Another Level

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Jack Finney is probably best remembered as the person who came up with the idea for The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  His book, The Body Snatchers, was the inspiration behind the two movies based on it, as well as various knockoffs.  The Third Level is a collection of short stories he wrote.  I’ve been trying to introduce more short stories into my literary diet, and this one was recommended by Stephen King in Danse Macabre.  Specifically, he mentioned it as being more like what The Twilight Zone should’ve been than much of what Rod Serling wrote.  Now, I’m an unapologetic Rod Serling fan.  This is based on memories from childhood when I watched the show and, let’s be honest here, wished he could be my father.  I already had a taste for the unusual and sometimes macabre, and so I was curious what King thought might do Serling better.

The Third Level was labeled as science fiction, but sci-fi and horror share more than a boundary or two and at least four of the stories have nothing sciency about them.  As a collection it’s good in the same sense as a mature reading of Ray Bradbury is good.  I would’ve liked this—probably loved it—as a kid.  I was reading, however, for The Twilight Zone.  There are some good twist endings here, but not all the stories have them.  A couple of them are pretty straightforward whimsical romances.  Many of them feel very much like they were written in the forties and fifties.  A couple of the stories, late in the collection, I really liked.  They were a bit more Zonish than some of the others.

One of the problems in writing a brief post on a collection—and no collection is uniformly great—is that it’s difficult to give a sense of the whole.  So instead I’ll just focus for a minute on the last story, “Contents of the Dead Man’s Pockets.”  This one shows the power of Finney’s descriptive writing and it caused physical reactions I seldom get when reading.  It involves a man climbing out on an eleventh-story ledge to reclaim an important bit of paper that blew out the window.  More than once I almost had to put the book down.  Fear of falling is deeply embedded in the human psyche and Finney is able to probe it for more pages than I was comfortable reading.  Well done, sir.  Overall, the collection is good to have read.  It won’t change my mind about the Zone, however.  It reached me a little too late to do that.

Like Twilight

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The weird thing about watching The Similars is that I’d convinced myself that the movie was from the late sixties.  It’s set in 1968, and the use of desaturated colors gave it an antique feel.  The movie is actually from 2015, a fact that jarred me when it was over.  As I watched it my first thought was, “this is like The Twilight Zone.”  It is, very much so.  It begins with a voiceover and it follows a group of eight people in a bus station during a preternatural hurricane.  By the way, there will be spoilers here.  It’s pretty difficult to discuss the movie without them.  Please be warned.  Also, the film is in Spanish, so you may need subtitles.

Ulises, a youngish man, is trying to get to Mexico City where his pregnant wife is giving birth in the hospital.  A native woman, a shaman, avoids Ulises, while Martin, the ticket seller, doesn’t trust him.  The bus isn’t coming because of the hurricane which, the radio announces, covers the entire world.  Another pregnant woman, Irene, is fleeing her abusive boyfriend, but odd things have begun to happen.  A bathroom attendant and the shaman have seizures.  A mother and her ill son arrive.  Martin insists Ulises is a witch, and Martin has covered his face with bandages.  What soon becomes clear is that everyone is taking on Ulises’ face.  They assume he’s either a government agent and they are being experimented upon, or he’s somehow a supernatural being.  Then the Twilight Zone twist comes: it’s the ill boy who’s the one with special powers.  He is following the plot of a horror comic book he read, where everyone is transformed to look alike and they lose their identities.  That part was borrowed directly from the Zone.  The shaman reveals that aliens gave the boy his powers and this is an extraterrestrial plot.

There’s a lot going on in this movie.  Isaac Ezban, the director, apparently wanted it to be a character-driven drama, like Twilight Zone.  Indeed, the film nods to more than one episode of Rod Serling’s series.  Although it’s derivative, it’s artfully done.  The retro feel to it adds to the effect.  And when Irene’s baby is born it’s pretty clear that we’re firmly in the world of horror.  There’s a certain amount of humor here, but the parts are played straight.  The idea of a child with unlimited power is terrifying, as even ancient stories of Jesus as a boy show.  It does seem to be, however, an alien plot while the camera stays firmly focused down here.

