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
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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