News

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

The "The Twilight Zone" episode "Gramma" is a strange one. Based on the short story by Stephen King and written by Harlan Ellison, "Gramma" tells the story of an 11-year-old boy named Georgie (Barret Oliver from "The NeverEnding Story" and "D.A.R.Y.L.") who has been tasked with looking after his infirm grandmother while his mother (Darlanne Fluegel) goes out for the afternoon. Georgie feels he is equal to the task, even though he is notoriously terrified of Gramma. Gramma does nothing more than lay in bed all day, occasionally calling out for a cup of tea. 

While alone with Gramma, Georgie begins to recall weird details about their family, recalling that she might have had some stillborn children. We hear Georgie's inner monologue throughout the episode as he nervously ponders everything he sees. After accidentally dropping Gramma's tea, Georgie finds a crack in the floor.

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

A Christmas episode of "The Twilight Zone"? As unlikely a combination as that sounds, it happened in the show's second season: "The Night of the Meek." Henry Corwin (Art Carney) is a mall Santa who loses his job after showing up drunk. Corwin's drinking isn't from apathy, though; quite the opposite. He cares too much and it breaks his heart to see so many living in poverty on Christmas.

Henry Corwin wants to see "the meek inherit the Earth," as the Bible once promised they would. Stumbling through the city (and still in costume), Corwin comes across a bottomless bag that can conjure any gift someone requests. So, he takes it on himself to be Santa for real. At the very end of the episode, once all the gift-giving is done, he stumbles onto a reindeer-pulled sleigh and an...

Untold stories written by the legendary Rod Serling may finally be revealed. While the beloved host of The Twilight Zone passed away in 1975, he'd come up with several stories that were never adapted into episodes of the show, and now it's looking like that will finally change.

Per Syfy Wire, Serling was the driving force behind the immense success of The Twilight Zone, personally writing 92 of the original 156 episodes. Famously, he also served as the narrator for the series, and his presence helped give the show a unique feel that has never been replicated. Following Serling's death, his life story was explored by author Marc Scott Zicree, who collaborated with the family to publish The Twilight Zone Companion. For his research on the book, which is now in its third edition, Zicree poured through Serling's personal belongings, uncovering a plethora of never-before-seen material.

Related 20 Most Disturbing Twilight Zone Episodes, Ranked...

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

"The Twilight Zone" episode "Little Girl Lost" follows two suburban parents, Chris (Robert Sampson) and Ruth Miller (Sarah Robertson), who hear their young daughter Tina crying out in fear. When they go to her room, she's not there. With the help of physicist friend Bill (Charles Aidman), they discover a portal to the fourth dimension has opened in Tina's room and she's fallen through it. "Little Girl Lost" is the original "Coraline": a story about a young girl who crawls through a tunnel to a parallel dimension.

The episode mostly consists of the three adults standing huddled around Tina's room, calling to the invisible girl. When the fourth dimension is finally seen, it's rendered as an ethereal, fog-filled realm — the budget and constraints of '60s TV special effects wouldn't have permitted anything else.

"Little Girl Lost" is scary...

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

We talk a lot around here about the best episodes of "The Twilight Zone," an influential and heartfelt show that perfected the moralizing genre story more than half a century ago. There's no shortage of great episodes of Rod Serling's fantastical anthology series, from still-timely political allegories like "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" to innovative twist-filled tales like "The After Hours" and "Eye of the Beholder" to episodes with great punchlines, like "Time Enough at Last" (which was Serling's personal favorite) and "To Serve Man." When it comes to the question of which "Twilight Zone" episode is the best one, there are a dozen or more correct answers, but there's another question worth asking that's equally loaded: what is the single worst episode of "The Twilight Zone"?

You probably have an answer to this question in mind already.

When you purchase through our links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

If you are a fan of the fantasy genre then you must be aware of the sub-genre, dark fantasy which uses a blend of horror, dark themes, and supernatural elements. Dark Fantasy has become one of the most popular genres in television after the release of shows like Game of Thrones, which at one point was one of the best shows ever made. That’s why we decided to compile a list of the best dark fantasy shows you can find on Netflix right now.

Interview with the Vampire Credit – AMC

Interview with the Vampire is a dark fantasy gothic horror drama series developed by Rolin Jones. Based on The Vampire Chronicles by author Anne Rice, the AMC series follows the life story of vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac as he tells it to veteran journalist Daniel Molloy,...

At the beginning of Nicholas Meyer's "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country," Captain Hikaru Sulu (George Takei) is in command of the USS Excelsior, a prototype spacecraft with a newfangled transwarp drive allowing it to travel faster than any ship yet built. The Excelsior was first glimpsed in "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock," and Sulu, still serving on board the USS Enterprise at the time, stared at new the ship in utter awe. He couldn't have guessed at that moment that he would one day be its captain. 

