You're traveling through another dimension—a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. Entering The Twilight Zone means experiencing dozens of episodes of some of the greatest sci-fi or horror ever to grace the small screen. Rod Serling's acclaimed anthology series, which ran for five seasons from 1959 to 1963, is full of iconic tales of the beyond.
Whether a science-fiction fable with a relevant message about society or a morality play with a devious twist, The Twilight Zone almost always delivered. There's a reason why its legacy endures these many decades later. So, submitted for your approval: here are the 32 greatest episodes of The Twilight Zone. This list only features episodes from the original CBS series rather than the short-lived UPN reboot in the '00s or the Jordan Peele-helmed reboot that streamed for two seasons in 2019 and 2020. The Twilight Zone movie is also not eligible.
Additionally, since many Twilight Zone episodes have famous reveals, there are going to be spoilers. After all, it's hard to celebrate some of these great episodes without revealing the twist that makes them so great.
32. "The Odyssey of Flight 33" (Season 2, Episode 18)
Though hardly The Twilight Zone's best episode involving an airplane, "The Odyssey of Flight 33" is a fun bit of sci-fi. When a Boeing 707 flying from London to New York City goes through some strange time-traveling jet stream, the passengers inside look out the window to see dinosaurs. "The Odyssey of Flight 33" explains very little, but the dinosaurs are cool, and it does touch on something inherently scary about being in a metal tube in the sky. As a passenger, you don't have any control beyond just hoping you get to where you're going—and in Flight 33's case, when you're going.
31. "The Hitch-Hiker" (Season 1, Episode 16)
Nan Adams is driving across the country in this Season 1 highlight, but she keeps seeing an ominous hitch-hiker along her route. He keeps appearing in front of her even though there's no possible way he could be getting in front of her, causing Nan to get more and more scared by his repeated presence. The reveal? Nan actually died in a car accident a few days earlier, and the hitch-hiker is a personification of death. She is, indeed, going his way. It's a good, spooky sort of ghost story.
30. "A Nice Place to Visit" (Season 1, Episode 28)
Henry Francis "Rocky" Valentine is a petty crook who gets killed during a robbery and finds himself in heaven under the guidance of a guardian angel named Pip—or so he thinks. Rocky soon grows bored of this paradise where his every desire and wish are granted, and he worries he's going to go mad. When he asks Pip to send him to "the other place," Pip reveals that he isn't in heaven at all. This is hell. There are plenty of Twilight Zone episodes where you can see the twist coming from a ways away, but this sense of inevitability doesn't diminish the best ones, including "A Nice Place to Visit."
29. "Kick the Can" (Season 3, Episode 21)
One of the more well-known episodes of The Twilight Zone, in part because Steven Spielberg directed a remake for his segment of the 1983 movie, "Kick the Can" is a cruel little story about aging and staying young. When a resident of a retirement home has the idea that he and his senior citizen friends can feel young if they act young, his old friend Ben thinks it's crazy talk. Of course, when Ben sits out and doesn't play a game of kick the can with the rest of the retirees, they somehow turn back into children. Because Ben couldn't (or wouldn't) access his inner child, he's stuck as an old, lonely man.
28. "The Silence" (Season 2, Episode 25)
There's a whole subgenre of Twilight Zone episodes where the twist is just really, really mean. "The Silence" is one of the nastiest of the bunch, following Colonel Archie Taylor, a rich man who is annoyed by the constant chatter of Jamie Tennyson, another member of the club. In an effort to get Tennyson to shut up, Taylor makes a bet: Tennyson will live inside the club's game room in a small glass-walled apartment with microphones in it. If he makes it a whole year without speaking a word, Taylor will give him $500,000. When the year's up, Taylor reveals that he actually lost his fortune and doesn't have the money. It's a devastating break for Tennyson, who in turn reveals that he had his vocal cords surgically severed in order to win the bet. Now he's mute forever with no money to show for it.