Burial Zone

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I don’t always believe the statistics.  Numerically, the number of horror films—depending on how the term is defined—declined into men (and sometimes women) in rubbery suits in the 1950s.  Indeed, it’s often opined that had not Hammer joined the horror business in the mid fifties that the genre born only twenty-something years earlier might’ve died out.  There seem to have been some good horror films made then, though, even if overlooked because of their B status.  A friend recently directed me to I Bury the Living, after reading my post about Carnival of Souls.  I have to confess to having never heard of I Bury the Living.  (Stephen King mentions it in Danse Macabre.)  Produced as a B movie it was itself buried among the various other efforts of the late fifties.  It’s not a bad movie, however.  In fact, it’s better than the title might lead you to believe.

The plot is something of a period piece—a well-respected department store supports a cemetery committee for Immortal Hills, the town’s graveyard.  Robert’s turn as chairman of the committee arises and he tries unsuccessfully to get out of the duty.  The caretaker, Andy, doesn’t want to retire, but he’s aging out.  The movie, however, revolves around the map.  The sold plots are marked with white pins while the plots already occupied have black.  When Robert accidentally puts black pins into newly purchased plots and the couple dies, he believes he’s cursed with an ability to kill those he black pins.  He substitutes a black pin for a white one at random.  The person dies.  In all, seven people succumb.  Convinced he’s murdered them, Robert decides to bring them back to life but putting the white pins back.  Only at this point does Andy confess that he’s been killing the victims in retaliation for being forcefully retired.

The ending is a little weak, but the psychological tension as it builds up is believable.  One critic compared it to an extended episode of The Twilight Zone, a comparison that has also been made for Carnival of Souls.  I would concur with that observation.  Although Twilight Zone wouldn’t air for another year, that kind of unsettling tale was already in the air.  No zombies appear, but the palpable belief that they might is what really makes the horror work in this instance.  The first half is an eerie story, but when Robert sticks in that first white pin a shift takes place.  Of course, modern viewers have been primed by Night of the Living Dead, so we know the possibilities.  Perhaps the power of Night gives life to older movies.  After all, anything can happen in the Twilight Zone.

TV Zone

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An unenviable task, it must be, to try to sum up The Twilight Zone.  Barry Keith Grant, however, has done an admirable job in this TV Milestones volume.  He addresses in a forthright way one of the questions on my mind quite a bit as of late—what are the borders of genre?  For a creative species such as our own, with imaginations that range far and high, we blend unlikely ingredients.  The Twilight Zone had finished its initial run before I ever watched television, but I was around to catch early reruns.  Their focus on the weird, the unusual, the twist ending, informed my childhood love of the strange.  They also helped shape my imagination.  This little book helps to capture some of that.

I haven’t watched every episode of the series yet.  I’ve been making my way through it slowly since I really don’t have much time for watching, and I tend to give priority to movies.  Still, The Twilight Zone was one of the most influential television programs of all time, as Grant demonstrates.  Although he tries, it may be impossible to determine just why so many people use it as a frame of reference.  Even with my penchant for analyzing, I can’t work out what it was about those disparate, discrete episodes that so captured me.  Perhaps like most influences, it was specific episodes that hit very deep.  That showed new ways of thinking about things.  That opened up worlds of possibilities.

I was exposed to Serling’s stories not only through my own reading, but also through school.  I have no hope of remembering what grade it was in, but in one of my English classes we were assigned “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.”  I was probably lost in the haze of puberty and adolescence at the time, but I remember well how that story made me feel.  And the teacher pointing out how people behaved when they were afraid.  Perhaps appropriately, Grant ends his book with a quote from that very episode.  Others, however, stayed with me as well.  Perhaps that’s the thing that’s so remarkable about the Zone—some episodes are not easily forgotten.  We’re accustomed to the flood of anodyne media that dowses us with entertainment of little consequence.  Some Twilight Zone episodes were that way as well.  But when we experience something significant, we tend to remember it and remember it well.  So many episodes did that kind of work on a mind too young to make lasting life decisions.  I guess I’m still waiting for Mr. Serling to step into frame and explain it.