Sulu's captaincy gave the character a satisfying arc. When audiences first saw him in the original "Star Trek," he was a helmsman bearing the rank of lieutenant. In "Star Trek VI," made 25 years later, he was finally in command. If one accepts expanded universe lore culled from ancillary books and the like, Sulu would eventually become an Admiral and...

Director J.J. Abrams' philosophy toward making his 2009 reboot of "Star Trek" likely involved a lot of uses of the words "high octane" and "kicked into overdrive." The characters in Abrams' "Star Trek" resemble the ones we all remember from the 1966 TV series, but electrified for a modern, action-hungry audience. Kirk (Chris Pine) is not just a captain who rules by instinct and occasionally snogs alien women (as William Shatner did), but a rash, skirt-chasing, destructive young punk who gets into bar brawls. Spock (Zachary Quinto) is not merely a logical scientist who, under rare circumstances, lets his human emotions slip through his stony visage (as Leonard Nimoy was), but a perpetually annoyed pill who, more regularly, is given to flights of rage and/or romance.

In the case of Sulu (John Cho), he is not merely a capable pilot with unusual hobbies, a great sense of humor, and a...

"Static" is a rare happy Twilight Zone episode with a magical twist that transports a bitter bachelor back in time for a second chance. Originally a short story by OCee Ritch, the episode highlights Beaumont's disdain for TV and nostalgia for the golden age of radio. Despite the romantic ending, the episode serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of living in the past and the pitfalls of excessive nostalgia.

The Twilight Zone episode "Static" is a mysterious tale about an old radio that enchants a man more than anyone realizes. Often ranked among the very best TV shows of all time, The Twilight Zone introduced a whole generation to a new brand of science fiction story-telling, a kind that felt real and of this world. Even when the plots are fantastical and dreamlike, the themes of The Twilight Zone episodes are prescient, relatable, and modern, particularly for...

True lightning-in-a-bottle phenomena are immensely difficult to recapture. 60 years after "The Twilight Zone" completed its initial run in 1964, subsequent attempts to resuscitate the property -- either with an anthology film or reboot series -- have failed to match its cultural impact, even with vaunted directors Steven Spielberg, George Miller, Wes Craven, William Friedkin, Jonathan Frakes, Ana Lily Amirpour, Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead, and Osgood Perkins lending their talents behind the camera. It's a testament to everything the late Rod Serling accomplished with his surreal amalgamation of genre storytelling and social commentary that we tend to overlook his many other significant contributions as an artist (which include co-penning the 1968 "Planet of the Apes" movie).

When the original "Twilight Zone" ended, however, its legacy seemed far from assured. Serling had burnt himself out after writing so many episodes for the series, with the consensus being that the show's final two seasons were...

Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone" features several stories about haunted towns, extraterrestrial invasions, and every strange thing that occurs within the titular liminal space, where belief and superstition meet. (Remember when an entire town of actors was seemingly frozen in place?) In the show's 134th episode, "You Drive," a sentient car hounds a guilty man to mete out justice — in this instance, technology and human inventions are not symbols of doom, but demonstrate self-awareness and morals that some of their inventors or users lack. Although the writing in this episode comes off as muddled or shallow at times, "You Drive" remains memorable for pulling off an impressive feat: Creating the illusion of a self-driving car following a guilty man around.

Before we delve into the mechanics of the sequence, here's a recap the broad strokes of the story. Oliver Pope (Edward Andrews), an anxious, self-absorbed government official driving a 1956 Ford Fairlane Club Sedan,...

Like most areas of the entertainment industry outside of acting, casting and costuming, television writing was generally one big boys club until women began making (incremental) inroads during the 1990s. There were trailblazers like "I Love Lucy" scribe Madelyn Pugh, but that trail was walked far too infrequently for far too many years.

Anyone who possessed a conscience knew this was unacceptable, which is why it's disappointing that a politically progressive (particularly for his era) writer like Rod Serling never made a concerted effort to work at least one female writer into "The Twilight Zone" mix during the series' five seasons (which stretched from 1959 to 1964). To be fair, Serling did adapt the work of women for certain episodes; in fact, a tale that many consider the show's finest half-hour, "Time Enough at Last," was based on a short story by sci-fi/fantasy writer Lynn Venable. But he never managed to...

Two years after the original run of the 1960s series "The Twilight Zone" came to an end, creator Rod Serling found himself as essentially a writer for hire. In his book "The Twilight Zone Companion," author Marc Scott Zicree says Serling was "far from satisfied" at that point in his career, quoting Serling's friend, producer Dick Berg, as saying "Serling and Chayefsky were the two major names from the golden era of television. And to move from that to becoming a member of the army of working journeymen writers was a great comedown. In Hollywood, he was a guy taking assignments."

