Imagine if you will, a man that in all likelihood suffered from undiagnosed PTSD from World War Two, was known as television’s angry young man that clashed with studio executives and sponsors over issues that included censorship, racism and war and was still able to create a seminal show like the Twilight Zone.

That man was Rod Serling.

While the Twilight Zone ran from only 1959 to 1964 its influence is still felt today amongst writers, film makers and others. Its importance and impact cannot be overstated. 

It influenced me.

Even at my young age when I first viewed it, I knew the Twilight Zone was something special. The first episode I remember watching was The Dummy. I found it truly frightening. I was also hooked on the show.

I knew then that I wanted to write stories like the ones that were on the show.

Fast forward to adulthood. After being a freelance newspaper reporter where I wrote sports and features and learned that I had to grab the audience in the first paragraph, I was still a Rod Serling fan. I had watched as he had a new series called night Gallery on NBC. This led me to try and find the Twilight Zone wherever and whenever it was on television. This was usually on some obscure channel late in the evening.

After I wrote my first book in 1999, I began writing short stories. My first short stories I wrote was where I had to take a pre-selected title and write a story around it. The first one I chose was The Beggar and the Devil. It was about a beggar that was granted a wish from the Devil. Naturally, I wrote it with the Twilight Zone in mind. It had a twist ending that I was quite happy with and felt the readers would enjoy.

The next story was Living Like a Pig. This dealt with a hard-working wife that was fed up with her lazy, philandering husband and decided to do something about him. This too had a touch of the Twilight Zone ending in it.

Since those two I had written other stories with Rod Serling’s twist or ironic endings that some found surprising. One of my favorites that I wrote recently was in my science fiction short story collection, The Thing From Uranus.  It was just before that The Thing From Uranus came out, I decided to do a tribute to Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone, and maybe a touch of Night Gallery too.

I also had encouragement from legendary actress Dee Wallace that I needed to finish the book and that she wanted a copy when we talked at Motor City Nightmares in April of 2019. So, I made sure that I finished my book by July of that year. All the while I was thinking how much Rod Serling had influenced me as a writer.

Whenever I was stuck or suffering from writer’s block while working on stories for my series of book tribute to Mr. Serling, I was turning on Netflix to watch episodes to give me my writing mojo back. Some episode, while not similar were at least in the same time or had the same genre of story that I was writing.

Let me say, I am in no way close to being anywhere close to the writer that Rod Serling was. He was truly a master. He was the reason that I wanted to write or tell a good story.

This is an example of Rod Serling’s writing that I find exceptional. This is from the episode Death’s Head Revisited.

Rod Serling in voice-over answers that question to the viewers in his closing monologue: "There is an answer to the doctor's question. All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes - all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God's Earth."

 

I think that Rod Serling encapsulated what happened during the Holocaust in one powerful and haunting paragraph of monologue at the end of the episode. 

But there were lots of other episodes. These ran the gamut of science fiction to horror, fantasy to humor. It was a variety of different tales designed to entertain, enlighten, and make you think.

Other episodes I found powerful and quite influential were The Obsolete Man, Two, Masks, The Passerby, The Sixteen Millimeter Shrine, People Are Alike All Over, The Howling Man, A Quality of Mercy, The Little People, The Trade-Ins, The Dummy, The Changing of the Guard, He’s Alive, The New Exhibit, On Thursday We Leave For Home, What’s In the Box, The Brain Center at Whipple’s, and In Praise of Pip.

These are episodes for one reason or another I find not just influential but helpful when I am trying to write. They are also just flat-out entertaining as well.

That is the power Rod Serling had in his words and influence that a young person like me that wanted to write.  I cannot say enough how much he influenced me to not only want to be a writer but in my writing as well.

Thank you, Mr. Serling.