles (1950) as "The Third Expedition," first appeared in the Fall, 1948 issue of Planet Stories. It tells of a crew of Earthmen who land on Mars and find that Mars looks exactly like their hometowns. In a macabre twist, the Martians have telepathically probed the men's minds in order to find the most pleasing illusion to lure them to their deaths. 

Although Beaumont borrowed from Bradbury’s story, he adds the perfect amount of dark humor and foreboding atmosphere to the story to make it his own. The uneasiness of walking through a group of motionless, life-like figures is a motif that the series revisited time and again, in “The After Hours,” “Still Valley,” “The New Exhibit,” and “A Kind of Stopwatch.” Though several of the figures can be seen to move in “Elegy,” this somehow adds to the creepiness of the episode. Cecil Kellaway gives a memorable performance as the kind yet sinister automaton Jeremy Wickwire. One scene which is memorably unnerving is the beauty pageant scene, which was a last minute addition to the teleplay. The final scene in which the tableau of dead astronauts are maintained by Wickwire remains a macabre high point in the first season. “Elegy” marks the second appearance of director Douglas Heyes on the show (after “And When the Sky Was Opened”). Heyes was arguably the director most suited to The Twilight Zone and his work on the series is the finest among any director to helm an episode, including as it does the classic episodes “The After Hours,” “The Howling Man,” “Eye of the Beholder,” and “The Invaders.”

Read our full coverage of “Elegy” here.