Twenty Two

"This is Miss Liz Powell. She’s a professional dancer and she’s in the hospital
as a result of overwork and nervous fatigue, and at this moment we have just finished
walking with her in a nightmare…in a moment she’ll wake up and we’ll remain at her
side, the problem here is that both Miss Powell and you will reach a point where it might
be difficult to decide which is reality, and which is nightmare…"

Despite being an enormous fan of The Twilight Zone, I had yet to encounter an episode that actually frightened me until tonight. The episode opened with a woman waking in a hospital bed to the absurdly loud sound of a ticking clock, with a look of unexplained terror on her face. In one long and uninterrupted shot, she reaches a trembling hand for a glass of water on the night table, and accidentally knocks it over…sending it shattering to the floor. The loud ticking stops at this point, but the tension only begins…footsteps are heard outside her door, and the woman, still shaking and terrified, walks to the door and steps into the hallway, which is empty. The eerie string music builds and builds, and the subtle fact that the camera never cuts once throughout the entire scene enhances the climbing inexplicable fear. She looks down the hallway, and the camera quickly rotates so we can see what she is looking at…we get a quick glimpse of a nurse, standing in an elevator, as the door closes. You can see that she is in uniform, but her face is black. Shaded out. The door slides shut before we’re even able to register this fact, and the woman approaches the elevator and looks at the floor lights, as the elevator goes all the way down to the basement. She pushes the button, gets in, and follows suit…emerging in the damp, dark, hospital basement, where she walks until she comes to Room 22. As she reaches forward to open the door, it flies open, and the nurse we had previously spotted in the elevator is suddenly standing there, with the morgue behind her…room for one more, honey, she says with a strange smile, and the woman wakes up screaming.

She goes on to have this dream two more times, each time trying to do something different to affect the outcome, per her psychiatrists request…but each time she is drawn into the same turn of events, always with the woman’s blacked out face getting on the elevator, and always ending with her swinging the door to the morgue open saying room for one more, honey.

And then suddenly the recurring dream stops, and she is able to go about her life…we find her some time later, preparing to board a plane. Suddenly she can hear the ticking clock grow louder and louder, and she is once again filled with the same kind of unexplainable terror that she felt in her dream. She bumps into another passenger on the way to board, and knocks something brittle to the floor, shattering it. The ticking stops. Trembling now, she walks towards the plane, and as she’s about to board a stewardess pops out of the door and says room for one more, honey, the same woman from her dream of the hospital. She screams and runs away…and as she sits recovering in the airport foyer, her manager cursing her for not boarding the plane, we see the plane explode on the runway.

It’s Rod Serling’s take on the classic horror tale, which usually concerns a man in a hearse pulling up to a woman’s house every night with three coffins in the back, telling her that there is room for one more. It goes on for a while, and then stops…the woman soon after is about to get into a crowded elevator, when the man operating the elevator holds the door and tells her that there is room for one more. Recognizing him as the man in the hearse, she freezes in terror, and the elevator closes….and soon after falls, killing everyone inside of it. I am not sure what it is about this particular tale that disturbs me so, in any form…perhaps it’s just the subtle wrongness that seems to radiate at the core of it’s driving power…a premonition, in the form of an accidental allegory…