Revisiting the Zone

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Like many people in the early eighties, I heard about the terrifying accident that killed Vic Morrow, Myca Dinh Le, and Renee Shin-Yi Chen during the filming of Twilight Zone: The Movie.  Because of that I steered away from ever seeing it.  I grew up loving The Twilight Zone, and I was probably enough of a self-assured critic at twenty to suppose the movie would never have been as good as the original series had been.  Still, it didn’t leave my consciousness.  Not entirely.  There have been a couple of television reboots of the series—most recently by Jordan Peele—and it seems that those of the present day still see the cultural value in the original.  Peele’s relaunch, although short-lived, brought the movie back to mind and I finally decided to watch it when I learned that one of the segments was based on “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” given my recent gremlin kick.

I knew the film was an anthology and those are always dicey.  I also knew I’d be watching an actor in his final role—the scene in which he and the children actually died was not used in the movie, of course.  I didn’t realize how many stars were in the cast, and I didn’t even know what the other three episodes were.  Critics (paid and un) have opined that the episodes increase in appeal as the movie progresses, and the opening segment has been hailed as one of the scariest introductions among films.  So some forty years after it released I watched it.  I actually found it to be largely in the spirit of Rod Serling.  I don’t know what he would’ve thought of the movie, but it seems to have continued his message.  The first segment, the one in which Morrow starred, wasn’t based on a single original Twilight Zone episode as the other three were.  A few “Easter eggs” exist for fans, such as Burgess Meredith narrating and Helen Foley saying she’s headed to Willoughby on the remake of “It’s a Good Life.”  No doubt, “It’s a Good Life” and “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” are among the most famous of the episodes in the series.

Part of me is surprised that the film was released at all.  Deaths have occurred, of course, in the making of other movies.  Some in which millions of dollars had already been invested.  Still, watching a final performance like this has a haunted quality to it.  At times it seems that acting can be a dangerous profession.  And certain movies may always be difficult to watch because of it. But should we expect anything different from this Twilight Zone in which we live?

The Goodreads Zone

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It happened on Goodreads.  I suspect she had no idea how much that simple “like” meant to me.  Social media is too big to be everywhere, so I primarily engage with those who reach out to me (without trolling), on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Goodreads.  Even with my activity on these venues, comments are rare.  Likes a bit more common, and always appreciated.  Several months after I posted a review of her book, As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling on Goodreads, Anne Serling liked it.  That may not seem like much, but this was the actual daughter of Rod Serling himself, liking something I wrote.  If you feel the way I do about The Twilight Zone this will be a personal brush with greatness.  Almost as if Serling himself approved.

I’ve met a few famous people in my time.  Mostly they are ordinary people and act like ordinary people.  Only those of us around someone famous know that millions of people have heard of one of us.  Heard of and admire.  The rest of us manage to get along, but we do so without notice.  Unless someone “likes” what we do.  It’s kind of like having someone famous blurb your book.  In any case, my childhood consisted of many snippets of things that made me who I am.  One of those snippets was The Twilight Zone.  I watched a lot of television growing up.  We were not a reading family (neither parent finished high school), so the television was the item of choice after work/school.  Much of what I watched washed off.  Not The Twilight Zone.

Like reading through the Dark Shadows novels, I’ve been slowly watching my way through The Twilight Zone alone.  Nobody else in my family cares for it and since I don’t have much free time I only get to it on rare occasions.  Now that mowing time is here, those occasions are even fewer.  I guess I feel that I have to justify why I’ve come around to writing about horror as an adult.  You don’t get to be an adult without having some kind of childhood first, and mine involved The Twilight Zone.  Anne Serling’s involved being raised by the creator of The Twilight Zone.  To me, that’s a validating kind of fame.  To be seen by someone who could, if she wanted, have an instant and ready-made audience.  A reverie, started by something that happened on Goodreads.

