The Twilight Zone: Season 1, Episode Twenty-Two “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street”

Original Air Date: March 4, 1960
Writer: Rod Serling
Director: Ronald Winston

“They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find and it’s themselves.
All we need do is sit back – and watch.”

One of the more consequential Twilight Zone episodes, “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street” drops an inspiring bit of horror and science fiction into the safest of American conventions –suburbia. The episode explores Serling’s oft censored wish to address socially relevant concerns, like the self-destructive nature of mankind or the serious dangers of fanatical groupthink (i.e. McCarthyism or Puritanism). No one is ever completely safe from the madness of crowds, especially on Maple Street.

“Maple Street, U.S.A., late summer. A tree-lined little world of front porch gliders, barbecues, the laughter of children, and the bell of an ice cream vendor. At the sound of the roar and the flash of light, it will be precisely 6:43 P.M. on Maple Street…This is Maple Street on a late Saturday afternoon. Maple Street in the last calm and reflective moment—before the monsters came.”
-Rod Serling

One summer day in the late afternoon a large burst of light appears across the sky above a safe, suburban community on Maple Street. Shortly thereafter the neighbors learn that all the household machines on the block have been rendered defective. One boy explains a theory about aliens and gradually as night falls, the neighborhood begins to turn on itself. Charges are leveled as various neighbors accuse one another of being an alien (inspired by young Charlie’s comic book stories) until total chaos breaks loose. The denizens of Maple Street are played by Claude Akins, Barry Atwater, Jack Weston and others.

In the end, with madness spilling out into the street, the camera pans out as we discover a group of bureaucratic aliens watching Maple Street afar from a hilltop. They ominously comment: “They [Humans] pick the most dangerous enemy they can find and it’s themselves. All we need do is sit back – and watch.” The two aliens return to their spacecraft with plans to bring the same strategy of fear and intimidation to every neighborhood in America. Rather than invading and attacking a la many first contact science fiction tales (such as H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds), the aliens in “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” simply allow humanity to destroy itself.

“The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and the thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own: for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined… to the Twilight Zone.”
-Rod Serling

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My Thoughts on “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”

A dark suburban satire of Cold War hysteria, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” offers another profound commentary on the human condition. With increasingly unhinged, primal behavior among all the neighbors on Maple Street, the true horror is the realization that we are the monsters –we all carry self-destructive instincts within us. It brings to mind Arthur Miller’s The Crucible or even a small-scale version of the mob violence seen in The French Revolution. A potent reminder of the madness of crowds, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” is another deeply powerful, eternally resonant episode of The Twilight Zone.

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Credits:

