What Jor­dan Peele’s Twi­light Zone needs to do to unnerve view­ers in 2019

“When truth is not the truth, what dimen­sion are you even in?” asked Jor­dan Peele dur­ing Super Bowl LIII, step­ping through a door to nowhere in the first pro­mo for his upcom­ing Twi­light Zone reboot. It’s a ques­tion that pro­pels the influ­en­tial orig­i­nal series into a time of Trump and democ­ra­cy-endan­ger­ing disinformation.

Rod Serling’s 1960s anthol­o­gy hor­ror show famous­ly opened with nar­ra­tion about, ​“a dimen­sion as vast as space and as time­less as infin­i­ty, a mid­dle ground between light and shad­ow, between sci­ence and super­sti­tion, between the pit of man’s fears and the sum­mit of his knowledge.”

In 2019, that place sounds an awful lot like social media: the murky depths of Twit­ter, the alt-right swamp­lands of Face­book. No won­der the trail­er gen­er­at­ed a fren­zy of excite­ment. Now isn’t mere­ly a good time for a Twi­light Zone revival – 2019, with its sim­u­la­tion-like sense of unre­al­i­ty and nev­er-end­ing news twists, pret­ty much is the Twi­light Zone.

A new ver­sion from the writer/​director of Get Out seems like an easy win – espe­cial­ly with pop­u­lar shows like Black Mir­ror and Elec­tric Dreams hav­ing giv­en audi­ences an appetite for sto­ries explor­ing mankind’s capac­i­ty for dark­ness. But, just like in Serling’s strange tales, every­thing may not be as it seems…

Peele’s Twi­light Zone reboot arrives on US screens on 1 April (a UK release is yet to be announced), almost 60 years after the first ever episode aired in Octo­ber 1959. In that time, two TV revivals and a Steven Spiel­berg-pro­duced fea­ture film have come and gone, all strug­gling to repli­cate the spook­i­ness of the orig­i­nal series.

There’s been no short­age of block­busters infused with Twi­light Zone’s DNA down the years, from Plan­et of the Apes to Incep­tion, Shut­ter Island and The Sixth Sense – all high-con­cept films built on ​“what if?” premis­es and a bleak under­stand­ing of what it is to be human. They keep com­ing, too: Rupert Wyatt’s new sci-fi thriller Cap­tive State, about a soci­ety brought to its knees by an alien race who turn the peo­ple of Earth against each oth­er, is essen­tial­ly the clas­sic 1960 episode ​‘The Mon­sters Are Due on Maple Street’ stretched to epic scale.

That episode began as so many did, estab­lish­ing a pic­ture-per­fect Amer­i­can sub­ur­bia that, over the next 20 – 30 min­utes, will com­plete­ly unspool. ​“Late sum­mer. A tree-lined lit­tle world of front porch glid­ers, bar­be­cues, the laugh­ter of chil­dren, and the bell of an ice-cream ven­dor,” begins Ser­ling, set­ting the scene with clear sig­ni­fiers of post­war, apple-pie Amer­i­ca. Then a space­ship floats over­head. Cars stop work­ing. Elec­tric­i­ty cuts out. Sud­den­ly a qui­et street is plunged into para­noia and a mob men­tal­i­ty takes over as fam­i­lies begin to sus­pect some­one among them may be an extrater­res­tri­al spy.

This was typ­i­cal of The Twi­light Zone, in which Amer­i­can dreams quick­ly cur­dled into night­mares; the pick­et-fence idyll estab­lished in episodes’ first acts cor­rod­ed by some­thing malev­o­lent and ter­ri­fy­ing. In Trump’s Amer­i­ca, though, what nor­mal­i­ty is there left to cor­rode? What the show sought to skew­er in its orig­i­nal run doesn’t exist any­more, and Peele’s biggest chal­lenge is to imag­ine some­thing worse than the night­mare many Amer­i­cans are already living.

Black Mir­ror became a suc­cess by tak­ing the Twi­light Zone for­mu­la and apply­ing it to tech­nol­o­gy. It showed the sin­is­ter side of some­thing we con­sid­ered nor­mal, a part of our every­day lives. Sim­i­lar­ly Peele’s Twi­light Zone must tap into mod­ern anx­i­eties and con­cerns. Details about the show are being kept under lock and key, a few cast­ing announce­ments aside. What we do know is it will have to do more than repli­cate ear­li­er incar­na­tions to tru­ly unnerve view­ers. If any­one can do it, though, Peele can.