Visualizing Twilight

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Graphic novels still feel like cheating.  That childhood message that comic books “aren’t really reading” has proven difficult to dislodge.  That, and the fear that we are entering a post-literary world, keep me from reading many of them.  Koren Shadmi’s The Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television, however, caught my attention right away.  Like many other people my age, my thinking was heavily influenced by The Twilight Zone.  As a kid, television had a kind of authority to it.  This is what adults were feeding us.  Although I was hardly intellectual then, I thought deeply about things and one of those things was The Twilight Zone.  The episodes were profound.  The twist endings certainly were among the best on the tube.  Shadmi’s graphic novel of Rod Serling’s life is a tribute to the influence the man had.

For a graphic treatment, The Twilight Man is strangely affective (yes, that’s spelled correctly).  I tend to shy away from hagiographies, and Shadmi’s treatment isn’t one.  It does illustrate, however, how Serling fought against a commercialism that would eventually win out.  Those who control the money control what we see.  Granted, the democratizing influence of the internet has let competition arise from unseen quarters—there are young people who watch YouTube to the exclusion of television altogether—but few shows manage the impact that The Twilight Zone had when there were only essentially three large networks.  Now we have so many choices that cultural reference points are rare.  Those who’ve never seen it, at least for the time being, know what The Twilight Zone is.

This book is biographical, based on published biographies.  There’s something about knowing, however, that the episodes actually happened.  Being in combat (as Serling was) puts some people into their own kind of limbo.  At least one person in my own family was irrevocably changed by fighting in a war.  The remarkable thing is that Serling came out of it wanting justice for all people. The book even points out that he became a Unitarian, although it doesn’t dwell on that point.  Some things, such as spiritual insights, are difficult to illustrate I suppose.  I can  see why Shadmi’s tribute receives good press.  Graphic novels are a means of telling a story that moves people.  I re-learn this each time I read one, which is something I rarely do.  Now that I’m starting to explore this genre I’m perhaps learning to address my own prejudices.  As long as there are still words to read.

New Twilight

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The strange thing about The Twilight Zone is its ability to endure in the minds of those exposed to it at an early age.  Often it’s more the image of it, that feeling of awe and wonder, that remains with me.  Rod Serling cut a sophisticated figure with what, for the time, was an unbounded imagination.  New Stories from the Twilight Zone was the last of the three standard collections of his tales.  Another book of stories published the same year, From the Twilight Zone, is a little difficult to pin down from online descriptions.  It’ll probably be the subject of a future nostalgia-laden post.  Reading the current collection is like déjà vu; some of the stories I remember from seeing on television, and others I’d probably read before.

In some ways these stories are time machines.  A slice of the early sixties.  The cover of my edition emphasizes that dramatically with Serling’s head hinged open and colorful ideas (“weirdies” in the copy) flying out.  Over half a century later the Zone continues to fascinate, despite the obvious context in which Serling originally wrote.  The enduring nature of his contribution somehow validates me, and probably many other kids of the sixties too.  The stories all suggest that the world isn’t quite what it seems.  It relates to what I posted on a couple days back, the weird, the eerie.  In other words, these are good stories.  Timeless in their own way.  Reaching back toward childhood, they help with the aging process.  

Weird tales have become a popular genre, and I suspect the popularity is due largely to the internet.  Those of us who liked stories such as these were an earlier generation of nerds (of the non-technical variety), those who didn’t find sports or girls or controlled substances—the more mainstream forms of diversion—to our liking.  We were perhaps misfits, but we knew we could well find a place in The Twilight Zone.  This may have been its great, subliminal draw; anyone could find her or himself in the Zone.  Some of the narratives were scary, some were funny.  Others were just odd (“weirdies”).  But they could sell books and Serling was able to make himself a household name through his imagination.  The internet has, in turn, made it more difficult to get noticed in its democracy of expression.  Indeed, it has become a twilight zone of its own.  At least it’s one where it’s a simple matter to still find the books that made us who we are.

