The Invaders: Ringside Report The Twilight Zone Review

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By William Kozy

As always, I thank the Twilight Zone fan page members on Facebook and writers who participated in my survey in which I ask, “What is your favorite episode of the original Twilight Zone series?” “The Invaders” have taken over 15th place with 135 votes thus far. Apparently, this was Rod Serling’s favorite episode from an outside writer.

 

Opening Narration:

“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.”

Probably the first notable aspect of this episode that people mention is the nearly complete absence of dialogue. I find it interesting that we appreciate the cleverness of the lack of dialogue from the main character which purposefully served the logic of the twist ending, that logic being since she is who she is, she WOULDN’T speak English! And yet how many movies and TV shows do we simply accept the notion of spoken English on alien planets for convention’s sake, that is, so we don’t have to watch subtitles while listening to a made-up language devised by the production. It’s just a way for us to step into the story easily, and smart alecks over the years have come to accept that as well and not cry out, “Hey how’d they learn English anyway if it’s a far away planet?” But here in “The Invaders” that illogic we’ve all accepted over the years, even from other episodes of this very same series, i.e., “Third From The Sun”, we’ve now dispensed with, and flip-flopped over to the logical perspective. It functions as a sort of little bonus accompanying the twist ending. We don’t really care this time that the show avoided having her speak English to support the twist. We don’t say, “Well why’d they have to do that? I’ve seen a lotta movies where they speak English on other planets?!” because we get the mindset—we get that the twist was the point of the episode and so we welcome all other supporting factors despite the inconsistency of this issue in the sci-fi genre.

So we open with an older haggard woman cooking and stirring a pot on a stove top. It’s a big pot, almost a cauldron, and it’s emitting enough vapor to remind us of a witch’s brew. Even the old woman makes a disgusted face at what she’s cooking. Actress Agnes Moorehead plays her with a laudable willingness to look unappealing, bedraggled and ugly wincing in pain, even drooling…and yet something about her performance at times seems so darned elegant—more on that later.
And what is she cutting up? Right before we hear the alien ship land, she has some sort of food chip in her mouth and she eats it for a prolonged amount of time with it sticking halfway out of her mouth. It’s an odd looking chewing. making her resemble some sort of creature as her mouth works at it.

So those two things provide very subtle clues that perhaps something is not what it seems to be. The props and acting begin doling out more of these clues as the episode continues, in real time by the way, one of the few episodes to unfold that way.

After reacting with pain and annoyance to the noise above her cabin, the old woman climbs up a ladder and emerges onto her rooftop. Nice cinematography here by George T. Clemens with very logically sourced low angle lighting on her as she peers out to investigate. The camera does a nice slow reveal of conventionally shaped flying saucer. Since “Twilight Zone” and the 1956 film “Forbidden Planet” were both owned by MGM, producer buck Houghton was able to use the United Planets Cruiser C57D spacecraft from that movie. The old woman cautiously circles around it. Curious and brave, she gets very close to it, nudging it with her foot and then crawling down low and looking beneath it. But a staircase ramp lowers, using the same sound effect that the communicators on “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” made when a call was coming in. Out comes what looks like a fat tiny robot, stepping robotically. She scuttles away and manages to kick it down the open door, down into her cabin. But another of the invaders comes out of the ship. He fires his toy gun weapon at her, hitting her with some unseen radiation that she reacts to. She manages to take her lit lantern and toss it at the invader, sending him careening off the roof. And without creating a fire. Halfway down the ladder back into her hovel, she hears little footsteps on the roof leading us to anticipate with suspense more little invaders to threaten her. On the floor, she sees one of their weapons—it probably broke off the invader that she kicked down the opening. She picks it up and it lights up, hurting her fingers so she throws it back down. But we had the opportunity to see in close-up a shot of her footwear when she bent to pick up the weapon, and I have to say kudos to the costume designer. The moccasin type shoe she has on is a perfect depiction of what this ragtag woman would have in this shamble of a cabin and rural existence. She retreats onto a stool and starts examining the warts and welts that have popped up on her hands and wrists. It makes her cry a bit, in her odd way–she make such unusual faces while tending to her injuries. And then, she then is alarmed by the telltale sign of nearby invaders—they start to make a sort of Morse code-like beeping noise. Subterfuge is not their strong suit.

She reaches backwards to her cupboard for a candle, and her spoon…her really big spoon. For a brief moment she holds her left hand out almost elegantly, and as I looked at her hand, I couldn’t help but notice that her left pinky dangled out so far from her hand that it made me think of that 60’s sci-fi show starring Roy Thinnes as the only man on Earth who knows that aliens have landed here, taken human form, and are plotting to take over. The only way to spot an alien was from their crooked pinky fingers! What was that show called…hmm, what was it…oh yeah!

“The Invaders”!

