The anthology format of The Twilight Zone (airing regularly on SYFY) made the iconic series a revolving door of great talent from the beginning. Whether we’re talking about writers, craftspeople, or actors, the show was always bringing in new artists to nail each episode, but while we can go on forever about the guest stars who made the show great, you don’t always hear so much about the guest directors who stepped in for single episodes.
That’s a shame, because in one special case, The Twilight Zone drafted a filmmaker who was already a horror icon well before he joined the series, and the result is a classic episode.
How “Night Call” got a legendary horror director
One of the final episodes of the original Twilight Zone series, “Night Call” was scripted by the great Richard Matheson, based on his own short story “Long Distance Call” (originally published as “Sorry, Right Number”). The story follows a paraplegic woman (Gladys Cooper) who starts receiving mysterious phone calls one night, then discovers that those phone calls might be supernatural in origin, and connected to her own dark past. It’s a wonderfully creepy, atmospheric story, that remains one of Matheson’s most influential, and the writer had a very specific director in mind to bring it to life.
To adapt “Long Distance Call” into “Night Call,” Matheson suggested Jacques Tourneur, a feature film director who’d previously directed early horror classics like Cat People and Night of the Demon. Producer Bert Granet, who’d worked with Tourneur on the 1948 drama Berlin Express, took the recommendation and hired Tourneur.
Though we perhaps remember him best today for his horror efforts (Cat People is one of the great atmospheric horror films of the 1940s, and it’s far from his only genre triumph), Tourneur was a versatile director who made all kinds of films, from dramas to crime stories to adventure pictures. He was also, by the time The Twilight Zone gig came around, an experienced TV director who’d handled episodes of everything from General Electric Theater to Northwest Passage to Bonanza. Despite that experience, though, there was concern among Twilight Zone leadership that, for all his talent and experience with genre directing, Tourneur might not be able to do adapt to the rigors of the show’s production. He quickly proved them wrong.
“There was some doubt at the time as to whether to use Tourneur, because they thought he was a movie director and couldn’t handle the scheduling,” Richard Matheson said in Marc Scott Zicree’s The Twilight Zone Companion. “As it turned out, he, to my knowledge, shot the shortest shooting schedule for a half hour — I think it was 28 hours.”
So Tourneur turned in the episode on time, and The Twilight Zone got one of its creepiest stories, shortly before the series bowed out after five seasons.
“Night Call” airs Thursday, May 1 on SYFY. Check the Schedule for more details.
