Shit That Scared Matt Groening: No. 10 - The After Hours (The Twilight Zone)

"10. That "Twilight Zone" episode in which the woman gets locked in a department store after closing, and the mannequins come to life."
~ "49 Things That Frightened and Disturbed Me When I was a Kid", Matt Groening (Bart Simpson's Treehouse of Horror #1, 1995)

Here's an installment of STSMG which didn't require an arduous amount of background research on my part. Matt isn't specific enough to provide the title, but I knew exactly which episode of The Twilight Zone he was talking about the instant I read his synopsis. It's "The After Hours" of Season 1, an episode which, alongside "Time Enough At Last" and "To Serve Man", would be a strong contender for the series' most well-known and celebrated of all-time. "The After Hours" first aired on 10th June 1960, and proved such an iconic component of Rod Serling's legacy that it was later remade in 1986 as part of the 80s Twilight Zone revival. This classic tale delves into a relatively new concern that was haunting mankind as we edged ever deeper into consumerist culture - what if those unnatural doppelgangers we encounter on our daily shopping excursions, store mannequins, have minds and wills of their own rattling away inside their fibreglass forms and are secretly observing us with envious eyes? Are these uncanny beings harmless props, or unpleasant reflections of our own hollow materialism?

"The After Hours" sees its ingenuous protagonist, Marsha White (Anne Francis), head up to the ninth floor of a department store, on what Serling's opening narration describes as "a most prosaic, run-of-the-mill, ordinary errand" - namely, she intends to purchase a thimble for her mother. We all know that "prosaic", "run-of-the-mill" and "ordinary" are not terms that nestle readily with the Twilight Zone, and sure enough, Marsha begins to sense that something is awry early on when she deduces that the elevator attendant (John Conwell) looks to have been lying in wait especially for her, ignoring the countless other shoppers in the store in order to give her a private ride up to floor nine. It gets even spookier when Marsha reaches the ninth floor, which looks empty and disused, and is served by a hair-raisingly curt sales clerk (Elizabeth Allen), who appears to have a personal bone to pick with Marsha, despite Marsha's insistence that this woman shouldn't know her from Adam. Marsha gets the thimble she seeks, but finds it suspicious that the ninth floor had no hint of any other people or merchandise in sight. Later, Marsha realises that the thimble is scratched and takes things up with a sales supervisor, Mr Armbruster (James Millhollin), who informs her that the department store does not have a ninth floor. Marsha spots what she takes to be the sales clerk who sold her the thimble but discovers, to her horror, that it is actually a mannequin with the sales clerk's exact likeness. Marsha becomes faint and is taken into a back room to recover, but the staff forget about her and leave her locked in the store after closing. Marsha comes to and attempts to escape, but finds herself back on the mysterious ninth floor, where she is besieged by the store mannequins, who become increasingly animated and speak to her, imploring her to drop the pretense. Finally, Marsha is met by the sales clerk from earlier, who asks her to think back and remember who she really is. With some prompting, Marsha recalls that she too is a mannequin who was permitted to live the life of a normal human for a month (as is a customary aspect of mannequin culture, although only one mannequin is allowed to do so at a time and they each have to wait their turn), but forgot her true identity and did not return to the store when her time was up. The sales clerk was next in line for a month-long getaway and was frustrated that Marsha's amnesia caused her to lose some of her own allotted time, but she forgives Marsha and goes her merry way. Marsha is left in the company of the elevator operator (also a mannequin), who asks her if she enjoyed her time in the outside world. Marsha responds that it was "Ever so much fun" and becomes inanimate. The episode closes on a punchline involving Mr Armbruster, who is wandering through the store one day and spots Marsha in her mannequin form, causing him to double take.

A key factor in why The Twilight Zone has remained such an enduring classic over the decades, and the gold standard by which all subsequent paranormal anthology series are inevitably judged, lies in its penchant for a well-crafted twist ending. Not every single TZ twist worked or holds up today, but when they did hit home, they ripped in with such spine-chilling ferocity that the teeth marks they left embedded in popular culture remain throbbing and raw (the ending of "To Serve Man", for example, is still shocking, despite being such an iconic twist that most viewers have ample chance to steel themselves up for it in advance). Still, it's fair to say that a high percentage of Twilight Zone twists were variations on what was effectively the same basic formula - ie: the protagonist thinks they're one thing, but they turn out to be either ignorant or deluded and by the end of the episode must come to terms with the fact that they're something else entirely. On paper, "The After Hours" hinges on such a whimsically hokey scenario that it could easily read as a parody of this kind of twist. Serling appears to be leaning upon the tongue-in-cheek in his closing narration, when he poses that, "it makes you wonder, doesn't it? Just how normal are we? Just who are the people we nod our hellos to as we pass on the street?" It's all very well to suppose that the random stranger you pass on the street may be a deeper or kinkier soul than you perhaps take for granted, but Serling cannot seriously be suggesting that they might secretly be animated shop mannequins masquerading as humans. Most Twilight Zone scenarios are obviously quite out there, but they resonate because they have something to say about human nature (occasionally, you will get an episode that attempts to supply a rational, down-to-earth explanation for its strange phenomena, such as the psychoanalytical "Nightmare as a Child" and the series opener, "Where Is Everybody?", but let's face it, we like our TZ best when it's spooky and a little inexplicable). In the case of "The After Hours", it's not immediately clear if there is a deeper message, beyond the very basic (and very versatile) one of "Things are not always what they seem", and yet the story is an immensely affecting one. It is a ludicrous outcome, and yet it works beautifully, chiefly for the haunting line it evokes between the real and the artificial, between energy and inertia, between living and merely observing. It's hard to overstate just how invested we become in the plight of this audacious mannequin who wanted to be human. Consider Serling's final words on Marsha - "in her normal and natural state, a wooden lady with a painted face who, one month out of the year, takes on the characteristics of someone as normal and as flesh and blood as you and I" - and notice the curious dual mention of "normal" therein. Here, Serling appears to be commenting on the superficiality of outer image, with the troubling inversion that Marsha's flesh and blood human exterior is exposed as the synthetic veil and her inert, wooden state as "normal and natural". In order to be truly real, Marsha must abandon all pretensions of being human and become the artificial other. Much like a consumerist who assumes that donning a new jacket can make them into a whole new person, Marsha's attempts to reinvent herself holistically by changing her outward appearance amount to little more than a frivolous game of play-pretend, one that is brutally undercut by the fellow mannequin who asks her who she supposes she's fooling.

