The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street
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“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” is an episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone.
[edit] Details
- Episode number: 22
- Season: 1
- Production code: 173-3620
- Original air date: March 4, 1960
- Writer: Rod Serling
- Director: Ronald Winston
- Producer: Buck Houghton
- Music: Original score by Rene Garriguenc, conducted by Lud Gluskin
[edit] Synopsis
[edit] Opening narration
"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 6:45pm 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."
[edit] Main story
It is mid-evening in September and the street is full of playing children and adults talking. A shadow passes overhead and a loud roar is heard, accompanied by a flash of light. Later, after it has gone dark, the residents of Maple Street find that the telephones no longer work, and there is no power. They gather together in the street to discuss the matter.
Pete Van Horn decides to go into town and see what is happening, but his car will not start and he decides to walk instead. Tommy, a young boy from the neighborhood, pleads with him not to go. He is sure that the outages are part of an alien invasion—just as he has read in books and comics. Furthermore, he says, most of these invasions are preceded by the infiltration of aliens who look human. Naturally no one takes him seriously, but soon the first signs of doubt appear.
Meanwhile another resident, Les Goodman, tries unsuccessfully to start his car. He gets out and begins to walk back towards the other residents when the car starts all by itself. The bizarre behavior of his car makes Les the object of immediate suspicion. The residents begin to discuss his late nights spent standing in the garden looking up at the sky. Les claims to be an insomniac. His problem becomes worse when the lights in his house come on, and the rest of the neighborhood remains in the dark. Suspicion then suddenly switches to Steve when he tries to defuse the situation and prevent it from becoming a witch-hunt. Charlie, one of the loudest and most aggressive residents, pressures Steve about his hobby building a radio that no one has ever seen.
A man is seen walking along Maple Street through the dark, towards the gathered crowd. Panic begins to build and Charlie grabs a shotgun and kills him. When the crowd reaches the fallen man, they realize that it is Pete Van Horn, a local resident who had gone to the next block to find out the situation there.
Suddenly the lights in Charlie's house come on and he panics, realizing how it looks. He is now the subject of the suspicion. He makes a run for his house while the other residents begin to chase him and throw stones. Terrified, Charlie attempts to deflect suspicion onto Tommy, the boy who originally brought up the idea of alien infiltration. Lights begin turn on and off in different houses, lawn mowers and cars start up for no apparent reason. A riot begins and the hysterical residents smash windows, fight and switch blame from one person to another with little justification.
The episode ends with two Martian observers watching the rioting on Maple Street and discussing how easy it was to create paranoia and panic, and let the people of Earth destroy themselves—one place at a time. One of them tells the other:
- "Understand the procedure now? Just stop a few of their machines...throw them into darkness for a few hours and then sit back and watch the pattern. They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find......and it's themselves."
[edit] Closing narration
"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."
[edit] Themes
As the aliens state, the central theme is how irrationally people act under stress and, in particular, it serves as an allegory for the Red Scare, particularly the House Committee on Un-American Activities which began as a congressional inquiry into the political influences of the Soviet Union but rapidly degenerated into a witch-hunt. This is especially prevalent near the end, when shifting the suspicion to someone—anyone other than oneself, innocent or guilty—becomes a way of survival; ultimately, everyone is suspected of being an alien in one form or another, and the town descends into total chaos. The episode is thus similar to works such as Arthur Miller's The Crucible, which depicts the Salem witch trials and how powerful unfounded accusations can become via the power of suggestion.
Other episodes in the series also deal with variations of this theme. For instance, "The Shelter" depicts a group of neighbors who, while celebrating their beloved doctor's birthday and teasing him about his recently-constructed bomb shelter, subsequently turn into a frenzied mob when an alert indicates a nuclear threat is imminent and it becomes clear there is only room for one family in the shelter. "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up", meanwhile, presents a situation where one person out of a group appears not to belong and two police officers attempt to discern who the impostor is; after the group gives up, it is revealed that two impostors, one from Mars and one from Venus, have been present all along without knowing of one another's presence.
[edit] Remake
A remake of the episode was created in the latest re-adaptation of The Twilight Zone, but it was renamed The Monsters Are On Maple Street. The difference between the two is that in the remake is more about the fear of terrorism in America and how it drives people apart. When the power surge happens in the remake, it is not caused by aliens but by the government, experimenting on how small towns react to the fear of terrorism. In the end, the neighborhood takes out its anger and frustration on a family who never left their house after the power surge occurred, thinking that they caused it since they still have power.
[edit] Trivia
The theme of this episode is revisited in The Trigger Effect (1996), a film directed by David Koepp.
MSNBC correspondent Keith Olbermann cited this episode as an allegory for the Bush Administration's conduct of the War on Terror in a "Special Comment" aired on the fifth anniversary of the September 11th attacks, titled "This hole in the ground." (transcript)
