31 TV Shows for 31 Days of Halloween Season: Day 31

Series: The Simpsons

Episode: “Treehouse of Horror IV”, in which the annual Halloween episode of The Simpsons hits its peak with a scarifying trio of terror tales presented by Bart à la Rod Serling on Night Gallery. First up is a spin on The Devil and Daniel Webster in which corpulent Homer Simpson barters his soul for one doughnut and Satan assumes the form of pious neighborino Ned Flanders. Next is the traditional Twilight Zone parody in which Bart plays a junior Bill Shatner who discovers a gremlin saboteur messing with his school bus. Finally, there’s the lavish “Bart Simpson’s Dracula”, in which Count Mr. Burns keeps an undead army of the undead at the bottom of his Super Happy Fun Slide and neither Francis Ford Coppola nor Stephen King make it out alive. Back when The Simpsons was still funny, nobody did Halloween episodes like they did, and no Halloween is complete without watching one. Happy viewing and happy Halloween!

31 TV Shows for 31 Days of Halloween Season: Day 24

Series: Night Gallery

Episode: “Green Fingers/The Funeral/The Tune in Dan’s Cafe”, in which Cameron Mitchell is a sleazy industrialist who wants to build a factory on the property of gardening-enthusiast Elsa Lanchester. Mitchell would have probably backed off if he’d known just how effective the sweet, old lady’s green fingers are. “Green Fingers” soars with a macabre script by Rod Serling (based on R.C. Cook’s short story), creepy direction by John “Saturday Night Fever” Badham, the star of the greatest monster movie ever made, and an awesome tribute in Siouxsie and the Banshee’s “Green Fingers” (song not included in this episode). Our next painting is a morsel of fun silliness from Richard Matheson in which a vampire plans the funeral he never got a chance to have. The mourners look like the cast of The Halloween That Almost Wasn’t. Yay! The portrait at the end of our museum of miscreants depicts Susan Oliver and Pernell Roberts as a couple incessantly blabbing about their flailing marriage in a bar while the same crappy country song plays over and over on the juke box. Apparently, it was the song that was playing when another doomed couple was swept up in violence at the joint years ago. Despite some groovy psychedelic solarization effects and an elegantly filmed shoot out, this last tale is a whole lot of nothing. The other two are essential Halloween season viewing.

Twilight Zone A - Z

“The Twilight Zone” was often directed with great artistry, but like most fine television series, it was a writer’s show. Struggling in a medium still regarded as lowbrow, head writer Rod Serling did much to bring credibility to T.V. writing. In the brief teasers he’d film to set up the following week’s show, Serling often gave featured credit to the writer. His very appearance in these pieces and his famed introductions at the head of most episodes highlighted the starring roles writers played in “The Twilight Zone”. Serling chose some of the very best sci-fi and fantasy authors to assist him in realizing his series.

From the series’ very beginning, Richard Matheson was among the most prolific “Twilight Zone” contributors. His involvement was a true coup considering the impressive bibliography he’d been building since the start of the ‘50s: the tremendously influential apocalyptic horror novel I Am Legend, The Incredible Shrinking Man, the short stories “Death Ship”, “Little Girl Lost”, “Long Distance Call” and “Steel”, all of which he’d adapt for “The Twilight Zone”. Matheson’s “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” was a rare moment of greatness in the series’ uneven final season. Charles Beaumont would do the same for his short classics such as “The Man Who Made Himself” (adapted as “In His Image”), “Perchance to Dream”, “The Howling Man”, and “The Devil, You Say?” (adapted as “Printer’s Devil”), while also contributing such first-rate original scripts as “Long Live Walter Jameson” and “Miniature”. Having also devised the story that would become “Living Doll”, Beaumont was responsible for some of the series’ most frightening pieces. George Clayton Johnson’s scripts and stories were fewer, but the humanity of “A Penny for Your Thoughts”, “Nothing in the Dark”, “Kick the Can”, “The Prime Mover”, and “A Game of Pool” has earned him a place among the most memorable authors who’ve passed through “The Twilight Zone”.

Serling’s work with one of his favorite genre writers didn’t go quite as smoothly as his collaborations with Matheson, Beaumont, and Johnson. He admired Ray Bradbury enough to pay tribute to the author with sly references in “Walking Distance”, “A Stop at Willoughby”, and “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up”, but the men’s working relationship was troubled. Serling wanted Bradbury to contribute scripts from the show’s conception. Bradbury was excited by that prospect. Once the series went into production, Bradbury began accusing Serling of plagiarism in private, citing “Walking Distance” among those he found a bit too Bradbury-esque. Serling later rejected Bradbury’s elaborate first script, “Here There Be Tygers”, for budgetary reasons. “A Miracle of Rare Device” met a similar fate. In the end, only the author’s “I Sing the Body Electric” made it to “The Twilight Zone”, only achieving that after two years of revisions and polite criticisms from Serling. Bradbury’s tale of a robotic grandmother was sweet enough, but failed to capture the heart or awe of the series’ classics. The writer’s stay in the Zone ended there.

Serling and his gang also adapted several stories by outside writers that achieved their greatest renown as locations in “The Twilight Zone”: Lynn Venable’s “Time Enough at Last”, Jerome Bixby’s “It’s a Good Life”, Damon Knight’s “To Serve Man”. Ironically, Serling’s love of prose and talent for screenwriting never translated to success as a writer of short stories or novels outside the television universe he created.




Much of the “Twilight Zone” magic radiates from the deep sense of nostalgia in so many of Rod Serling’s scripts. Rarely was this feeling more palpable than in the series’ fifth episode. In “Walking Distance”, a harried ad man steps through a time portal and returns to his childhood hometown where band concerts are still a summertime staple and the neighborhood carousel still spins. The fictional town of Homewood in “Walking Distance” is a thinly veiled stand-in for Serling’s own hometown of Binghamton. No doubt the hectic schedule of running and writing “The Twilight Zone” left him longing for the laziness of that burg in Broome County, New York. Further inspiration struck when he noticed how similar the back lot at MGM was to his boyhood stomping ground. The carousel is a particularly telling touch as Broome County’s signature landmarks are its six antique merry-go-rounds.