One of those assignments was a 1966 TV movie called "The Doomsday Flight." Serling wrote the screenplay, which involved a mentally disturbed mechanic who used to work for an airline planting a bomb on a commercial airliner and rigging it to explode if the plane falls below 4,000 feet. Things turned...

There are a lot of good things that have come about because of television syndication. It's helped shows find their footing and new audiences, and even helped other shows get created. After all, without the success of the original series of "Star Trek" in syndication, "Star Trek: The Next Generation" might have never happened. Essentially, syndication is when a television producer sells the rights to a show's reruns to other networks or channels, which is how "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air" magically seems to be on TV at almost every time of the day. Most of the time, shows selected for syndication are ones that don't require seeing several other episodes to understand, as they're often shown out of order (and sometimes seemingly at random). That means sitcoms work best, but game shows and anthology series also work pretty well.

Because of its self-contained anthology nature, "The Twilight Zone" seemed tailor-made for syndication.

For as much as Rod Serling's landmark anthology series "The Twilight Zone" reinvented the genre of science fiction storytelling, many of its best episodes also deal in the world of the fantastical, whether through witches, time-traveling radios, or just plain inexplicable phenomena. What kept "The Twilight Zone" consistent through it all is its focus on human nature and irony, the idea of following desire ultimately leading to one's downfall. You can see that in many of the classic episodes of the show, no matter what the genre is.

That focus on human drama is what keeps "Jess-Belle," a most unusual episode of "The Twilight Zone," in the running for the show's top tier. For one, "Jess-Belle" came out of the show's difficult fourth season, during which CBS had contracted hour-long episodes, twice as long as the episodes' usual length, per Marc Scott Zicree's indispensable "Twilight Zone Companion." While...

Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone" has likely inspired more nightmares than any other TV series in history. Several of the show's notorious twist endings often revealed horrors and grotesquerie typically not seen on the airwaves in the late '50s and early '60s, leaving younger viewers rattled and afraid. 

The above image, from the episode "The Masks" came at the end of an episode where a quartet of greedy gold-diggers were forced to wear personality-based masks by the rich patriarch they hoped would die. The patriarch does indeed die, but when the characters remove their masks, they find their faces have mutated underneath. That one kept this author up a few nights. 

Other scary faces popped up all across "The Twilight Zone." Many might immediately think of the episode "Eye of the Beholder", which was wholly a close-up of a young woman (Maxine Stewart) waiting to remove her bandages after extensive cosmetic surgery.

1956's "Forbidden Planet" follows a crew of astronauts traveling the galaxy in a flying saucer. While visiting planet Altair IV, they find a scientist and his daughter (Anne Francis) living alone on this deserted world — and realize they are hiding something.

Directed by Fred M. Wilcox and starring a young Leslie Nielsen, "Forbidden Planets looks like a kitschy B-movie today — and in a way it always was, but it was also a trailblazer. It was one of the first films to show humans in the distant future flying around in faster-than-light starships. Without "Forbidden Planet," there would be no "Star Wars" or "Star Trek."

While the Enterprise has an underbelly and nacelles beneath its saucer head, the "Forbidden Planet" ship (the C-57D) is a simple flying saucer — except this UFO is operated by humans, not aliens. The ship and the other effects got the "Forbidden Planet" special effects team an Oscar nomination.

"The Twilight Zone" enthusiasts might vaguely remember an episode titled "The Gift," a sci-fi tale about "a rootless little boy" named Pedro (Edmund Vargas), who stumbles upon an alien from a distant planet. "The Gift" is not one of the anthology series' better episodes, as it hamfists a twist ending while indulging in some problematic character stereotypes. However, there's a sense of beauty in a story about a lonely child who finds solace in the company of an extraterrestrial and is willing to treasure the gift given to him without learning its true purpose. The locale where the events unfold, a remote mountain village in Mexico, accentuates the loneliness that Pedro embraces and adds further meaning to the unlikely bond forged with the alien who crash lands in this space.

According to Marc Scott Zicree's "The Twilight Zone Companion," "The Gift" was not originally a standalone episode written as...

Look close enough at "The Twilight Zone" and it's clear that events surrounding the making of the show were often as unusual as its otherworldly subject matter. It's not that Rod Serling's science fiction classic was cursed: rather, production of the deeply humane series was often interrupted by deeply human moments. There was that time an episode was improved upon by an actor's injury that forced him to speak out of one side of his mouth, and the fact that veteran Serling named the series without realizing that its title was already an air force term used to describe an especially disorienting moment before landing.

Not every coincidence and unusual set story was serendipitous. In season 1, an actor passed away mid-shoot, and Serling paid out of pocket to reshoot his scenes so he wouldn't appear ill in his final performance. A horrific, preventable accident on the set of "Twilight Zone: The Movie...

