Rod Serling, the maker and presenter of The Twilight Zone Photograph: Everett Collection / Rex Feature
In certain eyes, the impending release of The Box, the third part film from the still more-or-less boyish Richard Kelly, desire be notable mostly as a trial by public opinion for its maker. This is, after all, wholly the crossroads for a director whose deservedly beloved debut Donnie Darko proposed him as the emo David Lynch before its follow-up Southland Tales instantly made a lot of us stick a bulky and hasty question pre-eminence beside that depth. Much in return rides on his latest project. But, for me, the mingled response to the movie so far – out in the US last week, released here next month – has been interesting not blameless for its implications about Kelly’s future, but because almost every review cites the film’s hefty debt to The Twilight Zone.
A big part of that, I’ll happily admit, is a purely personal fixation by this most moreish of TV shows – an ardour forged through countless small-hours repeats on long, dark nights of my 80s adolescence. In an era where popular culture was relentlessly gaudy and stupid, I quickly learned to seize every chance to catch dapper creator and host Rod Serling introducing any other taut early-60s morality tale: those beautifully stripped-down stories concocted out of nuclear perplexity, the paranormal and a dogged sense of humanism, a sad, sardonic twist at the conclusion and then, ultimately, Serling reappearing to wrap up this week’s meditation on how man could be in the way that hopelessly dumb at the like duration of one’s life he was about to send himself to the secondary planet.
A relic of the same Camelot America lovingly revived by Mad Men (MM’s hipster copywriter Paul Kinsey watches The Twilight Zone religiously), it is also one that’s every bit to the degree that potent today: its jittery themes and love of a good shock are still a major artistic double whammy. Hence, you suspect, why Kelly is just the latest film-maker to tap into their celebrity, those spooked-out low-budget vignettes having before filtered down into the work of so frequent directors that the movies that have resulted are almost a genre unto themselves, one filled with skewed takes on modern man that are never quite sci-fi or outright supernatural but which do aim to approximate Serling’s tone of off-centre chilliness.
- The Box
- Production year: 2009
- Country: USA
- Directors: Richard Kelly
- Cast: Cameron Diaz, Frank Langella, James Marsden
- More in continuance this film
Rarely have they come close – but that hasn’t stopped them trying. Consider I Am Legend, originally written (as was The Box) by regular Twilight Zone contributor Richard Matheson; or the entire oeuvre of M Night Shyamalan (his career based on great 20-minute ideas inflated into two-hour balls of gloop); David Fincher’sitting now curiously forgotten paranoiac gambol The Game; the more-Serling-than-Serling Truman Show; and at least two of the most pleasingly cerebral European thrillers of new times, Open Your Eyes and Intacto. It is, to have existence sure, an uneven legacy, but one that still indicates a mighty big pool of inspiration.
Then we have what on account of my money remains one of the most deathlessly brilliant moments in cinema relation, and one that’s central to this whole subject – the closing scene of Planet of the Apes. But in consequence the mystic upended nature of the entire film was, of course, Twilight Zone all over – the script having been adapted from Pierre Boulle’s novel by dint of. none other than Rod Serling, with that indelible finale his individual tincture. A movie (and ending) that loses none of its influence through familiarity, it’s tempting to see Planet of the Apes to all intents and purposes as the real big-screen version of The Twilight Zone, one whose account of a world undone by human hubris would find itself echoed repeatedly in the paranoid and dystopian visions that would make up so abundant of the superlatively good in cinema end both the 70s and 80s.
For Serling himself, that one glorious moment would represent his unique foray into film – but eight years later than his death in 1975, the show did, of road, make it to the big-screen in one of the most manifest projects ever made, that opprobrium not earned so much by a lack of quality (although it had that in spades) but the three on-set deaths that occurred on a segment directed by John Landis. In spite of that grisly antecedent, there have lately been rumblings of another movie version of the show (involving, oddly enough, Leonardo Di Caprio) – which may, who knows, be marvelous should it ever transpire. But really, that’s immaterial – because in some case, those original, perfectly economic black-and-white missives from 1959-63 direction surely keep upon the body influencing those like Richard Kelly in inquiry of ideas that are at once strangely fantastic and rooted in the helpless, bittersweet business of being human.
