As I’ve learned this year, there are still people out there who haven’t seen “The Twilight Zone” and are not aware of the often brilliant and shocking twists hiding within the mysteries that master storyteller Rod Serling composed in the fifties and sixties. As many know “The Twilight Zone” is one of the best and more influential anthology series of all time, a show that was at times scary, funny, and compelling while also serving a purpose to comment on issues like poverty, death, the war, the holocaust, crime, infidelity, greed, and the debate of heaven and hell along with theology and the flaws of the human soul.
At rare times it was merely a form of escapism, and not every episode was a bonafide masterpiece, but almost all of the time Serling’s seminal science fiction show was about something. It had a statement to make, it was important and that’s why it continues to be look at as the standard for modern pop culture influencing thousands of television shows, authors, and musicians across the world and is basically larger than life. It’s garnered two pretty underwhelming feature films, a respectable but mediocre eighties reboot, and a very bad, and quickly cancelled millennium reboot, all of which have paled in comparison to Serling’s original series. While we left out many good episodes of Serling’s science fiction horror series, these are the episodes we consider the best of the best and our absolute favorites.
Warning: If you’ve yet to fully indulge in the entire legacy of the series, be cautious there will be spoilers within this list as we offer up our ten favorite episodes of “The Twilight Zone” of all time.
While “Halloweentown High” really isn’t the most subtle of films with monsters and knights acting as symbolism for civil rights, it does excel in fully realizing the character of Marnie who is no longer a student and now just a matriarch of other students looking to make their way in to the human world. Kimberly J. Brown is as good and charming as ever in the role of heroine Marnie who takes it upon herself to play civil rights leader by insisting some of the monsters from Halloweentown should be allowed to go to human school for the sake of diversity and equality. The catch is by Halloween if she hasn’t made progress, her powers will be stripped away. This allows for a more open forum for new characters, all of whom have their own likable traits and quirks. One if a goblin, another is a werewolf, another a wood nymph, and so on. Marnie plays more of a protector this time watching over the new exchange students, and falling for a new guy named Cody.
While 1998’s “Halloweentown” was a very cute and entertaining little Halloween movie, the sequel “Kalabar’s Revenge” is much darker and slightly more adult in tone and atmosphere this time around. What’s interesting is you can sense the seeds for “The Witches of Waverly Place” within this sequel, and it’s not a far off prospect that what with Kimberly J. Brown getting older with each movie, Disney wanted to pass the wand over with a new franchise about magic and wizards.