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

In May 1962, the "Twilight Zone" episode "I Sing the Body Electric" aired, with generally positive reception. The season 3 episode, which centers around a father who buys a robot grandmother for his three children, is rarely ranked at the top of fans' list of best-ever episodes, but it's never ranked at the bottom either. "It's a pleasant story," writes Marc Scott Zicree in the official companion book for the show, "But somehow one feels that it was meant to be more."

For fans of the episode's writer, Ray Bradbury, it's a little disappointing that this was the only "Twilight Zone" episode ever to be directly penned by him. The guy is one of the most popular sci-fi writers of all time, with the show itself clearly taking note. Classic episodes like "Walking Distance" and "A Stop at Willoughby" included shoutouts to him,...

In the "Twilight Zone" episode "A Game of Pool", Jack Klugman plays a would-be pool champion named Jesse who feels that he would be more widely recognized for his billiard skills, were he not living in the shadow of the late pool champion James Howard "Fats" Brown. Jesse posits that if he had had the opportunity to play against Fats, he would definitely win. In a supernatural twist, Fats (Jonathan Winters) arrives from the afterlife to accept the challenge. The ensuing game, however, comes with a stipulation: if Jesse wins, he will indeed be granted the lifelong reputation as the greatest pool player of all time. If he loses, he'll die in obscurity. Jesse accepts.

Throughout their game, Fats points out that living well and happily is more important than the hard-edged fame of being a great pool player. Jesse doesn't listen. He wants fame.

Jesse, perhaps shockingly, wins the game.

The episode of "The Twilight Zone" called "Once Upon a Time" is one of the show's attempts at comedy and, by most viewers' gauges, didn't really work. "Once Upon a Time" starred the silent film superstar and immortal filmmaker Buster Keaton as a sad sack janitor named Woodrow Mulligan living in a small middle-American town called Harmony in 1890. Mulligan hates the fancy-pants modern inventions like bicycles and resents that livestock roam the street. The 1890 sequences were filmed in the style of a silent movie with no dialogue, plinking piano music, and intertitles. Mulligan works for a mad scientist who has invented a time-travel helmet that can bring its wearer into the year 1961, but only for 30 minutes. Mulligan, desperate to see his hometown grown up, gives it a shot.

In the year 1961, now filmed with sound, Mulligan meets Rollo (Stanley Adams) a scientist who feels nostalgia for a simpler time, a...

The "Twilight Zone" episode "The Midnight Sun" took place on an Earth that had fallen out of its orbit and was drifting very slowly closer and closer toward the sun. The episode was an exploration of humanity during its waning hours, as seen through the eyes of Norma (Lois Nettleton), a painter who tried desperately to hang on to water and stay cool as temperatures rose and rose. Norma's only recourse is to paint the fires she sees out the window and the burning, growing sun in the sky. Eventually, her neighbor breaks down and implores Norma to paint something cool and refreshing, like a waterfall. The episode ends with Norma being overwhelmed by the heat and her neighbor dying of heat stroke.

There is a twist, of course. Norma wakes up in bed, having dreamed the entire episode. It's revealed that the Earth is, in fact, drifting away from...

"The Arrival," the second episode of the third season of "The Twilight Zone," written by series creator Rod Serling himself, poses an unusual problem. The narrative starts with Flight 107, classified as a propeller-driven Douglas DC-3, landing with no crew or passengers, prompting the aviation department to appoint Grant Sheckly (Harold J. Stone) to investigate this curious case. Although Sheckley brings his A-game to the investigation and feels like he's close to the truth, the puzzle adamantly remains unsolved despite the involvement of many talented personnel.

All involved investigators reach a breakthrough when they realize that each one of them, including Sheckly, perceives the plane's seat colors and registration numbers differently. Concluding that the plane is not real, Sheckly tests this hypothesis by sticking his arm in the plane's propeller. When it fails to harm him, all of the staff promptly disappear along with the plane. Unsettled, Sheckly learns that the...

The former most popular episode of "The Twilight Zone" had a bumpy road to success. The season 3 outing "Nothing in the Dark" may have left a strong impression on viewers with its passionate take on mortality, but some of its casting choices left those involved worried it wouldn't work at first. Namely: a young Robert Redford, still in his earliest years on screen, apparently didn't make a strong positive impression with his performance.

"He was very new," episode director Lamont Johnson is quoted as saying in Marc Scott Zicree's book "The Twilight Zone Companion." Johnson, who also helmed such famous chapters as "The Shelter" and "Five Characters in Search of an Exit," didn't outright disparage Redford's performance as one of just three characters in the episode, but Zicree notes that he wasn't great in the chapter in which he interviews the filmmaker. While Johnson wasn't outright critical of the actor,...

