Leonardo DiCaprio enters The Twilight Zone

21 October 2010

John Howell

If you are as big a fan as I am, you'll be pleased to hear that Warner Bros. is developing a new Twilight Zone film to be produced by Leonardo DiCaprio and written by Joseph Rothenberg. The original Twilight Zone TV series ran for five seasons from 1959 to 1964, and was an outstanding, eclectic mix of the paranormal, supernatural, futuristic, dystopian, utopian and down right outlandish, with plenty of twist endings and powerful social messages. Narrator and host Rod Serling (who also wrote most of the episodes), with cigarette in hand, provided wit and panache, and a unique prose style frequently parodied.

Serling was a progressive thinker in regards to race relations, gender and politics, and his stories frequently used science fiction and fantasy concepts to explore these issues in complex, well written tales of strange places, people and events. Television shows have rarely produced anything as good. Apart from Serling, episodes of TheTwilight Zone were written by some of science fiction and fantasy's leading lights, including Richard Matheson, Harlan Ellison and Ray Bradbury.

Apparently Serling only discovered after the series aired that the "twilight zone" was a term applied by the US Air Force to the terminator, the border between "night" and "day" on a planetary body - extremely appropriate given the nature of the show.

There is little in the way of detail yet, but apparently Jason Rothenberg may use some of the stories from the original TV series to create a film with segments (much like the 1983 Twilight Zone movie directed by Joe Dante, John Landis, George Miller and Steven Spielberg). If you haven't watched the series, be sure to check out the episodes To Serve Man, Time Enough at Last, Eye of the Beholder and especially And when the sky was opened, about three astronauts who return from an aborted space mission and slowly begin to disappear...