LIST: The Best "Twilight Zone" Movies

My original plan for the Halloween season was to cover, in rigorous and riveting detail, the thirteen "best" Twilight Zone movies.  I got through the first four, and then life things happened.  Positive life things, but things that required my full attention and full time.  What follows is an abridged version of those Halloween entries, preceded with links to the first four I listed:

13. "Twenty Two" / Final Destination

12. "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" / Cube

11. "Judgment Night" / Triangle

10. "Number Twelve Looks Just Like You" / The Stepford Wives

9. "Mirror Image" / Doppelganger

A creepy-ass episode with Vera Miles as an anxious woman who's seeing too much of herself holds much in common with a Japanese movie called Doppelganger.  In that film, directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the doppelganger isn't just unreal and invasive; he's also better at life than the original.  The movie isn't as straightforward as the episode.  Instead, Doppelganger guns for a sardonic edge; call it deathpan.

8. "The Invaders" / Trilogy of Terror

This one's a bit of a cheat, since Trilogy was a TV movie.  But whatever.  Sometimes I break rules.  [adjusts shades].  Trilogy, an anthology horror films composed of three segments, has a famous finale involving an evil little scamp called a "Zuni Fetish Doll."  The terror-from-below recalls the excellent miniature terror of "The Invaders," with Agnes Moorehead as a mute woman fending off tinny little space invaders.

7. "Perchance to Dream" / A Nightmare on Elm Street

On Elm Street and in the Twilight Zone, there's a lurking nightmare that can literally scare you to death.  A Nightmare on Elm Street amps up the gore and makes its villain a scarred monster with knives for fingers, which sets it a ways apart from the subtler nature of the Zone, where a man is "chased down" by a mysterious female who's both alluring and deadly.  Is he crazy?  Who could ever know?

6. "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" / The Mist

The Zone episode is a masterpiece of fear and mistrust, a compact fable about how quickly civilization can self-destruct.  All that story required was the loss of electricity to get the scape-goating started.  Stephen King's novella-turned-film adds a healthy number of extradimensional monsters, but the story retains the core terror of Serling's classic: introduce enough panic, and society is almost excited to self-destruct.

5. "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" / Jacob's Ladder

If you've seen neither, watch them both.  If you've seen both, you know what I'm talking about.  If you've seen one but not the other, I'm sorry for spoiling the fun.

4. "Little Girl Lost" / Poltergeist

Poltergeist is probably the best film that cribs from The Twilight Zone.  Both the film and "Little Girl Lost" trap a girl in the walls of her suburban home.  Both stories also feature ticking clocks, convenient "experts," and the feeling that our world carries dimensions we can't begin to understand.  While Hooper's film also turns into a horror revue (clowns! skeletons! demons!), it never loses the anxiety of a family trying to reunite.

3. "The Dummy" / Magic

I saw Magic for the first time this year, and I immediately thought of Twilight Zone's "The Dummy."  Magic (directed by Richard Attenborough) generates Hitchcock-style suspense with its pitiable hero accused of murder, but the overall idea of a ventriloquist and his puppet honors the uncanny eeriness of "The Dummy."  Want more creepy puppet action?  Check out 1945's Dead of Night and 1989's Pin.

2. "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?" / 
Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Here's another cheat, since Invasion of the Body Snatchers came out years before Serling's tale of alien paranoia, but the film - an improvement on the Jack Finney source material - feels like a sort of precognitive echo of Serling.  With its depiction of Rockwell's America upended by imposters who look just like us, Body Snatchers understands - like Serling - that the illusion of peace can be more intimidating than any violence.

1. "The Hitchhiker" / Carnival of Souls

Herk Harvey's one-off B-movie chiller is one of the best horror flicks of the 1960's; it's one of those movies where the amateurish qualities - the hitchy soundtrack, the B-level acting - add to the atmosphere.  The film's familiar in spirit to one of the first Zone episodes, "The Hitch-hiker," where a nervous woman's pursued by a man who's seemingly supernatural.  Most of the films on this expand on their Serling-esque conceits with extra spectacle and additional twists.  Carnival is the only one that matches The Twilight Zone for pure simplicity.  Above all, this is a mood piece, a dreamlike film with a sad twist.  Serling would have approved.