27. "Number 12 Looks Just Like You" (Season 5, Episode 17)
This grim tale of conformity takes place in a dystopian society where all 19-year-olds undergo a procedure known as the Transformation that makes them look like one of a few different numbered models of beautiful, attractive people. Marilyn Cuberle decides she doesn't want to undergo the Transformation and instead wants to just go through life looking like herself, but she soon finds that the procedure is not optional, and it changes more than just your appearance. Once she's forced to undergo the Transformation, not only does she look like everyone else, she thinks like them, too.
26. "And When the Sky Was Opened" (Season 1, Episode 11)
Rod Taylor plays Lieutenant Colonel Clegg Forbes, one of three men who piloted an experimental spaceplane before it disappeared and then crashed in the desert. However, records show that only two people were aboard the craft, despite Forbes and his co-pilot's memories of a third man. But even those memories are fading, as is their very existence. Whatever happened on that flight is slowly, terrifyingly, erasing them and any evidence of them from reality.
25. "The Shelter" (Season 3, Episode 3)
Some of the best episodes of The Twilight Zone showcase how quickly society can turn ugly, including this episode from Season 3. It's Bill Stockton's birthday, and his friends and family are throwing him a birthday party, only for the celebration to be interrupted by news suggesting an imminent nuclear attack. Stockton has a fallout shelter, but it only has space and supplies for him, his wife, and their son. Faced with the prospect of death, the friendly neighbors turn cutthroat, fighting for space in the shelter and eventually knocking it down. Turns out there are no nukes coming—it was just a harmless satellite—but this community has been destroyed all the same.
24. "I Shot an Arrow in the Air" (Season 1, Episode 15)
When four astronauts survive a crash landing on what they presume is an unknown asteroid, it doesn't take long before they're fighting over meager resources on this seemingly deserted world. Eventually, one of them kills the last other survivor, reasoning that he'll survive longer now that he no longer needs to share the remaining water. He crosses a ridge only to see a sign for Reno, Nevada. They were on Earth all along, and not far from rescue, making the murder tragic, ironic, and pointless.
23. "The Masks" (Season 5, Episode 25)
Directed by Ida Lupino, the only woman to ever direct an episode of The Twilight Zone (and who appeared as an actress in a Season 1 episode), "The Mask" is a classic from the end of the series' run. A dying rich man gathers his horrible family members on Mardi Gras and tells them the only way they'll get any money in his will is if they agree to wear masks all evening. Each mask is a grotesque caricature of their personality flaws. When the clock strikes midnight, they take them off to discover that their faces have warped to resemble the masks—their outward appearance now matching their inner character.
22. "A Stop at Willoughby" (Season 1, Episode 30)
Gart Williams is an ad executive with a stressful job and an unhappy home life, yet he keeps having dreams when he's commuting on the train that he's riding the rails through a peaceful, idyllic town called Willoughby. As his waking life gets worse and worse, he eventually resolves to get off and just stay in Willoughby, and all the townsfolk warmly greet him. Then we learn that, in the real world, he seemingly just threw himself from the train and died. His body is loaded into a hearse… and the name of the funeral home is Willoughby & Son.
21. "Shadow Play" (Season 2, Episode 26)
One of the more nightmarish episodes of The Twilight Zone (literally), "Shadow Play" follows Adam Grant, a man who has been sentenced to death but who claims that this has all happened before because it's a dream. If he's killed, it will also mean the end of existence for everybody else in the courtroom. Grant attempts to convince people that this isn't real, noting strange inconsistencies or bits of dream logic. But it's too late. He's sent to the chair, and the whole dream starts again with everyone playing a different part. Some of the best Twilight Zones have an inescapable feeling of hopelessness to them, and this is one of the best examples.
