Films That Have Found Their Way into the Twilight Zone

By Lauren Davis
Didn’t get your full The Twilight Zone fix from the New Year’s marathon? Here are films that draw their inspiration from episodes of the show, and try to recapture Rod Serling’s sense of the unknown.

In addition to inspiring numerous TV episodes (including the original Star Trek pilot “The Cage,” which is based on the episode “People Are the Same Everywhere”), The Twilight Zone spawned its own anthological movie in 1983. But these movies were inspired by individual episodes of the series:

“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” (1960): A power outage strikes a small suburban town and the residents find that not only has the electricity been cut off, but the phone lines and vehicles have stopped working as well, completely isolating the town. The residents become convinced that this is the sign of an imminent alien invasion, and become suspicious of one another as lights and cars start coming on at random. Soon riots ensue, and it is revealed to the audience that this is, in fact, part of an alien plot. The aliens sow the seeds of suspicion and then leave the humans to destroy each other.
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