Episode: “The
Hungry Glass”, in which vane Donna Douglas becomes so enamored with her own
reflection that she is sucked into the glass. All who subsequently stand before
her massive collection of mirrors suffer grisly fates. Young couple William
Shatner and Joanna Heyes move into the woman’s old dark house, and much
creepiness ensues. Douglas Heyes’s adaptation of Robert Bloch’s story smartly
crosses time, giving us a break from Shatner and Joanna Hayes and their
contemporary setting to see how Douglas’s initial tragedy went down all those
years ago. The flashbacks shuffle up the storytelling nicely, but it’s still
the time spent in 1961 that provide the most unnerving moments when the couple
envision ghostly figures reaching out for them from the house’s mirrors. Heyes
only gives us impressionistic views of these figures, which play on the
imagination far more effectively than the graphically depicted, and rather
silly looking, monster from the earlier episode “The Cheaters”. The final
minutes of “The Hungry Glass”, which entail a tragic mistake and a character’s
haunting exit, creep me out as much as the scariest installments of The
Twilight Zone.