The invaders have been firing upon her and at first I didn’t assume the sound effect was from the weapons. It’s a ratchety sort of sound. The invaders look so unfortunately toy-like that I associated that ratchet sound with the kind of sound you hear a wind-up toy make after you crank it and set it down to walk. But soon enough we come to understand that that ratchet sound is from their ray guns.

But the old woman’s pain from the attacks shows on her face as she examines her body and discovers welts on her chest. She sets out to find the critters, but now she’s carrying with her, as Maxwell Smart would say, “That’s the second biggest spoon I’ve ever seen.” I mean the thing looks more like an oar. But it does on the other hand provide another clue among many that there’s something not quite right about this old woman.

Things about her seem off. Look at how her body moves as she searches about her cabin for the invaders, jutting her big spoon all about the floor. She has a bizarre way of moving—it’s almost balletic at times. Modern dance-like. And then comes a potentially scary moment when she creeps up slowly to her door, hearing a sound on the other side of it. She wants to open it because she wants to find the creature but at the same time she’s frightened to open the door. It’s the same sort of scene in “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” when Shatner wrestles with whether to pull back the curtain from his airplane window. He slowly moves his hand toward it, hesitating, then at last he goes for it, and instead of there being nothing there like so many times he’s looked before, this time the gremlin’s hideous face is right there pressed up against the window in a big close-up. It is the quintessential “Twilight Zone” moment of the entire series along with “It’s a cookbook!”. So why doesn’t it work as effectively in this episode as it did in “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”? I think the answer comes down to how it was shot and edited. Also importantly, “The Invaders” is hampered somewhat by the scale of the size difference between the two opponents—the episode has to work extra hard at figuring out ways to compose and edit shots to make it frightening. Think of the image size of the gremlin in that airplane scene: BOOM! It’s right there, right up in our face, nice and big on our TV screen.

But in “The Invaders” it’s almost comical that when she pulls open the door there’s nothing there at first, but then then the camera tilts down and there’s the little guy way down there. It’s almost like so many comic scenes we’ve in movies where the door opens and we don’t see anyone because the character is so short, and then the camera tilts down to reveal the shortie. All we get is a big wide shot from high up looking down on the robot/invader which any film school kid will tell you emphasizes the meekness of the subject. We’re literally “looking down upon” the invader. But there are solutions to this predicament. For instance, the classic short “Trilogy of Terror” had the same premise: a woman (Karen Black) alone in her domicile is terrorized by a six-inch tall creature, a doll she brought back from vacation. Faced with the same issues, the cinematography in that show solved the challenge. So why do people talk about the suspense of that episode to this day, much more than you hear people reference “The Invaders”? Well two things I think that helped “Trilogy of Terror.” One was that the little cannibalistic doll was so much more animated and angry; the little monster could move rapidly, speeding across the carpet toward Ms. Black. Granted, “The Twilight Zone” was handcuffed by a budget that couldn’t support upgraded visual creature movement FX. The spacemen were made from foam rubber and coated with gold paint to shine better. And they were moved by a puppeteer whose hand fit inside a slit behind the robot. Two fingers would make it walk. The puppeteer wore black sleeves to hide better , which required some extraordinarily precise lighting to help disguise the effect. Director Douglas Heyes gave himself the fun task of being the robot operator. But again, the invaders’ movements, being less than awesome, disappointed the writer Richard Matheson who said, “I thought those little roly-poly dolls were ridiculous looking…to see these little things waddling across the floor was about as frightening as Peter Rabbit coming at you.”

But that’s actually not even what I think was the more significant factor in “Trilogy of Terror’s” effectiveness. Think about the images in it—the camera gets very close up to the mini monster man, it gets eye-level. This helps to emphasize the monstrosity of it, as we get nice big close-up of his shark-like teeth. We’re not looking down on it so much, a camera angle that lessens its threat instead of magnifying it. Boy, all this makes me wonder if the Twilight Zone reboot would have fun with an adaptation of Stephen King’s short story “Battleground” with today’s FX.
So the old woman slams the door on the mini-Robbie-the-Robot wannabe, and she bolts it shut. She retreats back into the room and we hear the quick pitter patter of the jogging footsteps. Of course whenever we do see the invaders they become as slow-footed as a slug.

Poking around the room again, she starts swinging the spoon underneath the bed and suddenly it’s been grabbed. There’s a brief tug-of-war, and she falls backward, knocking over her candle. The room darkens and the old woman starts cawing like a raven. Backing out of the room, she notices that one of her knives with the odd handles has disappeared from the wall. Uh oh. The aliens obviously figured their space age ray guns (fashioned out of Christmas lights if you look closely!) weren’t proficient enough at killing her, so they’re gonna go old school on her!
And at this moment we finally get a very creepy shot of an invader walking, this time more convincingly and with a sense of menace. I’ve played the shot over and over trying to see the guiding hand, but couldn’t. If you watch closely (see link below) you can even detect a very slight editing glitch where they might have needed to fix a movement mistake. Anyway, the old woman slams the door shut on this intruder.