In the Zone

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Since it lies somewhere between waking and sleeping, between youth and old age, the Twilight Zone is often where I find myself.  I’m hard pressed to say why the show made such an impression on a young and otherwise religious mind.  Maybe it was because religion itself deals with the Twilight Zone of human experience.  In any case, reading Rod Serling’s Stories from the Twilight Zone, as I continue to make my way through the books of my childhood, was a trip down memory lane.  While living in coronapocalypse, these short stories, novelized from Serling’s teleplays, take you back to a different time.  The late fifties and early sixties seem so very different from where we are now.  And reading about them, I’m not sure why some people want to go back there.

At the same time, reading the physical book takes me back.  My edition was printed in 1964.  It smells like an old book.  It has that unmistakable feel of pulp fiction.  Reading a book is so much more than scanning the words with your eyes.  It’s the lying on your back on a lumpy couch on a hot, humid summer day after being at work for endless hours.  It’s the foxing of the pages and the almost laughable cover design.  But more than that, it’s a signpost back to childhood.  This is a book I first held before leaving home.  It was a refuge from a tense life never knowing what might happen in a day.  Believing that escape was possible could save a soul from a ton of grief.  At the same time, those characters who do escape often learn why that isn’t the best option after all.

Some of these stories I remembered from the shows I watched, while others seemed unfamiliar.  There really are no surprises here.  You see, the Twilight Zone was long ago and the stories have entered our national consciousness.  Some have been borrowed, adapted, and parodied by others.  Others, such as “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” were even part of anthologies we read and discussed in school.  Why are human beings so distrustful of others?  I remember us talking about that in class.  Serling’s version has a more grim ending, it seems, that the one I recollect as a youth.  Sitting here in coronapocalypse, however, I see it playing out around me every day.  We don’t know who might be infected.  And suddenly reading about the Twilight Zone seems like a most sensible thing to do in the circumstances.

WWW

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With a few exceptions I think we’ve lived beyond the time when a single name could spawn an industry.  I used to watch re-runs (itself an arcane concept) of The Twilight Zone when I was a kid.  These weird stories drew me in, and, it seems clear, not only me.  Rod Serling’s brainchild led to an industry and “twilight zone” became a household concept.  Lots of little books were written bearing Serling’s name in some way.  One of those paperbacks was Rod Serling’s Triple W: Witches, Warlocks and Werewolves.  I can’t remember where I picked it up, but it was a used book and it had Rod Serling’s name right there on the cover.  Going over my books to find unread gems, I picked up Triple W and sat down to find out what it was like.

None of the stories are by Serling himself.  He’s listed as the editor and he wrote a very nice little introduction.  The tales here reflect, as the subtitle indicates, witches, warlocks, and werewolves.  Some are old stories and some are fairly recent for a book published early in the 1960s.  Descriptive writing does tend to evoke a scene, but I’m often amazed at just how dated it can make a story seem.  What struck writers from the 1940s and ’50s as huge sums of money are likely less than we pay for our monthly internet bill.  Men all try to act tough and the ladies prepare dinner.  Stereotypes.  That’s somehow appropriate for this collection since most of the stories have to do with witches.  Serling was well aware of the tragedies of history, and these tales are told mostly for fun.  The scariest characters are the witch hunters (generally men).

Serling’s famed conscience shows in the choice of the final piece.  Not a story, not even fiction, Charles Mackay’s “Witch Trials and the Law” is an essay about the horrors of witch hunting.  It’s a rather sober piece with which to end a book of speculative fiction, but then Serling was always known for his impatience with injustice.  Also included is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” which I’ve been wanting to read for some time.  Given his shame at the Salem trials and his own ancestor’s part in them, it was mildly surprising that Hawthorne’s story seems to presuppose the reality of witches.  Of course, it condemns the respectable folk who, in reality, all participate in the ills of the society in which they find themselves.  In all, this collection made me think.  Not bad for an impulse purchase on what was probably a rainy afternoon.