20. "The Obsolete Man" (Season 2, Episode 29)
Burgess Meredith stars in this dystopian story about a man living in a totalitarian state who has been sentenced to death because he believes in God and because he's a librarian, and the state has rendered both books and faith "obsolete." Romney Wordsworth (Meredith) calmly makes a request for the manner of his death, revealed in the end to be a trap intended for the Chancellor who sentenced him. Trapped in a room that's about to explode, the Chancellor begs for Wordsworth to let him out "in the name of God," and Wordsworth obliges at the last second. Although Wordsworth is dead, he's proved his point; the Chancellor is sentenced to death in turn for invoking God. "The Obsolete Man" is a cutting story about fascist hypocrisy.
19. "The Midnight Sun" (Season 3, Episode 10)
The Twilight Zone at its most apocalyptic, "The Midnight Sun" takes place in a world that's progressively getting closer and closer to the sun, causing it to gradually become so hot as to be uninhabitable. It's scary to watch characters sweat, society crumble, and for paint to melt off paintings in a particularly effective special effect. Then, the ironic twist: This was just a dream, and the world is actually moving away from the sun, and everyone is slowly freezing to death.
18. "Little Girl Lost" (Season 3, Episode 26)
One of many episodes of The Twilight Zone to be spoofed in one of The Simpsons' "Treehouse of Horror" episodes, "Little Girl Lost" is an eerie story that hits a certain dreadful nerve for any parents who might be watching. Chris and Ruth Miller wake up in the middle of the night to discover that their daughter, Tina, has disappeared, though they can hear her and she's scared. Eventually, with the help of Chris' physicist friend, they come to realize that Tina has fallen through a portal to another dimension, and Chris resolves to go in and rescue her before the portal closes.
17. "On Thursday We Leave for Home" (Season 4, Episode 26)
Possibly the saddest, most devastating ending of any Twilight Zone episode (no small feat), "On Thursday We Leave for Home" follows the inhabitants of a colony on an inhospitable planet who have managed to survive for decades under the leadership of Captain Benteen (James Whitmore). Benteen, one of the few people who remembers what life was like on Earth, runs the colony and keeps its inhabitants, most of which were born here, together, but his status and over them is threatened when a rescue mission comes to bring everybody back to Earth. Unwilling to cede power, Benteen opts to stay behind, only to realize seconds too late that he's doomed himself to die alone on a desert world. Sure, Benteen had it coming, but it's such an awful self-inflicted fate nonetheless.
16. "The Little People" (Season 3, Episode 28)
Two astronauts make a pit stop on an alien planet to do some repairs when one of them, co-pilot Peter Craig, discovers a civilization of tiny people in a canyon. He soon has the tiny civilization worshiping him as a god, cruelly and effortlessly crushing their buildings should they not revere him the way he wants. Of course, in a twist that's not subtle but is still very effective, it's all a matter of scale. When a pair of giant astronauts arrive, they can't hear his puny pleas that he is the god here, actually. They accidentally crush him the way one might an ant.
15. "Where Is Everybody" (Season 1, Episode 1)
The very first episode of The Twilight Zone, broadcast on October 2, 1959, isn't as supernatural or sci-fi as many of the episodes that would follow, but it nails the tone that the rest of the show would emulate. A man with no memory of who he is finds himself alone in an abandoned town, and although there seems to be evidence of other people he's seemingly just missed, he can't find anyone. As he goes mad, it's eventually revealed that he's an astronaut in a sensory deprivation booth as part of a test for the effects of long periods of isolation in spaceflight. He made it 484 hours before losing it. Eerie with a nice build-up and satisfying twist ending, "Where Is Everybody" set the mold that later episodes would follow.
14. "The Invaders" (Season 2, Episode 15)
Agnes Moorehead plays a nameless woman in this nearly dialog-free episode that ends with a great twist that changes everything the audience assumed was taking place. The woman (Moorehead) finds herself fighting off an onslaught of tiny little aliens or robots who have arrived in a flying saucer and are shooting her with little ray guns or trying to use her knives as giant weapons. It's a pretty gripping, intense struggle, and you feel for this woman as she's attacked by these tiny invaders. Then, at the end, it's revealed that the invaders are American astronauts who have landed on a planet of giants. This is The Twilight Zone—in retrospect, of course, nothing is as it seemed.
