"The Twilight Zone" The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street (1960)

User Rating:

9.0/10   

Director:

Ron Winston

Writer:

Rod Serling (writer)

TV Series:

"The Twilight Zone" (1959)

Original Air Date:

4 March 1960 (Season 1, Episode 22)

Genre:

Drama | Fantasy | Horror | Mystery | Sci-Fi | Thriller

Plot:

On a peaceful city street, strange occurrences and mysterious people stokes the residents' paranoid to disastrous intensity. |

Plot Keywords:

Mob Action | Car | Power Outage | Light | Narration

Cast

Rod Serling	...	Narrator (voice)
Claude Akins	...	Steve Brand
Barry Atwater	...	Les Goodman
Jack Weston	...	Charlie Farnsworth
Jan Handzlik	...	Tommy
Amzie Strickland	...	Woman
Burt Metcalfe	...	Don Martin
Mary Gregory	...	Sally
Jason Johnson	...	Man
Anne Barton	...	Myra Brand
Leah Waggner	...	Mrs. Goodman (as Lea Waggner)
Joan Sudlow	...	Old Woman
Ben Erway	...	Pete Van Horn
Lyn Guild	...	Mrs. Farnsworth
Sheldon Allman	...	Alien

Runtime:

25 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.33 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Westrex Recording System)

Filming Locations:

Warner Bros. Studios, Warner Brothers Burbank Studios - 4000 Warner Boulevard, Burbank, California, USA

Company:

Cayuga Productions

Quotes:

Narrator: The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own for the children, and the children yet unborn.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Blackout (2007/II)

Paranoia Personified

Another of the truly classic episodes. It is set on an everyman street in an everyman town. This is on purpose because it's made to show how everyone is a friendly neighbor, washing cars, mowing lawns, doing that day to day stuff. All of a sudden, the power goes out. Not the usual transformer malfunction, but power to everything, even gas engines. It makes no sense to them. Then a boy makes a fatal mistake. He relates a science fiction story and gets them all worked up. Soon they are turning on each other. One engine starts and that person is seen as a threat. They think the monsters are within their mini-culture. It then escalates until each of them begins to believe terrible things about their recently loving friends. A shooting occurs and the world turns into chaos.

I guess a criticism of this would be that it is really simplistic and contrived. How would you get people to act predictably. There are way too many variables, way too many possibilities that could go wrong. Of course, we need to suspend the disbelief to allow it to captivate us. It's one of the most famous of the Twilight Zones and is even anthologized in high school textbooks.