The other day in the stillness of the library, a familiar avant-garde tune resonated among the musty stacks. Immediately, I looked around and half-expected to see a man in a suit and tie step forward and begin narrating the scene before him. For one moment that was both brilliant and terrifying, I thought that my normal day might enter another realm. Perhaps I was about to cross over into . . . The Twilight Zone. Then a woman flipped open her cell phone, the music cut short and I stood surrounded by several dozen books to shelve and a mundane world of which I am a hapless denizen. Yes, that is correct, I am a twenty-eight-year old woman who hears The Twilight Zone theme music and expects to see Rod Serling appear at random in the room. Let us not delve too far into the psychology of this, but it says something about my life that I would like to end up in the Twilight Zone.

But I digress.

I first discovered The Twilight Zone in the seventh grade. I remember my teacher had been trying to teach us about reading poetry and literature not only on the surface, but to find the real meaning that the author is conveying. A couple of nights later, I stumbled upon an old black-and-white television show on the SciFi channel (as it stilled called itself back in my day) and as I watched a harried man step from a train into an idyllic town called “Willoughby” and the events that ensued, I understood what my teacher had been explaining. Is that serendipity? I am not sure, but I do know that in an age of cable and color TV, a pre-teen girl fell in love with that old black-and-white show and never looked back. Every night at eight o’clock, I watched a world where anything might happen, be it weird, wonderful, terrifying or a blending of the three. I had found a place that told not only a captivating story, but spoke of the truth of human nature. The show did not shy away from exposing man’s monstrosities, but it also held aloft his triumphs so that the audience might understand what it means to be human. Let me tell you how thrilled I was when my husband and I were dating and he was as excited as I was to spend our first New Year’s Eve watching a Twilight Zone marathon.

So what about The Twilight Zone continues to resonate, so many years later? After all, we are talking about a show that ran from 1959 until 1964 and features people in dated clothes with equally dated visions of the future. I think the answer lies in the timelessness of the stories themselves. As I mentioned, the show speaks to the idea of what it means to be human, and that idea transcends vintage cars and floral print dresses. Watch, for example, the episode “The Brain Center at Whipple’s” (05.32) and you might wonder if Rod Serling was a prophet. After all, as the economy goes haywire, how many people have seen their jobs replaced by machines? How many people have been crushed beneath the mechanized tread of technology’s march? Serling does not depict technology as evil or wrong, but he raises very poignant questions regarding its use; many of which are questions we still ask today.

Or perhaps it is the show’s ability to rub raw our emotions and expose our fears. So often today movies and shows rely upon blood and gore to frighten an audience, and that is something which The Twilight Zone never does. True, the fear it invokes is not as shocking as a blood-spattered, ax-wielding psychopath, but this fear lingers and often touches something that all the bloody axes cannot. How many people still look tentatively at airplane wings years after seeing “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” (05.03)? The show also melds emotional pulls, mixing the frightening with the pathetic, and leaves a deep impact on the viewer. See for example the eerie but sad episodes “Night Call” (05.18) and “Long Distance Call” (02.21) which speak of sorrow and fear with such poignancy that, though I have seen the episodes only a couple of times, their emotional resonance remains clear in my mind.

I do admit that at times, the age of The Twilight Zone can distract. Some times the dialogue seems stilted and leaves me thinking, “Seriously? Nobody says things like that.” But then I pause and remember that this show debuted over fity years ago and then I get past the language. The other distraction happens in Season 2 when the visual appearance of the show changes for part of the season. This happened because the studio switched from recording on film to using videotape due to the budget, but it gives several episodes a soap opera-like appearance that I found slightly jarring. Regardless, such distractions are truly minor when compared to what the show accomplishes and as a viewer immerses himself or herself into the show, one easily overcomes such mild irritations.

Although people have tried resurrecting the series twice (once from 1985-1989 and again from 2002-2003), the original cannot be duplicated. Perhaps this speaks to the original series’ propensity to ask questions which nobody else asked, or perhaps it is because The Twilight Zone without Rod Serling is a creature without a soul. Or it might simply be that the original had better writing. For me, I know part of the reason is nostalgia -- I fell in love with the old black-and-white show and I cannot love any other version in its place. Let us travel together then, past the signpost up ahead.

   -- Katie Hager