While Obsession made money hand over fist, as Backrooms enjoyed the biggest ever box office take for an A24 release, the questions began to emerge: Where, when, and how would the next sleeper horror hit take root? Would it come from another up-and-coming director following Obsession’s Curry Barker and Backrooms’ Kane Parsons down the YouTube-to-big-screen pipeline? Would it, like the labyrinthine, extradimensional realm at the center of Parsons’ film, hail from the digital campfire tales of online creepypasta? Could it be the major-studio level-up from a filmmaker who’d helped kick off the past decade-plus of lo-fi scary movies, i.e., It Follows’ David Robert Mitchell and his time-traveling survival thriller, The End Of Oak Street?
Or, here’s a more unorthodox suggestion: What if the inspiration lay in a TV anthology that’s been around for so long, it already fired the imaginations of (and prompted one high-profile homage from) a whole other filmmaking generation?
Mitchell may have been the only director namechecking The Twilight Zone on the press trail in recent months, but the influence of Rod Serling’s immortal genre series could be felt throughout the summer movie season. In the doors between worlds they open up, in the monkey’s paws they present to their protagonists, even in their very titles, these movies evoke not just the general makeup, mood, and sometimes even the source material of classic Twilight Zone episodes. For what are the subreddits that helped popularize the concept of the backrooms if not our modern-day equivalents of the pulp magazines that Serling and company often turned to for the seeds of their next script?
There’s never a bad time to delve into The Twilight Zone or one of its three subsequent follow-ups—especially as we round the bend from this summer of genre potboilers and into the Halloween season that acolytes of Samhain and retailers alike now insist on kicking off in Spetember. If Obsession, Backrooms, Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma, The End Of Oak Street, or It Ends have whet your appetite for this sort of thing, here are five places to start with a TV show whose relevance to this day is, to quote one of its iconic intros, as vast as space and as timeless as infinity.
Recommended if you like Obsession: “The Chaser” (season 1, episode 31)
A more comedic take on the “be careful what you wish for” scenario within Barker’s breakout, this transmission from the home stretch of The Twilight Zone’s first season puts the sweaty desperation of its protagonist front-and-center. When we first see George Grizzard in the role of love-sick Roger Shackleforth, he’s positively melting under the collective glare of studio lights and the supporting players lined up to use the phone booth he’s camped out in. Broad caricature suits the short-story structure of The Twilight Zone, and in an episode where the love-potion-peddling mystery man goes by the name Professor A. Daemon, both Grizzard and Patricia Barry (as the unnaturally besotted object of his affection, Leila) play their roles to the hilt. And if all that pesky ambiguity in Obsession got you down, never fear: Barry’s big reaction to the magical mickey Roger slips Leila makes it plenty clear who’s the monster and who’s the victim here. [Erik Adams]
Recommended if you like Backrooms: “Little Girl Lost” (season 3, episode 26)
So you think empty department-store hallways that don’t conform to what we understand as the laws of physics are scary, huh? Well here’s something really scary: Tuning into a rerun of “Little Girl Lost” while it’s already underway and becoming just as unnerved as Ruth (Sarah Marshall) and Chris Miller (Robert Sampson) by the sounds of a sobbing, disembodied voice of a 6-year-old who can’t find her mom and dad. Adapted by Richard Matheson from his story of the same name, “Little Girl Lost” brought inexplicable cosmic terror (and its inextricable ties to parenthood) into benign suburban spaces in a way that wouldn’t be equaled until Poltergeist. Inventing no-clipping decades before there was a video game to no-clip through, the episode uses its chalked-out portal to another dimension to much more urgent ends than the one Chiwetel Ejiofor traces with painter’s tape in Backrooms. Though “Little Girl Lost” winds up having the opposite of that movie’s main problem: It loses its power to frighten once our POV goes through the portal. [Erik Adams]
Recommended if you like The End Of Oak Street: “Once Upon A Time” (season 3, episode 13)
Don’t you hate accidentally stepping into another century? In “Once Upon A Time,” Buster Keaton plays Woodrow, a grumpy janitor grousing about the speed of life and cost of living in 1890. By chance, he happens across a time travel device that brings him to the then-present day of 1962, where city life is much more costly and chaotic, and he’s desperate to fix the broken helmet to get back to the end of the 19th century. The episode is an endearing tribute to the silent era when Keaton was one of the reigning silent clowns of the cinema, but it’s also a cautionary tale of how we tend to romanticize the past and think things were always better back then. His clock isn’t wound back quite as far as the family in The End Of Oak Street’s—but you needn’t go all the way to the Mesozoic era to return to the future with a newfound appreciation for normalcy. [Monica Castillo]
Recommended if you like It Ends: “Five Characters In Search Of An Exit” (season 3, episode 14)
In a puzzling scenario, five different characters–an army major, a ballerina, a clown, a bagpiper, and a hobo–are stuck in a huge cylinder they can’t quite escape from. They are never hungry, have no memory of how they got there, or what their lives were like before the cylinder. All the major knows is that he must escape to get some answers. Alex Ullom’s feature debut It Ends shares DNA with this classic Twilight Zone puzzler, except this time, it’s four young characters in a car that doesn’t need gas and they don’t need food, but the road they’re on goes on for what seems like forever. In both stories, the characters try to rationalize their impossible situations. Have they died? Is this purgatory, or worse, hell? But how each character deals with this dismaying realization of their dire situation is what makes the story so memorable. Whether they rage against it or lie down to accept their fate, it’s a question posed to the audience as well: How would you react learning the life you led is now over and you’re stuck in a perpetual waiting room? [Monica Castillo]
Recommended if you like Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma: “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” (season 1, episode 4)
Maybe this one’s a stretch, but go with us for a second: An older actress living in seclusion and obsessing over the past as captured on the silver screen? It’s the logline for Sunset Boulevard, yes, but it’s also not too dissimilar to how Hannah Einbinder finds Gillian Anderson in Camp Miasma, no? Of course, what separates grand dames Barbara Jean Trenton and Billy Presley from Norma Desmond are the ways in which the barriers between their worlds and the one in the pictures are genuinely, physically breaking down. A ringing endorsement for leaving the past in the past, “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” holds off its more fantastical elements until the very last minute, a surprise delivered at a time when The Twilight Zone was still developing its reputation for pulling the rug out from under its audience. [Erik Adams]
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