Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
THE SIXTIES’ SPOOKIEST SHOW IS BACK
The Twilight Zone has been rebooted – and if you like a tale with a twist then it’s for you, says the man behind it
Browsing through the in-flight magazines and safety information, journalist Justin Sanderson comes across the very last thing you want to find lurking in the seat pocket in front of you when you board a flight. It’s an MP3 audio player that has the chilling words ‘The Tragic Mystery Of Goldstar Flight 1015’ passing across its glass screen.
Sanderson, as you may have guessed, has just taken his seat on Goldstar Flight 1015. Unable to resist the ghastly temptation, he tunes in to the podcast and discovers the fate that awaits him and the rest of the passengers on their journey from Washington DC to Tel Aviv.
‘It’s your worst nightmare come true,’ says Adam Scott, the Big Little Lies actor who plays Sanderson in the opening episode of the rebooted American drama series The Twilight Zone. ‘This guy is travelling at 30,000ft and he’s being told how the flight is about to vanish off the face of the Earth. Imagine how you would feel! If this story doesn’t give you goosebumps, I’d be surprised.’
Nightmare At 30,000ft is the first episode in a new ten-part remake of The Twilight Zone, a show that first scared the living daylights out of viewers on both sides of the Atlantic in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Stories included a woman who was convinced that she was being shadowed by her doppelgänger, and one starring Kojak’s Telly Savalas in which the voicebox of a talking doll took on a life of its own and started issuing threats to kill people. Twists and shocks were the order of the day, and the fact that early episodes were shown on ITV late at night in black and white only seemed to make them that much scarier.
Sci-fi featured regularly. To Serve Man, first shown in 1962, referred to the title of a book by an alien race called the Kanamit. Believing it indicated the aliens’ subservience, a linguist travelled to the Kanamit’s home planet, but sadly for him, the book was aimed at budding chefs among the Kanamit and described how best to serve up a meal of homo sapiens.
‘It was the twist in the tale that people used to stay around for, and To Serve Man is regarded as one of the best of them,’ says Oscar-winning writer Jordan Peele, who both co-created the new series and narrates the on-camera prologue and epilogue to each episode. ‘The key is to totally fool the audience. If you can predict where an audience thinks a story is going to go, you can use it against them and lead them in a different direction. And they love you for it!’ Stars of the future such as Burt Reynolds, Leonard Nimoy and Robert Redford appeared in the original Twilight Zone. William
Shatner – who later became Captain Kirk in Star Trek – took the lead role in Nightmare At 20,000ft, a 1963 story that’s been updated (and had an extra 10,000ft added to its title) for this week’s all-new episode. Later episodes include The Blue Scorpion, starring The IT Crowd’s Chris O’dowd as Jeff Storck, an anthropology professor who inherits a gun that appears to have an evil mind of its own.
But Jordan Peele says he doesn’t want the new series to give viewers sleepless nights. ‘It’s more about intrigue and fascination than it is about outand-out scariness and horror,’ he says. ‘It’s about firing the imagination and finding the same kind of territory that the original series did: that corridor of uncertainty, that middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition. We can’t go so dark that it makes us want to curl up in a ball. While I’m a big fan of shows like Black Mirror that went dark and stayed dark, in ours we have a little bit of light.
‘Rod Serling, the guy behind the original series who also played my role of the narrator, developed what came to be known as the Serling Wink, a visible connection with the audience that said, “We take ourselves seriously but never too seriously,” and we follow that tradition. You’ll see the odd acknowledgement from me towards the audience – the occasional nod or raising of a glass of something strong – when I’m delivering the epilogue.’