13. "The After Hours" (Season 1, Episode 34)
The idea of department store mannequins coming to life when the store is closed is scary enough, but it's a credit to The Twilight Zone that the horror in this episode touches on something deeper—that we might not be who we think we are. Marsha White is a woman who is shopping, only to be seemingly haunted by the mannequins on the seemingly non-existent ninth floor of the store. Eventually, she learns the reason for this. She is herself a mannequin, and all the mannequins take month-long turns living amongst the humans,and it's past time she came home.
12. "Nothing in the Dark" (Season 3, Episode 16)
One of the more beautiful episodes of The Twilight Zone, "Nothing in the Dark," stars a young Robert Redford as a police officer who has been shot and asks to be let into a reclusive old woman's apartment for help. The woman is hesitant to let him in because she's afraid of death, and she worries that anybody could be Death waiting to touch her and end her life. Redford is Death, but he's not a scythe-wielding spectre. Instead, he's kind; the ruse is meant to win the old woman over and show her that she has nothing to fear. And the episode's ending is, somewhat ironically, one of the most hopeful and uplifting the series has to offer.
11. "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" (Season 3, Episode 14)
A clown, a hobo, a ballet dancer, a bagpiper, and an army major find themselves trapped inside a deep, featureless pit with no memory of who they are or how they got there in an especially existential episode of The Twilight Zone. "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" relies on the mystery and uncanny vibes as these five try to determine where they are, each responding to their situation in unique, revealing ways. The reveal that they're all toys inside of a toy donation barrel might not have any cutting insights about society the way some other great episodes do, but there's such an effective strangeness to "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" that it remains one of the show's most effective outings.
10. "Deaths-Head Revisited" (Season 3, Episode 9)
Released just over a decade and a half after the end of World War II, "Deaths-Head Revisited" is perhaps the heaviest and most explicit episode of The Twilight Zone. The Season 3 episode follows Gunther Lutze, a former SS captain, who decides to visit the abandoned Dachau concentration camp where he served as a commandant during the war. Once inside, he's confronted by the ghosts of his victims and quickly driven insane with guilt. "This is not hatred. This is retribution. This is not revenge. This is justice," the lead ghost informs him. "But this is only the beginning, Captain. Only the beginning. Your final judgment will come from God."
9. "Living Doll" (Season 5, Episode 6)
With apologies to Chucky, Annabelle, and M3GAN, none of them can hold a candle to Talky Tina, the titular "Living Doll" from this classic Twilight Zone episode. Part of why Talky Tina is so scary is because of how little she does. She's not running around wielding a knife. She's just saying things that dolls shouldn't say and turning up in places where dolls shouldn't turn up as she develops a grudge against Erich, the curmudgeonly stepfather to little Christie. It makes Talky Tina less of a monster and more of an unstoppable supernatural force, a terror in the shape of a little child's plaything.
8. "Time Enough at Last" (Season 1, Episode 8)
If you were writing a dictionary and needed to find a picture to go along with the entry for "ironic," you could do a lot worse than including an image of Burgess Meredith from this iconic Twilight Zone episode. Meredith plays Henry Bemis, a bookworm who would rather read than interact with anybody else, though his boss and his wife are always getting in the way of his true passion. When he ducks into a vault at the bank where he works to secretly read a little during his lunch break, a nuclear apocalypse occurs. Bemis emerges from the vault to see that he's the last man alive—and that the library is miraculously not damaged. Finally, he has all the time he needs to read to his heart's content… until his glasses slip off his face and shatter, rendering him unable to see the pages "That's not fair," indeed.