• Director: Ronald Winston
• Written by: Rod Serling
• Music: original music composed by Rene Garriguenc and conducted by Lud Gluskin
• Director of Photography: George T. Clemens
• Production Manager: Ralph W. Nelson
• Art Directors: George W. Davis and William Ferrari
• Film Editor: Bill Mosher
• Assistant Director: Edward Denault
• Set Decorations: Henry Grace and Rudy Butler
• Sound: Franklin Milton and Jean Valentino
• Casting Director: Mildred Gusse
• Starring:
  • Claude Akins…..Steve Brand
    • Claude Akins (1926-1994) was a character actor who played Sonny Pruit in the 1970s show Movin’ On and Sheriff Lobo on The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo. He was born in Georgia, raised in Indiana, and was Cherokee. He appeared in shows like Perry Mason, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Gunsmoke, Have Gun – Will Travel, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and others. He appeared in two Twilight Zone episodes (“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” and “The Little People”). He appeared in films like From Here to Eternity (1953), The Caine Mutiny (1954), Rio Bravo (1959), and Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973) to name a few. He and his wife had three children, and he died of stomach cancer in 1994.
  • Barry Atwater…..Les Goodman
    • Garrett “Barry” Atwater (1918-1978) was a character actor who appeared in television shows like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Gunsmoke, Perry Mason, Playhouse 90, Hawaii Five-0, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., and The Outer Limits (“Corpus Earthling”). He was one of the few actors to play a character from Spock’s planet of Vulcan on Star Trek. He portrayed Surak in the late season three episode “The Savage Curtain” (the somewhat goofy episode wherein Abraham Lincoln appears in space). Atwater famously could not achieve the Vulcan salute naturally, so when he bids farewell in a medium shot in the episode, he lowers his arm so that his hand is out of camera view as he pushes his fingers against his body to configure them properly. He was sometimes credited as “G.B. Atwater.” He suffered a stroke only eight days after his sixtieth birthday. He passed away in 1978. He did not have children.
  • Jack Weston…..Charlie
    • Jack Weston (1924-1996) appeared in a variety of shows and movies, often as a comic character. He appeared in two Twilight Zone episodes (“The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street” and “The Bard”). He was nominated for a Golden Globe Award in 1976 and a Tony Award in 1981. He was married twice and had one child.
  • Burt Metcalfe…..Don Martin
    • Burt Metcalfe (1935-2022) was a Canadian-American film and television producer, director, screenwriter, and actor. His most notable work was as a writer for the hit CBS series M*A*S*H and he was the only producer to stay with the TV series during its entire run from 1972 to 1983. He also made an uncredited appearance in the James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever (1971) as Agent Maxwell.
  • Amzie Strickland…..unnamed neighbor
    • Amzie Ellen Strickland (1919-2006) was an American character actress who had a prolific acting career. She began in old-time radio, and later made some 650 television appearances. She had roles in two dozen films, appeared in numerous television movies, and also worked in TV commercials. Her television show appearances included: Adam-12, Dragnet, Gunsmoke, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Andy Griffith Show, I Love Lucy, My Favorite Martian, Make Room for Daddy, My Three Sons, Leave It to Beaver, Gunsmoke, Mission: Impossible, Bonanza, and many others. She was married to radio and television actor Frank Behrens and they had one son together. She was a lifelong practicing Roman Catholic and a Republican. She died in 2006 of Alzheimer’s disease (some 20 years after her husband’s passing). She later appeared in the 1985 Twilight Zone reboot episode “Night of the Meek/But Can She Type?/The Star.”
  • Anne Barton…..Mrs. Brand
    • Anne Barton (1924-2000) was an actress who appeared in shows like Leave It to Beaver (playing Eddie Haskell’s mother), The Twilight Zone, Thriller, Perry Mason, Death Valley Days, Gunsmoke, Have Gun-Will Travel, and “Hawaii Five-0”. She married actor Dan Barton, they had three children together, and she died in Los Angeles in 2000.
  • Jan Handzlik…..Tommy
    • Jan Handzlik (1945-present) is an American lawyer and former child actor best known for playing young Patrick Dennis in the 1958 film Auntie Mame. After retiring from acting, he became a lawyer in Los Angeles and worked as a federal prosecutor before becoming a white collar criminal defense attorney. Some of his notable clients he has represented include: Steven Seagal, Stanley “Tookie” Williams, Joe Francis, and Florian Homm.
  • Bob McCord…..the ice cream vendor
    • Robert “Bob” McCord III (1915-1980) appeared in a variety of Westerns in addition to The Twilight Zone. He set a record for appearing on The Twilight Zone 75 times (mostly uncredited). He was known as “Bud McCord.”
  • Mary Gregory…..Sally, Tommy’s Mother
  • Lea Waggner…..Mrs. Goodman
  • Ben Erway…..Pete Van Horn
  • Sheldon Allman and William “Bill” Walsh…..the real aliens
  • Joan Boston…..silent bit part
  • Paul Denton…..silent bit part
  • Beryl McCutcheon…..silent bit part
  • William Moran…..silent bit part
  • Vinita Murdock…..silent bit part
  • George Washburn…..silent bit part
  • Lyn Guild…..Charlie’s Wife
  • Joan Sudlow…..woman next door

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The Twilight Zone Trivia:

• The uniforms worn by the aliens, their spaceship’s ramp, and the shots of the flying spaceship were all originally borrowed from the 1956 film Forbidden Planet. This was the third episode in the series to borrow from Forbidden Planet. The departing flying saucer at the end was lifted directly from Forbidden Planet, but it was actually flipped upside down and reversed (the same shot was also used in “Third from the Sun” and the technique was also used in “To Serve Man“).
• The ship from Forbidden Planet was called the C-57D cruiser.
• The ending to “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street” contains a similar conclusion to an earlier Rod Serling radio script “The Button Pushers” in which apocalyptic weaponry is detonated in a futuristic earth in 1970. At the end, a pair of aliens –Verus and Felovius– discuss a bet in which they thought the earth would destroy itself in the next billion years.
• This entire episode was filmed on the New England Street on Lot 2 at MGM. There were two outside prop rentals costing Cayuga Productions $50 –a vending bike and a power mower. The set designs were: a “Maple Street” signpost, landscapes, automobiles and other props costing $750. The closing scene and spaceship set cost about $1,000.
• The Maple Street location was reused in the episode “Stopover in a Quiet Town.”
• In 2009, TIME magazine named “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street” one of the ten best Twilight Zone episodes.
• This episode was remade in the 2003 reboot with narration by Forest Whitaker.
• The set for this episode was shot used in MGM’s Andy Hardy series (starring Mickey Rooney). It would also appear in future episodes like “A World of Difference” and “Long Live Walter Jameson.”
• Prior to this episode, Rod Serling tried to honor requests from individuals around the country, requesting 16mm prints of episodes, however by this point in the series CBS started prohibiting it due to the high volume of requests.
• The concept of the power being mysteriously shut off was explored in the film The Day The Earth Stood Still.
• In The Twilight Zone Companion Marc Scott Zicree argues this episode “may well be the greatest piece ever written about mob violence in any medium.”
• Three automobiles are featured in this episode, including product placements by Ford –a 1959 Ford Sedan and a 1959 Ford Station Wagon (the same car that the mechanic worked on in “Walking Distance” as confirmed by the registration number).
  
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Click here to read my reflections on Rod Serling’s short story “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.”