Our family gathered around the television for
episodes of The Twilight Zone in
the 1980s. It was appointment viewing for us—right up there with the The
Wonderful World of Disney on
Saturday evenings and Spielberg's great (but short-lived) Amazing Stories.
The prologue to 1983's Twilight Zone: The Movie posits one potential response to the question of defining frightening narratives:
That scene took me by surprise as a youngster, and I still experience a delicious little thrill when Aykroyd's character turns away from the camera. It's scary, to be sure, but it doesn't scratch the surface of what I consider the heart of true horror. I didn't know it back then, of course, but watching all of those great episodes of The Twilight Zone (many of which were re-imaginings of classic original episodes) would kindle my interest in one of the horror field's most frightening tropes: the loss of personal identity.
When I was ten years old, I watched Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) with my mom on Halloween night. The film had a profound effect on me, and I distinctly recall sitting on the couch in silence, utterly absorbed by the events playing out on the screen.
Here was an ordinary American town filled with regular people who had somehow simply...well, simply lost themselves.
Two scenes in particular struck a chord with me. The first happens early in the film, when Uncle Ira mechanically mows his lawn. His rigid posture, saccharine smile, and robotic gait exude an aura of the artificial. It's still a very unsettling scene. A few scenes later, we get the dialogue hinting at Uncle Ira's existential dilemma:
Dr. Miles Bennell: Seriously, what's the
trouble?
Becky Driscoll: It's my cousin.
Bennell: Wilma? What's the matter with her?
Driscoll: She has a...I guess you'd call it a
delusion. You know her uncle?
Bennell: Uncle Ira? Sure. I'm his doctor.
Driscoll: She's got herself thinking he isn't
her uncle.
Bennell: How do you mean? That they're not
really related?
Driscoll: She thinks he's an impostor or
something...someone who only looks like Ira.
That exchange in Dr. Bennell's office chilled me. In that moment, I experienced Sigmund Freud's notion of the uncanny, of those things classified as fearful or frightful, and which might defamiliarize the comfortable. It was a novel insight for me, that the ones I loved the most could somehow be anything other than exactly who they had always been. The juxtaposition of the familiarity and comfort embodied in the persons of my family, friends, or teachers with an emotionless, alien impostor hit me hard.
I recall feeling a deep sense of dread, shortly accompanied by a pervasive aura of suspicion.
I recall feeling a deep sense of dread, shortly accompanied by a pervasive aura of suspicion.
But director Don Siegel wasn't finished there. He elevates the stakes in the film's second act, shifting the focus away from the notion of the uncanny around us and putting it squarely on the idea of the uncanny surfacing within us.
There's a haunting sequence when, right there in the center of Rockwellian Santa Mira, California, the already-turned city officials begin to distribute pods in a systematic attempt to convert the entire town. The creeping suspicion that was once focused on the family then becomes something altogether different, as the idea of pervasive community persecution bubbles up to the surface.
There's no escaping this fate, this scene says. It's inevitable, so why try to resist it?
But Bennell does resist it, right up until that terrific fly-away shot when he's bouncing from car to car on the Pacific Highway shouting, "They're here! They're among us!"
Bennell's professional, rationale facade crumbles, and he's dismissed as delusional. Perhaps he hadn't lost himself to the pods, but his identity had been shattered all the same. It's not until we see the revelation in the final scene that the threat from the outside is real, and that humanity will take decisive action, that Bennell finally exhales.
And we could too, thankfully...
Losing the grasp on personal identity is a form of terror. Whether that sense of loss is physical and grotesque, as is the case in David Cronenberg's excellent The Fly (1986), or more personal and realistic, as we see in the film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), the sense of human diminution is palpable.
Radiohead's Thom Yorke distills the dread that accompanies this feeling of alienation in the song "Karma Police":
There's a haunting sequence when, right there in the center of Rockwellian Santa Mira, California, the already-turned city officials begin to distribute pods in a systematic attempt to convert the entire town. The creeping suspicion that was once focused on the family then becomes something altogether different, as the idea of pervasive community persecution bubbles up to the surface.
There's no escaping this fate, this scene says. It's inevitable, so why try to resist it?
But Bennell does resist it, right up until that terrific fly-away shot when he's bouncing from car to car on the Pacific Highway shouting, "They're here! They're among us!"
Bennell's professional, rationale facade crumbles, and he's dismissed as delusional. Perhaps he hadn't lost himself to the pods, but his identity had been shattered all the same. It's not until we see the revelation in the final scene that the threat from the outside is real, and that humanity will take decisive action, that Bennell finally exhales.
And we could too, thankfully...
Losing the grasp on personal identity is a form of terror. Whether that sense of loss is physical and grotesque, as is the case in David Cronenberg's excellent The Fly (1986), or more personal and realistic, as we see in the film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), the sense of human diminution is palpable.
Radiohead's Thom Yorke distills the dread that accompanies this feeling of alienation in the song "Karma Police":
And for a minute there, I lost myself, I lost myself...
Are there effective ways of keeping these monsters at bay? Perhaps we can find a solution in the guise of monuments, those artifacts of the personal sacred that we all leave behind, and which offer at least some hopeful suggestion toward preserving our sense of identity...