7. "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" (Season 5, Episode 3)
Perhaps the best pure thriller of the entire series, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" is a classic Twilight Zone episode starring William Shatner as a man on an airplane for the first time since he had a nervous breakdown six months prior. As he looks out into the rainy night, he spies a horrid gremlin on the wing trying to tear the plane apart, but nobody believes him due to his past mental health issues and the absurdity of his claim. It's a tense, legitimately scary half-hour of TV.
6. "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (Season 5, Episode 22)
The only episode of The Twilight Zone to win an Academy Award, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" was originally a French short film that was later picked up and aired as an episode of The Twilight Zone near the end of the show's original run. Nearly dialogue-free, it's an adaptation of a short story written during the American Civil War, following a man who is set to be hanged by enemy troops, only for the rope to break. He flees, evading capture as he works to get back to his house and his wife. When he reunites with his wife and feels her arms around his neck, the truth comes out. All of this was a dream he had during the time before the rope snapped and his neck broke. Due to the short's origins, it has a different vibe than a traditional episode of The Twilight Zone, but it's hauntingly effective—and it does have a very Twilight-esque twist.
5. "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" (Season 1, Episode 22)
"The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" is not exactly subtle, though that isn't by any means a knock against it, as it's an extremely effective bit of storytelling with a highly relevant message. A seemingly idyllic American street is thrown into chaos and disarray when strange occurrences start happening. Lights go off—except for those in certain houses—car alarms start blaring, and once-friendly neighbors soon fall victim to paranoia and infighting as they suspect one another of being some sort of alien invasion. The episode ends with the reveal that two aliens are indeed invading Earth, but all they need to do is fiddle with the power, and people will turn on each other, doing the work for them. Rod Serling's message is very clear.
4. "To Serve Man" (Season 3, Episode 24)
A 9-foot-tall alien species known as the Kanamit comes to Earth, seemingly in peace with a benevolent intention "to serve man" in one of the best episodes of The Twilight Zone, one that features one of the best twists. Turns out, once the book these visitors brought that humanity assumed detailed their intention to help them has been fully translated, it means something quite different. It's a cookbook, and the aliens are getting ready to feast on humanity. It's a delicious twist, one that manages to be somewhat silly and deeply chilling at the same time.
3. "Eye of the Beholder" (Season 2, Episode 6)
It's a testament to how well-made "Eye of the Beholder" is that you might not even realize that none of the doctors' faces are being shown, all in an effort to preserve the amazing impact of that final reveal. Janet Tyler's entire head is bandaged up while she's recovering from an operation intended to fix her horribly misshapen face and make her fit in with the rest of society. She waits, agonizing and wondering if this final surgery will take or if she'll be sent away because her appearance doesn't match society's standards, until the end when the wrappings finally come off. And… she's beautiful. Or at least she is to us. To everyone else, whose faces we now see are twisted pig-like visages, she's hideous. Beauty sure is in the eye of the beholder.
2. "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up" (Season 2, Episode 28)
A sci-fi story with the vibe of a whodunit mystery, "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up" adds a gloriously pulpy alien twist to one of The Twilight Zone's most frequently revisited themes—the dangers of paranoia and infighting. When a bus full of passengers makes a pit stop at a roadside diner, they soon hear rumors of a crashed UFO and begin to suspect that one of them is secretly an alien because there's one more "passenger" in the diner than the bus driver remembered having aboard. It's a fun little mystery with two killer reveals. First, one passenger returns to the diner and unveils a third arm, as he's a Martian scout. However, the cook at the diner takes off his hat to reveal a third eye, as he's from Venus and his world's invasion has already begun. It's a twist on top of a twist.
1. "It's a Good Life" (Season 3, Episode 8)
One of the most terrifying monsters, not just from The Twilight Zone but in all of genre fiction, is a 6-year-old boy. Anthony Fremont has godlike powers, and he wields them with all of the restraint and reason that you might expect from a young child, isolating his small Ohio town from the rest of the world and forcing everybody to bend to his every whim lest they be sent away "to the cornfield." It's a novel premise with really fascinating, terrifying implications.
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