In the history of Rod Serling's original run of "The Twilight Zone," the season 2 episode "The Silence" sticks out like a sore thumb. The episode in no way falls under the categories of science fiction or fantasy, instead opting to tell a disturbingly human story about an extreme bet between two men. Wealthy Archie (Franchot Tone) bets fellow men's club member — and known chatterbox — Jamie (Liam Sullivan) that he can't spend a year in silence.

The episode unfolds in an odd and surprising but never unbelievable fashion. Jamie accepts the bet, hoping to win $500,000 (about 5 million dollars today). In an attempt to surveil his colleague and prevent cheating, Archie erects a public glass room in which Jamie will be trapped for the year. Archie also spends much of his time taunting Jamie with lies about his wife, but Jamie doesn't fall for the low blow. At year's end, Archie...

This article discusses subject matter related to mental health and suicide. If you or a loved one is in crisis, please reach out to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-talk or the Crisis Text Line (Text Talk to 741741) to talk to someone who can help.

Now that a majority of us exclusively use phones that double as handheld computers, the horrors of having no idea who could potentially be on the other line have mostly been eliminated. Perhaps this is why films like "Mr. Harrigan's Phone" and "The Black Phone" have been so popular as of late, but these stories of phones connecting mortals to those beyond the grave are certainly nothing new. In fact, one of the earliest examples comes from a season 2 episode of "The Twilight Zone" about a five-year-old boy who is gifted a play phone by his grandmother (Lili Darvas), who soon passes...

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's most unique episode is "Far Beyond the Stars," a story set in a Sci-Fi magazine's offices in 1950. One of DS9's most celebrated episodes, it deals with institutional racism at a time when no one else was talking about it. Yet, the story of Benny Russell and his Black space captain is also the story of Star Trek itself.

For a 60-year-old storytelling universe, it's nearly impossible to point to a single story that is its most influential and important. However, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's Season 6 episode "Far Beyond the Stars" is arguably the entire saga's most important hour. Benny Russell, the character played by actor and episode director Avery Brooks, is a man capable of dreaming up a future his peers cannot comprehend. In a way, Deep Space Nine used "Far Beyond the Stars" to tell a story about Star Trek itself.

The term "auteur theory" was first coined by American critic Andrew Sarris, a phrase he extrapolated from the essays published in Cahiers du Cinéma in the early 1950s by the founding members of the French New Wave. Auteur theory posited that a director stands as the final authorial voice behind a feature film, and not the writer, the editor, or any of the other filmmakers. While many critics over the years have objected to auteur theory (Pauline Kael famously hated it), the language of referring to a film's director as its "one author" has become the default used by pundits and journalists to this day.

Throughout the 2010s, there was a visible push-and-pull when it came to auteur theory. While plenty of striking, important directors put out unique, idiosyncratic works, massive studio franchise pictures stayed at the commercial fore, and individual directors were subservient to all-powerful Higher Ups. For the...

Within the lore surrounding Rod Serling's original "The Twilight Zone," which ran from 1959-1964 on CBS, the six episodes videotaped (as opposed to shot on film) during the second season are generally regarded by both fans and creators to be some of the series' biggest failures. These episodes are rivaled in reputation only by the shortened season of hour-long episodes (as opposed to the series' usual half-hour length) during the show's 4th year.

In both cases, these changes were mandated by the network, and were not internal decisions made by Serling or his crew. However, while the 4th season hour-length episodes suffered more from script and pacing issues, the videotaped second season episodes are by and large solid "Twilight Zone" scripts; it's the technical side of things that suffered instead, as CBS tried to cut the show's production costs.

The fact that these episodes were still pretty great sci-fi...

It's probably the fault of closed-minded, conservative propaganda that the idea of subversiveness within art received a bad reputation. Just as all art is political, all art is (or at least can be) a little subversive. Certainly the dictionary definition of the term, where a work of art intends to undermine the power and/or authority of an established idea, system or value, is heavily akin to the way plot structure tends to be broken down within plays and screenplays: a period of Stasis being interrupted by an Intrusion or Inciting Action, and so on.

Given how weird a number of people are when it comes to the behavior and attitudes toward the Christmas holiday, it's no real surprise that any art having to do with Christmas tends toward subversion. This can manifest in tangential ways (like the slapstick violence of the "Home Alone" series) or direct ways (Santa Claus...

Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone" delves into everything from the delightful to the macabre, where every incident exclusively takes place in the mysterious, unpredictable Twilight Zone. While some episodes lean into the deep-rooted fears of human existence, others probe into speculative fantasies about extraterrestrial life, time travel, and dream states that feel all too real. However, one particular episode of the show stands out: episode 5, "Walking Distance," is a deeply poetic and personal exploration of childhood nostalgia and the importance of moving forward, where some details were drawn fondly from Serling's personal life.

