Nightcrawlers (The Twilight Zone)

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“Nightcrawlers”
The Twilight Zone episode

Scene from "Nightcrawlers"
Episode no. Season 1
Episode 4, Segment 3
Written by Philip DeGuere
Directed by William Friedkin
Guest stars James Whitmore Jr.: (Sheriff) Dennis Wells
Scott Paulin: Price
Robert Swan: Bob the cook
Exene Cervenka: Waitress
Bobby Bass: Ray
Sandy Martin: Lindy
Matt Levin: Ricky
Original airdate 18 October 1985
Episode chronology
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List of Twilight Zone episodes

Nightcrawlers is the third and final segment of the fourth episode of the television series The Twilight Zone. It is taken from a short story of the same name by Robert R. McCammon, first published in the 1984 collection Masques

[edit] Plot

Various customers come into a diner during a heavy rain, including a Vietnam veteran named Price. While Price is having coffee, he asks for a cold beer, but the cook, Bob, tells him that the diner doesn't have a liquor license. Price laments how a cold beer would taste good and a can of Budwiser appears in his hand.

After a confrontation with Dennis Wells, the local sheriff, Price is compelled to describe how he fled and abandoned his unit during the war, comdemning all of them to death in the jungles. He relays that he dreams one recurring nightmare in which his unit, "The Nightcrawlers", are hunting him down to exact revenge.

He was endowed with the power of mind over matter (as were the others in his unit) that he demonstrates by materializing a t-bone steak on the grill. The sheriff, who believes Price is a dangerous troublemaker who may be responsible for a massacre at the nearby motel, pulls his gun on Price, but Price melts it with his mind. The sheriff knocks Price unconscious, and the diner begins to experience Price's nightmare where ghost-like soldiers materialize, destroy the diner and the surrounding parking lot and vehicles, and then force their way inside to kill Price, before vanishing again.

Injured from a very real gunshot, Bob the cook realises that Price's powers, coupled with his special abilities, actually caused the massacre in the hotel and the events in the diner, and Bob cries out the reminder to the others that Price said there were still four more soldiers with the same abilities.

[edit] Production Details

[edit] References and links