On "The Invaders" (1961)
It wasn't jump scares or fear tactics that made "The Twilight Zone" terrifying...
This is one of the out-of-the-way places, the unvisited places, bleak, wasted, dying. This is a farmhouse, handmade, crude, a house without electricity or gas, a house untouched by progress.
This is the woman who lives in the house, a woman who's been alone for many years, a strong, simple woman whose only problem up until this moment has been that of acquiring enough food to eat, a woman about to face terror, which is even now coming at her from ...the Twilight Zone.
So goes Rod Serling’s opening narration for “The Invaders” (episode 15, season 2 of The Twilight Zone) as we’re introduced to our silent, nameless, female protagonist. Maybe I’m already nostalgic for spoopy szn, but I felt compelled to put something together in honor of this delightfully strange story from a staple of New Years Eve melancholy marathon programming.
“The Invaders” is one of the most recognizable and lauded episodes in the archive and it exemplifies what made The Twilight Zone so scary, even til today. The show rarely delivers its frights by way of jump scares, viscera, or even the ghastly. Instead, The Twilight Zone relies heavily (I mean heavily) on irony.
I like Wikipedia’s definition of Irony: “(from Ancient Greek εἰρωνεία / eirōneía 'dissimulation, feigned ignorance'), in its broadest sense, [irony] is the juxtaposition of what on the surface appears to be the case and what is actually the case or to be expected…”
So it is with nearly every notable Twilight Zone episode. A particular expectation is set in the better part of the show’s runtime—only to be reversed or dispelled in the final minutes, turning the established diegesis upside down. This is the terrifying magic of The Twilight Zone. By episode’s end, it’s unlikely that you’re afraid or even appalled by the occasional grotesquery. Rather, you’re unsettled, questioning everything you thought you knew, and perplexed by what you couldn’t see coming. In literary terms, we call this kind of narrative resolution the denouement. Or, in Italian prosody, la volta, the rhetorical turn that arrives at the end of a sonnet (often parabolic). This is what made the show so special and consistently surprising.
The series, having premiered in 1959 and run for five seasons on CBS, I consider a short-fiction anthology as influential as any in 20th century literary canon. So many episodes in this original run are as memorable and profound as your favorite Guy de Maupassant short-fiction. And, of course, the name most synonymous with The Twilight Zone, was that of its creator and proto-showrunner Rod Serling. I’d go so far as to argue that Serling is so beloved and so synonymous with the show, that many (myself included) forget the variety of behind-the-scenes talents employed by his production company to make it so original and haunting.
All of that to say: it came as some surprise when, late last night, I caught this classic episode on God-knows-what-channel and I found that it hadn’t been written by Rod Serling. “The Invaders” was written by science-fiction and horror legend (pun intended) Richard Matheson.
It’s very likely that, even if you don’t recognize his name, you would recognize some of his most popular works. Maybe you’ve seen the 2007 adaptation of his novel I Am Legend, starring Will Smith—a novel that would come to define the zombie genre. Or perhaps you’ve seen his Vincent Price film The Last Man on Earth? Maybe you’ve seen other of his notable Twilight Zone episodes (of which he wrote 16) like “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” and “Nick of Time” (both starring William Shatner)? Matheson has proven oddly influential on both late 20th and early 21st century media. Born in New Jersey in 1926, Matheson lived a good long life, passing on June 23, 2013 at his home in L.A. He was 87.
At the time of his passing, I’d seen I Am Legend, but had no idea it’d been adapted from a novel. It wouldn’t be for another few months, while driving through the night on an unlit Texan backroad, that I’d really learn the name Richard Matheson.
I think it must’ve been the autumn of 2013. I’d planned a trip to Texas to be with my beloved for her birthday. It was really one of the loveliest and romantic weeks of my life. She had insisted on taking this city-boy out on a hike along one of Texas’s national park trails. So we did and it was a wonderful experience, the first of many scenic hikes. For the long trip there and back, she’d packed a yellowback anthology of sci-fi stories (leant to us, I think, by friends Dirk and Elizabeth). So, on the way back, driving through the dark, she pulled out the book for an impromptu storytime (the first of many). I said find the shortest one! Not because we were crunched for time, but because I still believe brevity is the soul of wit. She flipped through the book and the shortest story in the collection seemed to be this one called Born of Man and Woman by Richard Matheson.
Born of Man and Woman was Matheson’s first “professional sale” (he was twenty-four). It would later headline his first collection. It’s a very short story (not even two pages) available here if you’d like to read it before I give a brief synopsis.
The story is written as a kind of first person diary, written or dictated in skewed English by a deformed child who’s been chained to a wall and confined in its parents basement. The child is a source of great shame to its parents, who beat it whenever it manages to escape the basement or be seen by outsiders. Eventually, the child resists one of its beatings and this terrifies its father. Suddenly aware of its power, the child resolves not to take it anymore:
“I will show them. I will do what I did that once. I will screech and laugh loud. I will run on the walls. Last I will hang head down by all my legs and laugh and drip green all over until they are sorry they didn’t be nice to me. If they try to beat me again I’ll hurt them. I wilL”
I loved it. Driving down those dark, unlit roads—the story was short, chilling, and creepy enough to make me shudder and smile at its cleverness. Context is key, of course. Maybe you won’t find it so strange and chilling while reading it on your phone or desktop with twenty tabs up, a Youtube ad for Grammarly playing in the background, and your Spotify playlist open. But having my beloved read me a scary story while doing 80 down a dark Texas road totally did something for me. Or to me.
