TONIGHT on ME-TV @ 12:35am EST, one of the GREATEST episodes of THE TWILIGHT ZONE: “THE HITCH-HIKER” (Written by Rod Serling, adapted from Lucille Fletcher’s radio play, directed by Alvin Ganzer, originally broadcast January 22, 1960) Perhaps Rod Serling’s greatest adaptation for The Twilight Zone is another take on the “Mr. Death” concept, “The Hitch-Hiker,” that Serling adapted from the famous 1941 radio play by Lucille Fletcher, that featured her husband at the time, Orson Welles, in the lead role of a driver who keeps seeing the same mysterious hitch-hiker all along his cross-country trip from Brooklyn to California. But Serling changes the male lead to female, making it one of the first of his many TZ episodes to feature an independent, single woman in the starring role, at a time when most women on television were either domesticated housewives like Donna Reed or screwball comediennes like Lucille Ball. Again, Rod Serling, The Visionary. And in the “Hitch-Hiker” lead role is ‘60s beauty, the enigmatic Inger Stevens (in the first of her two nuanced Twilight Zones; the other is season two’s “The Lateness of The Hour”). The Swedish-born Stevens had “a sadness hidden in that pretty face” (Bruce Springsteen, “Candy’s Room”), her soulful, sorrowful eyes betraying her failed suicide in 1959, while foreshadowing her unfortunate, successful attempt in 1970—which gives “The Hitch-Hiker,” in which we, and Stevens’ character, come to realize she’s been dead all along (shades of Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense), a meta-melancholy subtext. After the climax of this chilling, macabre story, Stevens, in voiceover, describes what it’s like to accept the radical reality of her own death, in some of Serling’s most heartbreakingly beautiful, simple but terse prose: “The fear has left me now. I’m numb. I have no feeling. It’s as if someone had pulled out some kind of plug in me, and everything—emotion, feeling, fear—has drained out. And now I’m a cold shell. I’m conscious of things around me now...the vast night...the stars that look down from the darkness.” arlenschumer.com/twilight-zone #rodserling #twilightzone #thetwilightzone #arlenschumer #ingerstevens @dgareps https://www.instagram.com/p/CpAue9Ar7QH/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
