As a fan of Rod Serling’s seminal, damn-near-perfect experiment in fiction, ‘The Twilight Zone,’ I am always thankful for the way I first encountered it. When I was young, TZ was either on late at night (which made my basement room even more creepy and tomb-like) or early in the morning (which gave everything a dreamlike, disconnected feeling.) Seeing these morality plays in black and white, on a vintage Magnavox TV, at strange times made the show even more alienating, more engaging and more personally haunting than it already was, leading to today’s macabre query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) still finds ‘A Kind Of A Stopwatch’ utterly chilling, asking: What story or series gave you the strongest, most disturbing, disconnected feeling?
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As much as I love the Twilight Zone, the black-and-white nature made it seem.. less real?.. to me at the time I caught it in syndication. Sure, the stories are winners, and Serling’s narration spot on, but what truly affected me was the X-Files, preferably the stand-alone monster-of-the-week stories.
Probably the first time I saw “Ghostbusters” as a kid going through chemo, sitting up in bed in a dark hospital room while heavy drugs flowed through my system (including both a strong painkiller and the remnants of anesthesia). I loved the movie, but the whole experience was very, very surreal.
One that comes to mind is X-Files. I was just perfect age for it at the time.
Honestly for me it was a film I don’t even necessarily consider a good one, at least not a favorite, and have not watched since the few times I did when it came out when I was a young lad of 14. This would be 2001’s “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence”. The whole film was slightly unnerving in its core concepts and painted a bleak future for humanity. However the part that really overwhelmed me was the very end. Mankind’s existence and influence is literally buried in an avalanche of the ages, a relic for more advanced races of the cosmos to idly reflect on in passing like we would ants. I would liken the feeling I had to a full-body pain experienced in an out of body sense; my soul hurt from its new found smallness.
Yeah, I get that. That final sequence with Frances O’Connor? Heart-rending…
This year I read Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle, the end left me feeling like this for a long while. I actually recall having to read Douglas Adams to come back down from it.