In the episode, a media executive named Martin Sloan (Gig Young) ends up near his childhood home in Homewood after his car breaks down within walking distance from his town. Serling based some of the details for Homewood on his own experiences of growing up in Binghamton, New York, and even inserted self-referential details such as...

Most episodes of Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone" are of the tense, mysterious variety. Entries such as "Nightmare At 20,000 Feet" zoom in on the intrinsically human fear of flying, while stories such as "The Masks" linger on the psychological complexities of human nature. To take a break from the overarchingly grim nature of the episodes, Serling occasionally injected moments of levity here and there, including the comedic twist at the end of "Will The Real Martian Please Stand Up?" In 1961, the season 2 episode "Mr. Dingle, the Strong" delighted audiences with its playful, tongue-in-cheek tone, where it embraced comedic moments with sincerity while telling an unusual story about a man who is gifted with superhuman strength by a group of visiting aliens.

How, exactly, did the foundational idea for "Mr. Dingle, the Strong" come about? According to Marc Scott Zicree's "The Twilight Zone Companion," a newspaper reporter who...

When Rod Serling won an Emmy for "Outstanding Achievement in Drama" for "The Twilight Zone" in 1960, he was completely taken aback by this well-deserved win. Serling had previously earned several Emmy nominations for the show, having also won two Emmys for "Patterns" and "The Comedian" under the "Best Teleplay Writing" category. However, the writer-producer had good reason to believe that he would not be winning this particular award — he was up against the likes of James Costigan, and his adaptation of "The Turn of the Screw," alongside Loring Mandel, whose "Project Immortality" also emerged as a worthy contender. Costigan's adaptation was especially deemed deserving, as its screenplay was entirely built on visceral suspense, with a brilliant Ingrid Bergman belting out a chilling, memorable performance.

Per Marc Scott Zicree's "The Twilight Zone Companion," Serling was completely unprepared for the win, to the point that he didn't even bother shaving before the broadcast.

An airplane, Flight 33, is en route from London to New York City on what seems to be an uneventful trip. Captain Farver (John Anderson) notices that the aircraft is increasingly gaining ground speed, but it poses no real danger to the plane or the crew. After a brief flash of light and turbulence, Farver descends lower to scope out the scenery beneath. He's met with a most shocking sight: droves of dinosaurs roam the terrain, cementing the fact that Flight 33 has somehow traveled through time to the prehistoric era. This is the crux of the 54th episode of "The Twilight Zone," "The Odyssey of Flight 33."

How did the idea for such an intriguing episode concept come about? Series creator Rod Serling was struck with the inspiration for "The Odyssey of Flight 33" while his brother, aviation writer Robert Serling, had come to visit him. In The Twilight Zone Companion by Marc Scott Zicree,...

Along with being one of the finest shows in the history of television, the original run of Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone" could function as a laboratory for advancements in visual effects. The often fantastical nature of the series, and Serling's desire to push the envelope of the still-developing medium's potential, was something of a creative sandbox for directors. As such, the show attracted not just aspiring young filmmakers like Richard Donner, Jack Smight, and Richard C. Sarafian, but established masters on the level of Jacques Tourneur, Don Siegel, and Norman Z. McLeod.

Douglas Heyes was more of a journeyman director when entered "The Twilight Zone." His experience and skill were highly valuable to Serling, who assigned him a total of nine episodes – the second most over the show's five seasons next to John Brahm's 12. Heyes' most celebrated episode is probably "Eye of the Beholder," the creepy tale...

The key to the success of Rod Serling's original run of "The Twilight Zone" (and its enduring popularity) was ingenuity in all aspects of production. Obviously, the writing was almost always top-notch, with episodes boasting wildly clever premises from genre masters like Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, and George Clayton Johnson. Though the budgets were modest, directors employed all manner of trickery and inventive makeup effects to dazzle and/or terrify viewers. Meanwhile, the strange tales conjured by Serling's stable of scribes required fully committed performances from actors both established and new to the scene. They had to roll with the weirdness.

On certain occasions, however, Serling and his collaborators couldn't resort to special effects to transport their audience. Sometimes, they had to shell out some dough and wow 'em with the real thing. And sometimes this forced the director to scramble a good deal more than usual. Such was...

Remember "Gilligan's Island?" Yes, the widely-loved American sitcom that earned massive popularity throughout its 98-episode run from 1978 to 1982, and featured an ensemble cast including Bob Denver, Natalie Schafer, Alan Hale Jr., and Russell Johnson. The show took the castaway trope and remolded it as a comedy in which seven castaways attempt to survive on an island after they're shipwrecked, which is further complicated by the shenanigans of the ship's first mate, Gilligan (Denver).