This is how I came to know Matheson. And it hadn’t dawned on me, until last night, a decade later, that he’d also written this and several other Twilight Zone episodes I’ve seen a million times over.
“The Invaders” is a relatively simple story. Serling introduces us to this woman in her rustic garb, in her rustic house, tending to her rustic chores. We imagine perhaps that she’s a country woman, perhaps a frontierswoman, someone from another time and place apart from our technological (medieval) age. We watch her cutting some vegetables for a stew with one of three knives hung on the wall (the second knife proves dull, so she uses the third). Night has fallen and she’s alone. Maybe, we assume, she’s a widow. A poor, defenseless, old woman.
Just as we begin to make assumptions about her backstory, a terrible, alien noise shatters the mundanity. It’s so loud and jarring, she has to cover her ears. After she’s regained her composure, she stumbles outside to discover a flying saucer, the size of a large drone, has landed outside. She regards it with trepidatious curiosity as its hatch opens and slowly from the silvery disc descend two small robot-like beings. The two strange visitors quickly prove hostile when they train their lasers on our poor protagonist-lady.
The lasers leave horrible welts over her body. She escapes their torments, diving back into the house and locking the door behind her. But, after tending to her wounds, she realizes the invaders have managed to get inside.
Here I should note the music. In what we might consider classic (or typical) horror orchestration, you’ll hear the high, rolling tritones of a piano, the low hum of a bowed cello, the odd percussion of a xylophone, and the screechy, gothic strings of a violin—all against the terrifying silence and Agnes Moorehead’s occasional gasp of pain or despair. The discordant score creates more tension, contributes to some sense that our old woman is in grave danger and that these tiny invaders could be anywhere, waiting to strike her down. What do they want? Why are they there? The cinematography too is a fascinating interplay of light and shadow—something I associate with the stark and haunting German Expressionist films of the 1920s and 30s.
The rest of the episode is an odd game of cat and mouse without dialogue, where the mice seem to be hunting the cat and the cat finds itself on its back paws, playing defense. The woman grabs a giant, wooden spoon and begins swatting at the dark corners of her home in hopes she’ll catch one of these lilliputian vermin. For a moment, things go quiet. Maybe she’s got them or scared them off? That’s when she notices the sharpest of her three knives is missing from the wall.
If you’ve never seen “The Invaders” and want to see for yourself, you can watch it for free here. I’ll say that it all boils down to one final confrontation. Who will survive? And will we finally understand who or what those invaders are and why they’ve come to torment her?
Yes. Yes we will.
After the grand reveal, Rod Serling concludes the episode with his iconic closing narration:
These are the invaders, the tiny beings from the tiny place called Earth, who would take the giant step across the sky to the question marks that sparkle and beckon from the vastness of the universe only to be imagined.
The invaders...who found out that a one-way ticket to the stars beyond has the ultimate price tag...
And we have just seen it entered in a ledger that covers all the transactions in the universe...a bill stamped "Paid in Full" and to be found unfiled in... the Twilight Zone.
Fascinating to note too is that Yuri Gagarin, first man in space, would not launch into orbit for another few months (April 12, 1961). “The Invaders”, which aired in January of that year, had, like a handful of other bold sci-fi writers, envisioned a future in which the U.S. military had already undertaken full scale exploration of a universe heretofore unknown.
It’s this topsy-turvy irony, again, that unsettles us. At first it’s the terrible fear that we (the woman) might be invaded and terrorized by tiny, hostile robots. Then we realize, we (the human invaders) are the terror, and that there might exist in the universe giant, brutish versions of human beings that we are ultimately powerless against. Evocative in some sense of Attack on Titan, season 1 (only!).
The power dynamic shifts radically with our perspective in one of the finest examples of a narrative legerdemain in television history. We come to realize we’ve been pulling for the wrong team, and that we’ve unwittingly hoped for the demise of our very own (American) representatives on an alien planet.
But maybe that’s the point. The U.S. Air Force are the invaders here, the belligerents. It just so happens that the “helpless woman” who’s been victimized by her invaders, isn’t as helpless as she seems—and now it’s the American aliens who’ve proven vulnerable and helpless despite their technology and their ambition to conquer and colonize.
Like the deliberately whitewashed 1997 film adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s 1959 sci-fi epic Starship Troopers, we’ve sided with them that look like us, “our own,” and completely disregarded that “our own” have already been militarized into a fascistic and genocidal regime.
Both ‘The Invaders” and the ‘97 film adaptation of Starship Troopers rely on irony to trouble our preconceived notions of us and them. When those channels are scrambled and lines are blurred, whether by clever story-telling or world events, the ensuing uncertainty is one akin to pure terror—that is, the sense that there is some greater and malefic force puppeteering the moving parts of your world, whose hand remains imperceptible, but whose intervening reach cannot be denied. At such moments, you begin to realize you’ve always been at the mercy of...