The Twilight Zone: Season 1, Episode Twenty-Nine “Nightmare As A Child”

Original Air Date: April 29, 1960
Writer: Rod Serling
Director: Alvin Ganzer

“Month of November, hot chocolate, and a small cameo of a child’s face, imperfect only in its solemnity. And these are the improbable ingredients to a human emotion, an emotion, say, like—fear. But in a moment this woman, Helen Foley, will realize fear. She will understand what are the properties of terror. A little girl will lead her by the hand and walk with her into a nightmare.”
-Rod Serling

“Nightmare As A Child” delivers a shocking story of psychological repression and unacknowledged anguish as one woman meets a shadowy figure from her past and suddenly confronts her long-forgotten childhood trauma. Children’s schoolteacher Helen Foley (played by Janice Rule) arrives home to her apartment to find a little girl sitting outside on the stairwell. The girl goes by the name “Markie” (played by Terry Burnham) and she periodically sings the children’s nursery song “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” throughout the episode. They talk over hot chocolate and Helen realizes that Markie knows a surprising level of detail about her life –such as the fact that Helen dislikes marshmallows and that she got burned once right below the elbow. Markie’s awareness forces Helen to acknowledge: “There are a lot of things I don’t recall at a certain age. Something happened to me then and I’m not sure exactly what it was… there are some things I’m rather vague about.” Earlier that day, Helen remembers that she vaguely recognized a man in a car who stopped at a red light outside the school where she works –and somehow Markie also knows about this incident. Just then, there is a knock at the door and Markie runs in terror.

Helen greets the strange man who is named Peter Selden (played by Shepperd Strudwick). He used to work for Helen’s mother, handling her investments for about a year (some eighteen or nineteen years earlier). Slowly, Helen is reminded of a traumatic childhood experience she had long-since repressed. It involves the violent death of her mother which led to a prolonged mental illness for which she was apparently institutionalized. She is shocked when Peter pulls out a picture of Helen as a child –and the photo clearly shows the little girl Markie. Peter then says “Markie” was Helen’s childhood nickname. Following this dramatic moment, we are treated to a blurred memory of Helen as a child lying in bed while her mother argues with a man over a “property investment” before she accuses him of being a thief and slaps him. He then grabs her and bludgeons her with a nearby heavy object, killing her. The flashback is narrated by Markie whose voice is nothing more than the repressed memory of Helen as a child.

Though her mother’s killer was never caught, Markie helps Helen remember the incident. Then Peter suddenly reappears in her apartment and admits he was the culprit. He was always around the apartment when Helen was young, and even disturbingly remarks that he had quite a “crush” on little Helen. But he killed Helen’s mother many years ago. Why? Because there was “some trouble with the books” and Helen’s mother was a “particularly rigid, straight-laced woman” who was going to report Peter. After he killed her mother, he very nearly killed Markie, as well, but her screams were her salvation. Helen’s screaming drew the attention of other people in the building, forcing him to flee. Ever since, Peter has been keeping an eye on Helen (from Chicago, to college, to her present job as a schoolteacher).

Helen tries to flee from Peter but she is caught in a scuffle in the hallway that only ends when she heaves him down a flight of stairs, finally killing him. Later, the police and a doctor investigate the crime scene. They give Helen a sedative and when asked about the little girl Helen keeps referencing, the doctor notes that “The child is her, at least she conjured up the child. It was a part of her buried deep inside… a memory, a recollection that finally had to come out. And when it did, it took the form of herself as a child… The human imagination is often weird. Sometimes it means salvation.”

The episode ends as Helen walks past another girl sitting on the stairwell singing the same children’s nursery song Markie was singing (“Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”). Helen tells the girl that she and her dolly have lovely smiles, and they should never to lose them.

