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Is there a more iconic episode of the original Twilight Zone (airing regularly on SYFY) than “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”?
Sure, you could argue that “To Serve Man” or “Eye of the Beholder” deserves the top spot, but there’s something so timeless about a young William Shatner being gaslit by a plane-wrecking gremlin. Unless you are deathly afraid of air travel and exclusively stick to ground-based transportation, the experience of flying is pretty much universal — as is that sudden stomach drop you get when the aircraft hits a particularly nasty pocket of turbulence. In light of recent events, the fear of taking to the skies has understandably increased at a rate hitherto unseen.
“I was on an airplane, I looked out at all these fluffy clouds, and thought, ‘Gee, what if I saw a guy skiing across that like it was snow?'” Richard Matheson, who adapted his own short story for the classic episode, once recalled in an interview with the Television Academy Foundation when asked about the origin of the idea. “And then when I thought it over, [I realized] that wasn’t very scary, so I turned it into a gremlin out on the wing of the airplane.”
Interestingly, the episode is one of those rare Twilight Zone installments to not contain a clear takeaway message about morality or human behavior. Like Henry Bemis (Burgess Meredith) in “Time Enough at Last,” Shatner’s character is tormented for no discernible reason. He’s a decent man recovering from a nervous breakdown and is tragically deemed insane all over again, even though the final moments prove the gremlin wasn’t just some figment of his imagination. Perhaps the lesson of “Nightmare” is that the universe is, more often than not, a cruel and unforgiving place where not even the good are spared from grotesque acts of fate.
Something that hasn’t quite held up since “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” first aired on CBS in October of 1963, however, is the look of the gremlin, which, in hindsight, is very clearly just man in a slapped-together costume (an uncredited Nick Cravat). One can’t judge the show too harshly for its somewhat cheesy creature design. After all, budgets and production schedules were extremely tight at the time — not to mention the fact that Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling was constantly hamstrung by both network censors and sponsors when it came to what he could and couldn’t show on television.
According to Marc Scott Zicree’s The Twilight Zone Companion, the turbine-hating gremlin almost had a very different look under the purview of original director Jacques Tourneur (“Night Call”) before he was replaced by a young Richard Donner.
The Twilight Zone‘s iconic gremlin from “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” almost had a very different look
While it’s unclear why Tourneur was ultimately removed, Matheson preferred the director’s vision for the monster, stating: “I didn’t think much of that thing on the wing. I wish Jacques Tourneur had directed it, because he had a different idea. The man who was inside that suit looked exactly the way I described him in the story. All they had to do was use him the way he was. Tourneur was going to put a dark suit on him and cover him with diamond dust so that you hardly saw what was out there. This thing looked like a panda bear.”
Based on the writer’s comments, it sounds like he didn’t mind the mask designed by William Tuttle (mastermind of the pig-nosed prosthetics in “Eye of the Beholder”). “If he hadn’t had that costume, if they’d just sort of gnarled him up a little bit, it [would have looked] exactly like the way I described it in my story,” Matheson added during his conversation with the Television Academy Foundation.
For context, here is how the gremlin appears in the original text: “It was a hideously malignant face, a face not human. Its skin was grimy, of a wide-pored coarseness; its nose a squat, discolored lump; its lips misshapen, cracked, forced apart by teeth of a grotesque size and crookedness; its eyes recessed and small — unblinking. All framed by shaggy, tangled hair which sprouted, too, in furry tufts from the man’s ears and nose, birdlike, down across his cheeks.”
Matheson and audiences would have to wait a little over two decades for a truly effective interpretation of the gremlin in 1985’s Twilight Zone: The Movie, which featured a re-adaptation of “Nightmare” helmed by George Miller and starring John Lithgow. Unfortunately for Matheson, the cinematic segment had the opposite problem of its small screen predecessor: a great-looking creature, but a disappointing narrative.
“The monster in the movie was much better, although I didn’t care for the way the story was done,” Matheson told TAF. “Lithgow is a wonderful actor and he did the best he could, but I think he was asked to do an impossible job, to start at 100% hysteria and work your way up from that. Whereas when Bill Shatner did it, he was trying to control himself the whole time because he’d had a mental breakdown. I think it was much more gripping that way.”
Classic episodes of The Twilight Zone air regularly on SYFY. Click here for complete scheduling info!
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