But it also feels like the only move he has left if he wants to save the plane and, in the process, prove his sanity. When Bill, gun in hand, breaks a window and collapses the divide between the two, it’s shocking. He makes particularly good use of the contrast between the darkness and bad weather outside and the brightly illuminated sterility of the airplane interior. Then just starting out - in the next decade he’d go on to direct The Omen and Superman - Donner demonstrates a lot of technical expertise in the episode, turning the confined space of the airplane cabin into a pressure cooker as Bill becomes increasingly desperate. Yet even if the gremlin’s seemingly magical movements were the result of the limitations of a network TV budget, director Richard Donner made its dreamlike qualities part of the episode’s atmosphere. What’s more, the gremlin seems to float away as if powered by fairy dust or, well, the kind of wires used in television productions. Or maybe not.ĭoes he see a monster on the wing? We see it, but the episode withholds any kind of confirmation that we’re not just seeing the creature - a gremlin like pilots described seeing during World War II, by Bob’s reckoning - through Bob’s unreliable eyes. He’s traveling with his wife, Ruth (Christine White), who’s come to retrieve him from a treatment center where he’s been recuperating under a doctor’s care. A key contributor to The Twilight Zone, Matheson adapted the episode himself, and the script wisely puts as much emphasis on Bob’s mounting psychological distress as it does on the monster driving it. I looked out the window and said, ‘Jeez, what if I saw a guy out there?’”įrom that thought sprung Matheson’s short story “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” first published in 1961. Speaking to Marc Scott Zicree for the invaluable book The Twilight Zone Companion, writer Richard Matheson said, “I was on an airplane. When anyone else looks, they see nothing at all. The premise of the episode is simple: When Bob looks outside, he sees a monster. But what matters is that it terrifies the episode’s hero, Bob Wilson (played as one giant raw nerve by William Shatner), a man taking his first flight after having suffered a nervous breakdown - on a plane. The gremlin in the original episode looks a bit like an oversized teddy bear left in the wash too long. Okay, “worst nightmares” might be something of an exaggeration. Imagine the horror of looking out and seeing a creature out of your worst nightmares waiting there. It’s ridiculous, of course, the idea of a creature walking on the wing of an airplane and wreaking havoc. ![]() “Nightmare” has endured in the culture for the last 55 years in part because it doubles as such an effective shorthand for a fear of flying. ![]() The third episode of The Twilight Zone’s fifth and final season, it’s since become one of the series’ most acclaimed outings, as well as the inspiration for one of the premiere episode of CBS All Access’s new Jordan Peele-hosted Twilight Zone reboot. “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” first aired on October 11, 1963. Throw in, say, a malevolent monster seemingly determined to bring down the plane, a monster only you can see, and even teeth-gritting doesn’t cut it. No matter how many reassuring statistics you read about the safety of air travel, it’s still a leap of faith to step into a heavy machine that doesn’t look like it can fly and hope for the best, sometimes through gritted teeth. ![]() Some of the most effective Twilight Zone episodes made an already scary scenario even scarier. A ventriloquist’s dummy is naturally creepy, so what if it really did come to life? Con artists prosper, so if a bunch of friendly-seeming aliens showed up, who’s to say we wouldn’t see through their scams? The classic Rod Serling–created series specialized in stories just askew from reality, tales of the uncanny that felt like situations an ordinary person could stumble into with a few wrong turns. One reason The Twilight Zone works so well is that it always feels just a couple of steps removed from the reality we know.
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