The Twilight Zone – Episode 3: “The Hitch-Hiker” and “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”

Every week on The Twilight Zone Zone,we go down Donald Liebenson’s list The 26 Episodes We Talk About When We Talk About The Twilight Zone from Vanity Fair, chronologically by release date and compare two episodes and choose which one to recommend. This week we watched “The Hitch-Hiker” and “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.”

By the way, some of you may be wondering, where the episode was last week? Well, last week we released a full episode on Alien Resurrection for the Patreon only! Join us, for all the back catalogue, special episodes, and monthly newsletter! There will even be an additional full movie episode this month!  

From the Article:

“The Hitch-Hiker”

One of The Twilight Zone’s most insinuating nightmares. There are a couple of effective jump starts, but for the most part, this is a slow dread of an episode. Inger Stevens stars as 27-year-old Nan Adams, driving cross-country. Emerging unscathed from a blown-out tire (“By rights . . . somebody should have called for a hearse,” a mechanic tells her), she is haunted by a seemingly omnipresent hitchhiker. You can probably guess where this one’s heading, but like the “shabby, silly-looking scarecrow man” himself, this episode is hard to shake.

“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”

“We are in a time where we fear the other,” Jordan Peele told his audience following the premiere screening of Us at South by Southwest. “Maybe the monster that we’re looking at has our face.” This was a recurring theme on The Twilight Zone—and it reached its bleakest apotheosis in this first-season nightmare, in which an idyllic suburban street runs riot from a creeping paranoia that pits neighbor against neighbor. “For the record,” Serling intones at the episode’s end, “prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy . . . and the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the ‘Twilight Zone.’” It’s like Serling was looking right into our souls.

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There are many paths in life, but which one will you travel down in the Twilight Zone, Zone…

Host: Nic Hoffmann

Panel: Daniel and Matthew Quinn