“Miss Helen Foley, who has lived in night and who will wake up to morning. Miss Helen Foley, who took a dark spot from the tapestry of her life and rubbed it clean—then stepped back a few paces and got a good look at the Twilight Zone.”
-Rod Serling

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My Thoughts on “Nightmare as a Child”

Often in The Twilight Zone we are asked to sympathize with the quiet inner struggles that people often endure, from psychological repression to childhood trauma. We learn about Helen Foley’s childhood at the same time she learns about it herself. In this way, we become part of her nightmare. “Nightmare as a Child” is a mesmerizing, haunting story about the ghosts of yesteryear that never fully leave our subconscious. Indeed, little Markie shows up at just the right moment, serving to strengthen Helen moments before the arrival of Peter Selden. But I am still left to wonder: why would Peter Selden return at all? After having gotten away with murder for nearly twenty years, why confront the one living witness to the crime? Wouldn’t he prefer to simply continue living his life? His character motivations are a bit befuddling to me.

Nevertheless, this haunting, psychological horror episode of The Twilight Zone strangely has no supernatural twist ending (any other episode likely would have revealed that Markie does, in fact, exist in some meaningful corporeal way beyond Helen’s memory). In this way, “Nightmare As A Child” is a fairly unique episode of The Twilight Zone and one that has always struck me as powerful and penetrating. Janice Rule delivers a forceful performance as the trauma victim Helen Foley, Shepperd Strudwick masterfully plays the predatory Peter Selden, and young Terry Burnham gives a wonderfully unsettling performance as little Markie, the memory of Helen Foley’s forgotten childhood whose repeated singing of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” is downright creepy. “Nightmare as a Child” is a real tour de force, with a terrific score from Jerry Goldsmith –another masterpiece from the first season of The Twilight Zone.

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Credits:

• Director: Alvin Ganzer
  • Alvin Ganzer (1911-2009) began his career in casting and as an assistant director at Paramount, working on films like The Great McGinty (1940), The Hitler Gang (1944), Going My Way (1944), and At War with the Army (1950). The first feature film he directed was The Girls of Pleasure Island (1953), which starred Leo Genn, Don Taylor, and Gene Barry. Ganzer was handed the film after director F. Hugh Herbert fell ill during production. Ganzer directed episodes of many television shows like Science Fiction Theatre, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and Lost in Space. He directed four episodes of The Twilight Zone (“What You Need,” The Hitch-Hiker,” “Nightmare as a Child,” and “The Mighty Casey“). He and his wife Murial had two children. He died in Hawaii in 2009.
• Written by: Rod Serling
• Music: Jerry Goldsmith
• Director of Photography: George T. Clemens
• Production Manager: Ralph W. Nelson
• Art Directors: George W. Davis and Merrill Pye
• Film Editor: Bill Mosher
• Assistant Director: Don Klune
• Set Decorations: Henry Grace and Keogh Gleason
• Sound: Franklin Milton and Philip Mitchell
• Starring:
  • Janice Rule…..Helen Foley
    • Mary Janice Rule (1931-2003) was a versatile American actress and psychotherapist who earned her PhD from the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute in the 1970s and 1980s while still acting. During her acting career, she somewhat famously turned down the role of Edie Doyle in On the Waterfront (1954) which was ultimately played by Eva Marie Saint. On television, she appeared in shows like Wagon Train and Have Gun – Will Travel, as well as anthologies like Goodyear Playhouse, Suspicion, Schlitz Playhouse, General Electric Theater, and Playhouse 90. Rule later remarked at how she preferred not to play recurring series characters in television shows, finding it both boring and formulaic. The roles also would have prevented her from seeing her family. She was married three times and had two children. She practiced psychoanalysis in New York and Los Angeles, and continued to act occasionally until her death from a cerebral hemorrhage in 2003 at the age of 72.
  • Terry Burnham…..Markie
    • Elizabeth Teresa “Terry” Burnham (1949-2013) was an American child actress. She is best known for her appearance in this episode of The Twilight Zone and her role as Lana Turner’s young daughter “Susie” in the film Imitation of Life (1959). She retired from acting in 1971. She died of cardiac arrest in 2013 at the age of 64. With no surviving next of kin, her unclaimed cremated remains were stored at Los Angeles County Crematorium until of 2018 (which would have been her 69th birthday) when Burnham’s ashes were then buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Long Beach, California.
  • Shepperd Strudwick…..Peter Selden
    • Shepperd Strudwick (1907-1983) was known for playing Adam Stanton, the idealistic doctor who kills Willie Stark in the classic film All the King’s Men (1949) and Father Jean Massieu in Joan of Arc (1948), which starred Ingrid Bergman as Joan. He appeared in television shows like Perry Mason, Wagon Train, and Have Gun – Will Travel. He was married four times and had one child. Strudwick died in New York City from cancer in 1983 at the age of 75.
  • Michael Fox…..Doctor
    • Born Myron Melvin Fox, Michael Fox (1921-1996) was a prolific character actor, known for his recurring physician roles in shows like Perry Mason. He appeared in the penultimate episode of Adventures of Superman as the ringleader of a criminal gang, as well as appearances in shows like Science Fiction Theatre, The Ford Television Theatre, The Rifleman, The Untouchables, The Dick Powell Show, Gunsmoke, Batman, Lost in Space, Mission: Impossible, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and many others. He appeared in three episodes of The Twilight Zone (“Nightmare as a Child,” “Mr. Dingle, the Strong,” and “Sounds and Silences“). He married a fellow actress who was in a joint stage production with him (borrowing Dorothy Gish’s car for their wedding). He and his wife had two children, and he died of pneumonia in 1996 at the age of 75.
  • Joseph V. Perry…..Police Lieutenant
    • Joseph Victor Perry (1931-2000) was frequently cast a criminal or policeman in television shows. In addition to this episode of The Twilight Zone, he also appeared in Rod Serling’s Night Gallery episode “Midnight Never Ends.” His most famous recurring role came later in life as the pizza restaurant owner Nemo in the sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond. He died in 2000 at the age of 69.
• Extras:
  • Morgan Brittany…..little girl (uncredited)
    • Suzanne Cupito, who later went by the stage name Morgan Brittany (1951-present) is an American actress who had her start as a child actor in a variety of television shows and films. She had an uncredited role during the birthday party scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963). She appeared in Gunsmoke, The Andy Griffith Show, and in a two-part episode of The Outer Limits (“The Inheritors”), among many other classic shows. She appeared in three episodes of The Twilight Zone (“Nightmare as a Child,” “Valley of the Shadow,” and “Caesar and Me“). In her adult career, she has played Vivien Leigh in several productions and appeared in shows like Married with Children, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and Murder, She Wrote. She has since become a conservative political commentator. She is married to stuntman Jack Gill and has two children.

