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
#8 - Voices in the Dark, from “The After Hours,” season one, episode 34
Written
by Rod Serling, directed by Douglas Heyes, starring Anne Francis, Elizabeth
Allen, John Conwell
Rod Serling’s “The After Hours” still retains
its power to frighten the viewer. This is chiefly due to the excellent use of
setting, as being locked inside an empty department store after closing hours
is something every viewer can clearly imagine. It is the feeling of
being lost, alone, afraid, disoriented, with the added horror of life-like
mannequins looming over every darkened aisle from high pedestals. And when
those mannequins begin to speak, to move, one can easily imagine their own
level of terror and helplessness. Though the episode is seen largely through
the eyes of an unreliable character, Serling is not content to present a
one-dimensional thriller or even the type of psychological horror story he
favored in which a young woman slowly loses her mind under the strain of a supernatural element. Instead, Serling gives us perhaps his most bizarre
fantasy of the series, in which department store mannequins assume living,
breathing form for a limited period of time in order to experience life as do
those they watch in the store every day. The episode is
director Douglas Heyes’s earliest masterpiece on the series and contains many
of the hallmarks of Rod Serling’s classic episodes: a young woman in
danger, an isolated, atmospheric set, a strong central performance, and a
technically challenging element, in this case the mannequin forms of the
principle actors created by chief MGM makeup artist William Tuttle and Tuttle’s
colleague Charles Schram. After a first season spent searching for a unifying
theme among the show’s output, “The After Hours” heralds the arrival of the
show’s principle identity: serious, character-based dark fantasy with a strong
psychological element.
Trivia:
-MGM makeup artist William Tuttle, with
the assistance of Charles Schram, sculpted life masks from the faces of
Anne Francis and Elizabeth Allen in order to create their mannequin
counterparts for the episode. These life masks are housed alongside a number of
Tuttle’s other creations for the film and television industries in the Hugh M.
Hefner Moving Image Archive at the University of Southern California.
Read our full coverage of “The After
Hours” here.
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