Among this cast of colorful characters is the Professor (Johnson) — the only level-headed person among the castaways, who uses his scientific background to create little devices to make their stay on the island more hospitable. While Johnson perfectly conveyed the subtle comedy inherent in his role (a running gag being his ability to create almost anything using bamboo and coconuts), the actor also embodied serious, dramatic roles in "The Twilight Zone," where he appeared in two separate...

When "The Twilight Zone" first began broadcasting in October 1959, there was a lot of skepticism in the air. Rod Serling's now-celebrated sci-fi anthology series was by no means a guaranteed success (few things are), and Serling was careful to talk about his show at every available opportunity. In Marc Scott Zicree's book "The Twilight Zone Companion," Serling confessed, "I make no bones about taking every opportunity to blatantly plug my show." The series featured excellent writing, memorably twisted stories, and a stable of upcoming talent that is still remarked on to this day, but none of that meant that Serling wasn't constantly hustling. Evidently, he conducted interviews with every publication that would have him.

At the time, the main criticism of "The Twilight Zone" was that it was too cerebral. Every episode was a "thinker," and, as always, television executives didn't expect their audiences to think. It was...

Emma Tammi's new horror film "Five Nights at Freddy's," based on a popular series of video games, posits that the animatronic animal band from a local chain of pizza palaces is secretly coming to life at night and stalking the palace's night watchman. A puffy, friendly, anthropomorphic bear becomes a bloodthirsty murderer, haunted by the ghosts of children who have secretly died on the pizza restaurant's premises. The animatronic band at Showbiz Pizza, later Chuck E. Cheese's, was considered greatly unnerving to many children, and it doesn't take a very large cognitive leap to imagine the band members stepping off the stage of their own demonic volition, eager to eat the children in their company. 

A fear of fake people, of animatronics, and of mannequins, however, goes back many years prior to the inception of "Five Nights at Freddy's," or even the Rock-afire Explosion (the name of the Showbiz Pizza band). Indeed,...

When you think about "The Twilight Zone," chances are you think about the legendary show's famous twist endings, and the way it wrapped socially relevant stories in a science fiction package in order to smuggle those stories onto network television. But more than any of that, the first thing that likely comes into your mind is Rod Serling, the creator and inimitable voice of the series. Serling wrote nearly 100 episodes of the beloved show, but he also served as its host and narrator, setting the stage for the odd or unexpected situations that would take audiences on a psychological rollercoaster ride over the course of 30 minutes.

But while Serling's calm, collected, sometimes sardonic on-screen appearances have left an indelible mark in viewers' memories, they were "absolute hell" for the man himself to actually film. In Marc Scott Zicree's book "The Twilight Zone Companion," Zicree writes that when Serling's hosting...

The tenth episode of "The Twilight Zone" was an episode called "Judgment Night," written by show creator Rod Serling and directed by John Brahm. "Judgment Night" takes place on board a British cargo liner crossing the Atlantic in the year 1942. The main character is an amnesiac named Carl (Nehemiah Persoff) who has no recollection as to how he got on the boat or what his name is. Everyone on board the cargo ship is deathly afraid of Nazi U-boats that may potentially be lurking in the water, and Carl is infected with the premonition that something utterly horrifying is going to happen at 1:15. Curiouser: a cap found in Carl's quarters indicates that he is a member of the Nazi navy. What is going on? 

Then a Nazi U-boat does appear in the water next to the cargo ship and blows it up at 1:15, killing everyone on board, including Carl.

"The Twilight Zone" has been revived three times on three different networks, it's been adapted into a feature film, a TV movie, a long-running radio drama, a series of comics, novels, amusement park rides, and even more. But I bet when you see that title you think of the black-and-white series hosted by Rod Serling, don't you?

Really, how could you not? It's no knock on any of the variations that followed; the original run of episodes that spanned from 1959 to 1963 is just that excellent. Sure, there are a few duds, but "The Twilight Zone" was simply paradigm-shifting, zeitgeist-seizing, landmark television, in its time and now. Of course we wouldn't have "American Horror Story", but filmmakers from David Cronenberg to Martin Scorsese to Karyn Kusama have all professed to be inspired by the series, some even to kickstart their careers. That kind of influence is hard to even tabulate.

For...

Most fans of "The Twilight Zone" know that there's typically nothing funny about the show's attempts to do comedy. As a storyteller, Rod Serling was part poet, part prophet, part pioneer, and though he had the ability to create a seemingly endless supply of profound moral tales and prescient horror stories, he wasn't exactly a humorist. Many of the seminal sci-fi series' comedic episodes go down like a lead balloon, and the season 1 outing "The Mighty Casey" is no exception.

The episode follows a failing underdog baseball team called the Hoboken Zephyrs, which gets a surprising new advantage in the form of a pitcher named Casey (Robert Sorrells), who happens to be a robot. With Casey on the mound, the Zephyrs are undefeatable, but in typical "Twilight Zone" fashion, anything that sounds too good to be true is. The wheel of fortune turns when Casey is given a heart that makes him start to feel.

