The Twilight Zone!

Since my love hadn't heard of this fantastic phenomenon, I feel somehow obligated to spread the word of it to the world.

See, The Twilight Zone is the brilliant brainchild of the genius Rod Serling. The concept is that of a long series of short movies, each telling the story of some person in a very peculiar way. It is most commonly referred to as science fiction with a message. More often than not, it touches on the subjects of redemption and personal enlightenment, with many supernatural elements, but in a way that doesn't get preachy.

Myself, I'd call it very very discrete and subtle horror. It's nothing like regular horror movies, where there is gore and monsters jumping out in front of the camera. It's much more subsued or subsumed or some other word like that; many episodes leave you with a kind of eerie feeling, like there is just something very wrong, relying more on a disconcerted feeling than on fear. It also contains quite a lot of twist endings, you are lead to believe something throughout the entire episode, then it's turned on its head at the very end.

The best example of this is ironically enough not an episode of the series at all, but rather a movie that I believe most people have heard of; The Planet of the Apes, that is, the original, not the remake. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who knows that it was in fact Rod Serling who wrote the screenplay for the movie, so it plays out like an episode of The Twilight Zone, especially the ending.

Here's the SPOILER for those who have already seen it, everyone else should skip this part!

At the end, the protagonist is riding away with his girl on a beach. Suddenly, he spots something that makes him fall to his knees in despair; the ruins of the statue of liberty, showing that he had in fact traveled not through space, but through time, and human civilization had destroyed itself, which allowed the apes to rule the world.

That brought me a particular feeling of it all being so wrong, like the world wasn't working the way it was supposed to, and that is precisely what many episodes of The Twilight Zone does.

You are reading this post, thinking it to be just another amusing anecdote in the life of a normal human being. But what you don't know, is that you have just checked into a hotel, that rest forever inside...The Twilight Zone!