The Twilight Zone: Season 1, Episode Thirty-Four “The After Hours”

Original Air Date: June 10, 1960
Writer: Rod Serling
Director: Douglas Heyes

“Express elevator to the ninth floor of a department store, carrying Miss Marsha White on a most prosaic, ordinary, run-of-the-mill errand… Miss Marsha White on the ninth floor, specialties department, looking for a gold thimble. The odds are that she’ll find it—but there are even better odds that she’ll find something else, because this isn’t just a department store. This happens to be The Twilight Zone.”
-Rod Serling

Marsha White (played by Anne Francis) enters a department store looking for a golden thimble. When she cannot find it, she is ushered onto an elevator and mysteriously taken to the ninth floor, though only eight floors are actually listed at the department store. She is then left alone on a seemingly vacant ninth floor. She roams around until a sales woman appears and calls her by name: “Marsha.” A thimble is given to Marsha and she leaves, only slightly disturbed by the situation. On the way back down in the elevator, Marsha notices that the thimble is dented. She is directed to the complaints section of the department store where she learns there is no ninth floor. In shock and defiance, Marsha turns around and believes she has spotted the sales woman from the ninth floor –but it turns out to merely be a mannequin! Marsha has a panic attack and she is given some space to rest in the manager’s office, but she is soon forgotten during the busy day.

Somehow Marsha finds herself accidentally locked inside the store after hours and she is surrounded by voices calling her name though there are no people in the store. She flees back to the elevator which returns her to the ninth floor. As it turns out, the ninth floor is a lesser-known storage area for store mannequins. While Marsha panics, the mannequins seem to come to life. They animate right before her eyes! Marsha is confronted and she is reminded that she herself is, in fact, a mannequin. Per the mannequin’s custom, each month a different mannequin comes to life and lives among the humans. During her month, Marsha apparently became so enmeshed in life as a life that she completely forgot about her duty as a mannequin.

The next day, Marsha is found on the floor of the department store (now a mannequin). The floor walker stops to look up at her, remembering the panicky lady from the prior day, but he then brushes it off. The episode ends with a close-up image of Marsha’s lifeless mannequin face on the floor of the department store –the perfect bookend to another triumph for George T. Clemens’s cinematography and William J. Tuttle’s makeup effects.

“Marsha White, in her normal and natural state, a wooden lady with a painted face who, one month out of the year, takes on the characteristics of someone as normal and as flesh and blood as you and I. But it makes you wonder, doesn’t it, just how normal are we? Just who are the people we nod our hellos to as we pass on the street? A rather good question to ask… particularly in the Twilight Zone.”
-Rod Serling

---

My Thoughts on “The After Hours”

Amusingly enough, I once had the vague idea of drafting a comedy/horror story about mannequins in a mall that come to life at night (long before I ever watched this episode). Though I doubt I would have ever written something so eerily surreal as this episode. “The After Hours” is an absolutely iconic episode of The Twilight Zone –it offers a perfect blend of William J. Tuttle’s startlingly believable makeup effects, George T. Clemens’s mood-setting cinematography, Douglas Heyes’s direction, and Rod Serling’s writing (as well as a top notch performance by Anne Francis). And to top it off, “The After Hours” has Bernard Herrmann’s wonderfully unsettling score which was previously featured in the pilot episode “Where Is Everybody?”

---

Credits:

• Director: Douglas Heyes
• Written by: Rod Serling
• Music: Bernard Herrmann (from “Where Is Everybody?“)
• 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
• Makeup: William J. Tuttle (and his uncredited assistant Charles Schram)
• Starring:
  • Anne Francis…..Marsha White
    • Anne Francis (1930-2011) was an American actress known for her ground-breaking roles in the classic science fiction film Forbidden Planet (1956) and the television action-drama series Honey West, for which she earned a Golden Globe Award and Emmy Award nomination. She later remarked: “Looking back on those years, I would say that I get more fan mail related to The Twilight Zone than anything else I have done – including Honey West and Forbidden Planet.” She was also known for having a trademark mole near her lower lip. She appeared in episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Route 66, The Virginian, Rawhide, Mission: Impossible, The Man from U.N.C.L.E.., Murder, She Wrote, and two episodes of The Twilight Zone (“The After Hours” and “Jess-Belle“). She was married and divorced twice, and gave birth to a daughter in addition to adopting another daughter (one of the first cases of an adoption granted to an unmarried person in California). She was a smoker for much of her adult life, though she quit the habit in the mid-1980s. She was diagnosed with non-small-cell lung cancer in 2006 and died of pancreatic cancer in Santa Barbara, California in 2011 at the age of 80.
  • Elizabeth Allen…..Saleswoman
    • Born Elizabeth Ellen Gillease, Elizabeth Allen (1929-2006) had a 40-year career that lasted from the mid-1950s through the mid-1990s. She was a cast member in five TV series: The Jackie Gleason Show, Bracken’s World, The Paul Lynde Show, C.P.O. Sharkey, and Texas. She starred alongside John Wayne in John Ford’s Donovan’s Reef (1963). She was briefly married and divorced. She never remarried. Allen died of kidney disease in 2006 at the age of 77 in Fishkill, New York.
  • James Millhollin…..Mr. Armbruster, the floor walker
    • Arthur James Millhollin (1915-1993) was a character actor who appeared in a variety of shows like Perry Mason, Lost In Space, Batman, The Brady Bunch, and The Odd Couple. He appeared in three episodes of The Twilight Zone (“The After Hours,” “Mr. Dingle, the Strong,” and “I Dream of Genie“). Millhollin later retired to Mississippi where he died of cancer in 1993 at the age of 77 in Biloxi.
  • John Conwell…..Elevator Man
  • Patrick Whyte…..Mr. Sloan
  • Nancy Rennick…..Ms. Keevers
  • Don Anderson…..Shopper (uncredited)

---

The Twilight Zone Trivia:

• This was one of four Twilight Zone episodes to include the “eye” opening, the other three being “Mr. Bevis,” “The Mighty Casey,” and “A World of His Own.”
• The head of the mannequin doubles for Anne Francis, Elizabeth Allen, and John Conwell were made from a casts of the actors’ faces which were then painted over with acrylics (all completed by noted make-up artist William J. Tuttle). Tuttle later displayed Anne Francis’s mannequin head in the 1968 MGM short film The King of the Duplicators.
• Director Douglas Heyes had learned from the previous episode “Elegy” that using real cast members to stand perfectly still means they will move ever so slightly, so instead for “The After Hours” he used mannequins. Douglas Heyes and William Tuttle would successfully collaborate again on the classic episode “Eye of the Beholder.”
• This episode was originally broadcast with the rare opening sequence of a woman’s eye closing (one of three late season one episodes to feature this unique opening).
• This episode was remade in 1986 in The Twilight Zone reboot series.
• Apparently, elements of this episode were inspired by Boscov’s Department Store in Rod Serling’s hometown of Binghamton, New York.
• This episode owes a debt to the story “Evening Primrose” by sometime Twilight Zone contributor John Collier. The story is about a woman who enters a department store becomes one of the “night people,” people who decide to live inside locked up department stores. It was dramatized on a radio program entitled Escape in 1947, a show which Serling was a frequent listener. No one representing Collier filed a claim against Serling, and his tale later appeared as a teleplay several years later in 1966 on ABC, starring Anthony Perkins. However, another author Frank Gruber (a celebrated Los Angeles pulp writer) made a complaint for his own story “The Thirteenth Floor,” which had a minor similarity to “The After Hours” in that the story is about a mysterious missing floor. Gruber also apparently spread rumors at parties that Serling had plagiarized his story. This led to a confrontational string of letters in which Serling adamantly denied stealing the story and challenged Gruber to lawyer up if he truly felt he had been wronged. After a pair of lengthy letters were exchanged, nothing happened and Serling apparently never heard from Gruber again.
• At one point in this episode, Mr. Armbruster, the floor walker, calls out to a woman named “Miss Pettigrew” who is not a performed character. This has led to some reviews to erroneously claim Nancy Rennick played Miss Pettigrew, though in reality she played Miss Keevers.
• The department store set was previously used as a large newspaper office in MGM feature films.
• This episode was remade as part of the 1985 Twilight Zone revival series.
• When this episode was first set to broadcast, TV Guide rather carelessly revealed the twist ending: “Miss Francis plays a mannequin who comes to life in CBS’s Twilight Zone.” Naturally, this upset Rod Serling and Buck Houghton. Future episode press materials came with an accompanying memo reminding periodical editors not to reveal surprise endings.
  
  Click here to return to my survey of The Twilight Zone series.