Mannequins make for persuasive horror antagonists, not least for the strong vibrations they tend to give off of the uncanny valley - we created mannequins in our own image, so there's a subconscious level on which they inevitably register as a threat to our own identity - but, nevertheless, it is integral to the success of "The After Hours" is that the mannequins, while sufficiently spooky, are not villains. This is in stark contrast to the 1986 remake, which plays the same scenario as a straightforward horror and has the mannequins harass Marsha relentlessly (here played by Terry Farrell) as her body slowly reverts to its mannequin state. In both cases, the mannequins' rationale is the exact same - Marsha has used up her permitted month in the outside world and must now surrender the privilege to the next mannequin in line - and yet the remake abandons all sense of camaraderie among its plastic people, presenting them as mindless, pitiless drones who'll use whatever means necessary to restore the status quo. The remake also diverges in that Farrell's Marsha does not willingly accept her true identity as a mannequin and opposes her supposed brethren every step of the way; her motivation, this time, has less to do with her being overly enamored with the human way of life than with her aversion toward the horrors of subsisting as a motionless object. The 1986 version works as an exercise in pure suspense, but compared to the 1960 original it feels emotionally and thematically rather shallow. The 1960 version is enigmatic precisely because it resists courting more straightforward chills. There are some extremely unsettling sequences, notably those extended, near-silent shots of Marsha treading through the empty department store, which assumes a very different aura during the titular interval, when all of the human souls have gone home and unwittingly abandoned it to the unearthly forces that have free reign in their absence. It is a classic exercise in making the mundane appear nightmarish (there is also a moment in which Marsha is startled by her own mirror reflection, which provides a nice bit of foreshadowing as to her human exterior being the real intrusion). In the end, though, the mannequins themselves are not malevolent, and as such the episode only needs to make them so scary, yet they are consistently otherworldly - even when they assume their human forms and line up smiling at Marsha, there's something eerily stilted and artificial about their mannerisms. We are confronted by the fundamental wrongness of this world, and yet for Marsha, and for narrative purposes, it signifies truth and authenticity, the stripping away of all that is fake and cosmetic. Once Francis's Marsha has been exposed for what she is, she realises that there is little point in fighting it.

Francis's Marsha finds acceptance among her fellow mannequins, if not esteem (there's something very revealing in how they noisily abandon her, save the elevator operator, to bid farewell to the sales clerk as she heads off for her own month of masquerading). She is rendered an observer twice over, for even among mannequin society she is swiftly forgotten and left stranded on the sidelines (we learn very little about how Marsha has been occupying her allotted month as a human, other than convincing herself that she has a mother who needs a thimble, yet it is the quiet solitude in which she is left to resume inertia that makes her insistence that it was "so much fun" so heartrendingly convincing). The greatest irony of "The After Hours" is that it is when Marsha becomes the other that we truly recognise her as one of us. She is an eternal observer who longs to be a participant, and who, forever taunted with a lifestyle unattainable to her, finds fulfillment only in the realm of dreams and fantasies. What could be more authentically human than that?


Does it frighten and disturb ME?

"The After Hours" is a superb piece of television, and its reputation as one of The Twilight Zone's strongest installments is well-deserved, although I would hesitate to rank it as the series' scariest (for my money, you can't beat "The Hitch-Hiker" in that regard, even if the twist there is fairly predictable and telegraphed early on). There's some detectable horror to be had from the notion that mannequins are supernatural beings who come to life and patrol our public spheres when our backs are turned. The fact is, though, that these particular mannequins are all so delightfully genteel. They're not out to hurt or punish Marsha for her transgression; they simply want to remind her of who she really is so that their own way of life can be restored to them. The ability to live as a human, just for a month, means as much to them as it did to Marsha, and you can't fault them for demanding it back. Ultimately, this is one of those TZ scenarios in which something that appears threatening turns out to be quite benign (I'd cite "The Hitch-Hiker" as another example, only Leonard Strong's character frankly does remain sinister to the finish, even when his true identity is made clear).

Is it more frightening and disturbing than the 1987 movie Mannequin? That's a discussion for another occasion.