The Top 5 Richard Matheson Twilight Zone Episodes
Like many people at the beginning of the pandemic I turned towards doing things that delivered maximum comfort for minimal effort. For me, this was methodically bingeing every episode of The Twilight Zone and rereading some of my favorite horror novels. Along the way I realized the two had some crossover.
Perhaps most famous for his science-fiction/horror novels I Am Legend and The Shrinking Man, Richard Matheson is responsible for several important works of genre fiction over his long and prolific career. From 1959 to 1964, he provided stories for sixteen episodes of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, fourteen as the teleplay writer and two as the author of the short stories on which the episodes were based. Some of his contributions are considered the greatest Twilight Zone episodes of all time.
Here are my top five Matheson-penned episodes of the classic anthology series.
5. A World of His Own
Matheson is a master of the simple yet elegant plot twist. Even though he often deals with the supernatural, nothing he presents is ever completely preposterous in light of the world he creates. This episode is about a playwright who discovers a way to conjure the characters he writes into actual being, so he fashions himself a nearly perfect girlfriend. The problem is his wife finds out about it.
This is one of the few humorous Twilight Zone episodes, and is also notable as the first time Rod Serling appears on camera. Up until this point, his intros and outros were done entirely in voiceover.
4. Little Girl Lost
An absolutely fantastic episode about parallel universes and the awesomeness of physicists, “Little Girl Lost” concerns a couple who finds their daughter and dog have been misplaced in the worst possible sense of the word. Thankfully their friend Bill, a man somewhat familiar with string theory, is able to help out.
This episode is a great example of the kind of slow-burn tension that Matheson and The Twilight Zone were known for, and shows that you don’t need a bunch of fancy special effects to create serious scares.
3. The Last Flight
This is one of the best time-travel stories I’ve ever seen. Simple, subtle, done with the lowest of budgets and without overly fancy special effects, it’s completely dialogue and story-driven. This was the first episode Matheson actually wrote the teleplay for — before this he was just the author of the short stories that inspired two episodes.
In it, a British WWI fighter pilot flies into a storm, loses his bearings, and eventually lands at an American Air Force base forty-two years into the future. After struggling to convince the American soldiers he’s not crazy, the pilot eventually realizes he must play an integral part in the Great War and sets out to right a wrong in his own past.
2. Nightmare at 20,000 Feet
Most would peg this episode as Matheson’s finest Twilight Zone episode, and if I wasn’t such a huge fan of my top choice, I’d be hard pressed to disagree with them. It’s also one of the best Twilight Zone episodes of all time, with the story famously being included in 1983's Twilight Zone: The Movie, recasting the William Shatner part with John Lithgow.
This episode ranks among the most famous of the classic series, with perhaps only “Time Enough at Last” surpassing it in recognizability. In it, a man terrified of flying finds himself the only one who sees a malevolent gremlin/alien/guy-in-a-bear-suit wreaking havoc on the wing of an airborne plane. As easy as it is to make fun of William Shatner these days, he totally nails this part.
1. The Invaders
Most people remember Agnes Moorehead as the shrewish mother-in-law of Darrin in Bewitched, but she’s really a badass actress in her own right and should be counted among the ranks of those like Angela Lansbury.
Long before everyone was losing their marbles over Tom Hanks’ performance in Castaway (and not to take anything away from Hanks — holding a major motion picture alone with nothing but a volley ball to act against is a no small feat), she made her way through an entire episode with nary a spoken line, yet managed to convey disbelief, desperation, terror, and everything in between when her farmhouse is invaded by tiny aliens from another world.
