In the past two years, I've celebrated Halloween by judging
the most Lovecrafty movies ever made and
the best Stephen King adaptations. This year, I'm looking at thirteen good-to-great horror flicks that mirror classic, creepy episodes from
The Twilight Zone. Whether purposeful or accidental, these movies showcase the same imagination and excitement that made Serling's series so fantastic.
For a fun time, watch the episode and movie of each entry back to back - you decide the order.
The fun starts now.
...you will reach a point where it might be difficult to decide which is reality and which is nightmare, a problem uncommon perhaps but rather peculiar to the Twilight Zone.
13. "Twenty-Two" / Final Destination
Final Destination (dir. James Wong, 2000)
What's So Similar?
Both focus on heroes who have a horrifying precognitive dream steeped in awareness of their own mortality. Both heroes are immediately dismissed as a basket case. Both are right on the money. Go figure. There's also a potent image at the end of the
Twilight Zone episode that's replicated in
Final Destination, but that's as far as I want to go with that.
What's So Different?
Serling's story is based on an old
E. F. Benson story that will sound familiar even if you haven't seen any permutation. It's the old tale about the specter in the morgue who says to a hero, "Room for one more," and how that specter re-appears later in the hero's life.
Final Destination takes the idea of a mortal premonition and turns it into a logical game - if you can predict your death and then evade it, Death gets pissed and tries to find a way to kill you by "natural" means. If you beat it, Death tries again, unless you saved somebody else's life with your premonition. Then that person becomes the new target. By having teens as its heroes,
Final Destination adds another layer to the fear of mortality - there's no other age where death seems so distant.
What's So Special?
Serling's episode offers plenty of dread, with its wordless passages that focus on Liz Powell (Barbara Nichols) wandering through the hallways of her own nightmares, and its twist - while familiar - still packs a punch. One of the creepier ideas is that, if Liz wasn't haunted before, she sure as hell is now.
Final Destination ends up going in a different direction, acting as a stripped-down slasher, where a flesh-and-blood killer would be a redundancy. There are a few times when the flick feels more complex than engaging, but the infamous plane crash scene is still horrifying, and, by making the story about the futility of evading death, the film gains some extra weight.
All of The Best Twilight Zone Movies...
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11. "Judgment Night" / Triangle
12. "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" / Cube
13. "Twenty-Two" / Final Destination
Check out the season one episode "And When the Sky Was Opened" too. Three astronauts return to Earth as heroes from a space voyage after having gone off the radar for a few brief moments only to start inexplicably disappearing. One of the character's speeches--"We were never supposed to come back!" (paraphrasing)--mirrors a good amount of the ideas in FINAL DESTINATION. The fact that the characters aren't killed in messy ways somehow makes it worse.
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That's a damn fine episode, and you're right - I hadn't thought about the potential connection to "Final Destination," but it's there in a sense.
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