As an anthology television series, with new stories and new characters every single week, "The Twilight Zone" never had someone you could call a "main character." Audiences tuned in every week to see Jessica Fletcher catch killers on "Murder, She Wrote," and for Larry David to be a massive a-hole on "Curb Your Enthusiasm," but there was no single star in "The Twilight Zone."

There was, however, one person who appeared throughout the whole series, in pretty much every episode, if only briefly. His name was Rod Serling. He was already one of the most celebrated TV writers in the world when he created "The Twilight Zone," thanks to hard-hitting dramas like "Patterns" and "The Comedian," and his name was probably not unknown to many fans of televised programs when the series premiered. Over the course of "The Twilight Zone," he would introduce new episodes, tease upcoming stories, and generally...

One might see Rod Serling's 1959 sci-fi anthology series "The Twilight Zone" as an ambitious amalgam of all modern genre writers. Prior to production, Serling famously solicited scripts from some of the best-known sci-fi writers of his time, including the likes of Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, George Clayton Johnson, Malcolm Jameson, and several others. Serling typically wrote the scripts for "The Twilight Zone" himself ... which led to some occasional accidental plagiarism. "The Twilight Zone," then, was somewhat of a culmination of an entire generation's sci-fi literature.

Now handily condensed, many of the more striking speculative tales of the day could be easily consumed by a mass public. Serling's show was a huge hit and lasted five seasons before going off the air in 1964. Sering later wrote "Planet of the Apes" in 1968.

Thanks to syndication deals and Thanksgiving marathons, "The Twilight Zone" lingered in the pop consciousness for decades, eventually spawning...

There are a whole lot of things that Robert Redford is famous for: acting, directing, co-founding the Sundance Film Festival, being incredibly handsome, even running Hydra from within the United States government ... the list goes on and on and on. He became a silver screen icon in classic films like "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "The Way We Were," "The Sting," "Three Days of the Condor," "The Natural," "Sneakers," and "Captain America: The Winter Soldier." He even won an Academy Award for directing the acclaimed 1980 drama "Ordinary People."

But in spite of all that there's one thing that Robert Redford is not famous for, and that's his tireless work in the horror genre. That's because, despite an acting career that spanned 60 years, he never really made any horror films. You'd have to go way back to 1962 to find Redford's last real brush with the supernatural, but it's well worth the journey.

Every episode of the classic sci-fi/horror anthology "The Twilight Zone" begins with the introduction of some seemingly normal people, usually in the midst of a seemingly normal day. What they don't realize, of course, is that this will be the day they encounter the strange, the fantastic, and sometimes the horrifying. And just as they begin their journey, the camera pans over to a man in a respectable suit. He looks directly at the audience and explains who these people are, exactly what troubles them (or is about to), and reveals that they are about to enter — you guessed it — "The Twilight Zone."

Exactly what "The Twilight Zone" is, is never made clear. Episodes of the classic series often take place in the real world as we know it, but also sometimes in the distant future, or the distant past, or on other planets, or in the afterlife. They don't clearly connect together,...

My favorite episode of "The Twilight Zone" is "The Howling Man." Self-adapted from a short story by Charles Beaumont, the episode's star is David Ellington (H.M. Wynant), an American hiker in post-war Europe. Caught in a storm, he stumbles upon a monastery and meets the secretive Order of Truth, led by Brother Jerome (John Carradine). The Order has the titular man (Robin Hughes) imprisoned in a cell, claiming him to be Satan in human form. After some persuasion from both parties, Ellington ultimately frees the prisoner and all of mankind pays for his mistake.

I discovered the episode when I was a Catholic schoolboy and a burgeoning horror fan, so the premise stirred primal fear within my soul. Even now, with my faith lapsed, "The Howling Man" is still an excellent half-hour of TV, with some of the best atmosphere and mystery in "The Twilight Zone."

Many "Twilight Zone" episodes...

William Shatner wasn't always Captain James T. Kirk. Before his breakout part, he starred in two episodes of "The Twilight Zone." The first, and more famous, was "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet." Shatner plays Bob Wilson, an airplane passenger with a fear of flying. Wilson has recently recovered from a mental breakdown and his sanity is seemingly in doubt again when he sees a gremlin messing with the plane's engines. Is the Gremlin just his illness and fear acting up? After failing to convince everyone else aboard of the monster's existence, he takes matters into his own hands.

Shatner wasn't the only future star on board this flight. The episode was directed by the late Richard Donner, future director of "The Omen," "Lethal Weapon," and "Superman." The irony is twofold. In a few short years, Shatner would star as the captain of a ship that flies a lot higher than 20,000 feet.