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
#22 - Accusing Ghosts, from “Judgment Night,” season one, episode 10
Written
by Rod Serling, directed by John Brahm, starring Nehemiah Persoff
Rod Serling’s tale of spectral vengeance
is one of the most disorienting episodes of the series. Under John Brahm’s
excellent direction, the entire episode feels as ethereal as a dream, with
tilting camera angles panning over shadowy, fog-shrouded sets. The episode
rests on Nehemiah Persoff’s tortured performance as a confused passenger on a
ghostly ship and it is this performance, one of brooding tension and mounting
fear, which propels the story along its circular course. What the story lacks
in originality it more than makes up for in atmosphere during a first season in
which nearly every type of fantasy story was attempted in order to find the
right tone for the series. The most disquieting moment in the episode is
undoubtedly when Persoff’s character, Carl Lanser, confronts the
expressionless, unmoving figures crowding the hallway of the ship. The scene is
presented without music, heightening the dreamlike aspect of the play. Lanser screams
at the other passengers to prepare for an attack he does not yet realize he is
responsible for. By the time of realization it is already too late to either
prevent the attack or escape his place in this ever-enduring nightmare.
Trivia:
-Rod Serling wrote three collections of
short stories for Bantam Books based on his episodes from the first three
seasons of the series: Stories from the
Twilight Zone (1960), More Stories
from the Twilight Zone (1961), and New
Stories from the Twilight Zone (1962). Serling intended to continue
adapting his teleplays into prose for subsequent books but his increasingly
hectic schedule preventing him from doing so. He turned over the work to
veteran pulp fiction writer Walter B. Gibson (writer of many adventures of The Shadow under the house name Maxwell
Grant) who continued the series with Grosset & Dunlap for two books: Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone (1963)
(reprinted as: Chilling Stories from Rod
Serling’s The Twilight Zone, 1965, Tempo Books) and Rod Serling’s Twilight
Zone Revisited (1964). Gibson adapted “Judgment Night” into prose for Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone as well
as several other episodes across the two volumes he authored, including “Back
There,” “The Purple Testament,” “Beyond the Rim” (“A Hundred Yards Over the
Rim”), “The 16-Millimeter Shrine,” “The Man in the Bottle,” and “The Mirror
Image.” Gibson also wrote several new stories in the Twilight Zone mold from both his own and Serling’s original story
ideas.
Read our full coverage of “Judgment
Night” here.
Didn't he pretty much remake this as a Night Gallery episode?
ReplyDeletePretty much, "Lone Survivor," from the first season of Night Gallery. The doomed passenger in that one is a coward that escaped the sinking of the Titanic by dressing as a woman. Three years later he is found adrift in a lifeboat by another ship. He claims that he is fated to be repeatedly picked up by doomed ships. It is revealed that he has been picked up by the RMS Lusitania just before it is shelled by a German U-Boat. Despite the derivative nature of the plot, it is still a good episode. John Colicos gives a particularly manic performance as the lone survivor character but it doesn't quite match Nehemiah Persoff in this one and it doesn't have that superb John Brahm atmosphere.
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