One of them seems to perhaps be shooting through a wall at this point–that wasn’t clear, but as the old woman sidles away, we get another beautifully choreographed shot: as she backs away the camera moves with her and then glides fluidly down low just in time to see a door in the floor slowly rise up and an invader emerge with that missing knife! It’s brilliantly timed. The invader stabs her calf and she cries out in anguish as she slumps down onto her bed. Then an invader hurls itself through the air at her! It soars in from screen right and lands on top of her on the bed, but she’s quick to corral it and toss it across the room. We’re getting a nice sense now of the pace of attacks ramping up.

She limps away and this time grabs a hatchet. Now we’re talking! What the heck was she wasting time with a spoon for? Even if it was the second biggest spoon I’ve ever seen.

And then she sees a rod sticking through a hole in a door. And this next harassment is particularly devious. She creeps up to the rod that the invaders stuck through and she reaches up to it to try and grasp it, but just then, a knife juts through the same hole and slices her palm.
That’s it. Angered, she gathers herself and charges at the door and opens it, wielding the axe in a rage holding it high above her, ready to smash it down on the little bastard. But they’re gone. She pokes around and then grabs another candle to help her search under the bed. Then she sees movement under the blanket on top of her bed. One of the little invaders seems to be humping something, so she yanks the blanket off and grabs the spaceman and quickly wraps it in a blanket, keeping him all bundled in a heap.

An invader appears in the window trying to save his buddy, shooting at her, but she is able to push him off the sill, and shutter the window. She retrieves the captured invader, still wrapped up, but then it sticks a knife right through the blanketing. It waves threateningly up toward her. She’s able to wrestle the knife away, and then takes that wrapped up invader and starts whumping it but good! BAM BAM BAM she slams that blanket against the table. For good measure she puts it inside a box and then puts the box in the fireplace. Trilogy of Terror’s Karen Black borrowed from this old woman’s playbook!

Then an alien blows a sort of mouse hole through the bottom of the door and starts to shoot at her from there. She picks up her axe and moves to the side of the door, poised to rain some shots down on anyone’s head if they decide to strut on through the mouse hole. The action has piled up rather nicely by this point, as Matheson had intended I should think: “My script…moved like a shot.”

The suspense builds again in this quiet moment as we hear footsteps scatter to and fro outside that hole with lights moving back and forth, almost like a searchlight. After it’s apparent no one seems bent on coming through, she gets up and she hears footsteps overhead again. She starts up the ladder back to the spaceship, and this is really the only cheap-looking part of the episode from a set design standpoint. That roof is as spotless and smooth as a dance floor. And so is the little glimpse we get of the very neatly, perfectly assembled wood siding of the house. The ramshackle downtrodden quality has vanished, and that’s too bad. When she gets up there, we see the saucer’s stairway pull up in retreat.

And now our old woman goes to town on the saucer with her axe. She starts beating and chopping it up with abandon. And then we hear the reveal; the spacemen utter the only words of dialogue in the entire episode, and they’re spoken by the director of this fine episode himself, Douglas Heyes: “Central control. Come in, Central Control. Do you read me? Gresham is dead. Repeat, Gresham is dead. The ship’s destroyed. Incredible race of giants here. Race of giants. No, Central Control. No counterattack. Repeat, no counterattack. Too much for us. Too powerful. Stay away. Gresham and I, we’re finished… finished. Stay away… stay away.”

She hacks away with every ounce of energy in her being. The sight of her swinging that axe with one arm now because using two arms has exhausted her, and her head tilted back almost in ecstasy and too tired to hold it up has a powerful hold on the viewer. She has spent herself utterly, in defense of her home and life. There’s almost a sexual sounding rampantness to her grunting and moaning and cries. I feel certain if you just played the audio of her final moments onscreen it would sound like the triumphant climax of a love-making scene. Ms. Moorehead deserves a cigarette now after that tour de force.

The camera pans around the defeated spaceship and the truth is revealed as we see

U.S. AIR FORCE
SPACE PROBE NO. 1

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 on file – in The Twilight Zone.”

I’m glad Mr. Serling likes this script the most of the non-Serling scripts. Good screenwriting isn’t about being dialogue laden with purple prose as some have felt Twilight Zone could be sometimes. If there were an award for best written TZ, I wouldn’t be disappointed or surprised to see this one win. Sci-fi writer Theodore Sturgeon sums it up appropriately: “I loved The Twilight Zone…of all the episodes the one I liked the best was ‘The Invaders.’” And he described that a TV producer once said to him, “If a blind man sits in front of a television set listening to a drama and he can tell you afterwards what it was about, then the director, the producer, the writer and everybody else have failed. Likewise, if a deaf man watches a television show and can tell you what the whole thing was about, then it has succeeded.”

RSR Rating: 8.7

Watch it HERE.

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