The season of Halloween is upon us! If you’re at a loss for what to watch to celebrate the best holiday, I have the show for you. One of my favorite tv shows has always been The Twilight Zone. The creepy, mind blowing twists have always made me think. It’s truly a classic. Jordan Peele (the genius behind Get Out and Us) created a revival of the show, keeping the same creepiness and crazy twists while adding a modern spin. Here are the three best episodes out of the season, perfect for Halloween!
Replay
The creepiness of Replay is in the realistic horror of the episode. Police violence is a very real issue in the world today. In Replay a woman finds out that her camcorder can turn back time, and tries desperately to save her son from being killed by a racist police officer. The episode takes an older concept, one used in the classic Twilight Zone, but applies a very real issue to it. This combination creates a very creepy and interesting episode, sure to make people think.
Nightmare at 30,000 feet
Nightmare at 20,000 was always one of my favorite classic Twilight Zone episodes, so I was very excited to see how the revival would handle it. In a smart move on the writer’s part, they kept the basic idea but changed a lot of the plot. The original episode was about a man recently released from a sanitarium tries to convince people on the plane with him that there is a gremlin messing with the plane. By comparison, the revival’s episode, Justin, a journalist with PTSD travels for work.
He finds a podcast that has an episode about “The Mystery of Northern Goldstar Flight 1015,” the very flight he is on. As Justin tries to convince the rest of the passengers that the flight is doomed, he is met with skepticism at every turn. Nightmare at 30,000 feet provides a pretty good twist, but what really makes this episode one of my favorites is what intrigued me the first time, the protagonist being put into a position where he must convince everyone they are doomed and no one believing him.
Blurryman
The best part of this episode is the meta aspect of it, a Twilight Zone episode within a Twilight Zone episode. Sophie, a writer for The Twilight Zone, is plagued by a mysterious figure referred to as the Blurryman. She learns that Blurryman was seen in one scene from every episode from the season.
As the line between real and fantasy is blurred for Sophie, Blurryman starts to appear to her in a typical ghost haunting. It reminded me of the episode Black Museum in Black Mirror, with a ton of references to episodes from the whole season. The episode was a typical The Twilight Zone episode, full of commentary on story-telling, creepiness, shocking twists, and nods to the classic The Twilight Zone.