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The Twilight Zone Trivia:

• Helen Foley was the name of a beloved English Literature and Drama teacher who taught Rod Serling at Binghamton Central High School. The main performance theater at Binghamton High School is named in her honor (she died in 2002 at the age of 90). Richard Matheson would later borrow this name for Kathleen Quinlan’s character in the “It’s a Good Life” segment (directed by Joe Dante) for Twilight Zone: the Movie (1983). Helen Foley became a founding member of the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation in 1985.
• Janice Rule was paid $2,000 for this episode. Terry Burnham was paid $400.
• Richard L. Bare was initially slated to direct this episode but after the infamous plane crash (see “The Purple Testament“), he was replaced by Alvin Ganzer.
• Fans have speculated as to whether or not Serling may have been inspired by Truman Capote’s 1946 O. Henry Award-winning short story “Miriam” when he wrote this episode.
• In this episode, Helen refers to little Markie as “solemn” and “wise” when speaking to Peter Selden.
• “Nightmare as a Child” is one of a handful of Twilight Zone episodes not to feature any fantasy/science fiction elements.
• The children’s nursery song Markie sings in this episode is “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” It was first written by British sisters Jane and Ann Taylor around 1806. It was later set to the 1761 French melody “Ah! vous dirai-je, maman” (or “Oh! Shall I tell you, Mama”) as arranged by Mozart.
• Immediately after Janice Rule had finished her scenes for this episode, MGM rushed her into rehearsal for her starring role in the Buick-Electra Playhouse’s television adaptation of The Snows of Kilimanjaro.
• Morgan Brittany (a.k.a. Suzanne Cupito) later appeared on the show Dallas where some of her scenes were shot on the same stages that were used to film The Twilight Zone episodes “Nightmare As A Child” and “Caesar and Me.” She also apparently had frequent run-ins with fellow child star Terry Burnham at auditions.

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