Very well.
There's a general consensus among TV viewers that the mid-1980s revival of The Twilight Zone, though it came nowhere close to capturing the magic and intrigue of Rod Serling's original series, was an enjoyable show in its own right and yielded its fair share of legitimate classics - "A Little Peace and Quiet", "Nightcrawlers" and "The Shadow Man" being commonly-cited candidates in round-ups of the series' strongest contributions to television culture (myself, I'm fond of the oft-overlooked "Wordplay"). One installment that you're less likely to encounter in such lists is an eleven-minute curiosity piece entitled "The Elevator", which is so poorly regarded among the show's viewership that many are shocked to discover that it was written by none other than horror/science fiction master Ray Bradbury. On a Twilight Zone forum I frequented some years back, I encountered very little praise for this segment, one criticism that particularly stood out coming from a user who attributed their intense dislike of "The Elevator" to the fact that it put them so strongly in mind of that devilishly inane Night Gallery installment, "The Nature of The Enemy". Being one of that segment's few really ardent supporters, my immediate response would be to query why that's necessarily a bad thing. But I can see the logic in the comparison. Both stories involve humans being menaced by gigantic versions of ordinarily tiny creatures in unexpected places. Both have to do with humankind's underestimation of the natural world, but whereas Serling's story was a cautionary jab at man's hubristic assumptions that his technological advancements have enabled him to transcend the rest of the natural kingdom, Bradbury's story is more concerned with mankind's attempts to interfere with and modify nature to his own ends, and potentially to his own detriment. The off-screen scientist who plays an crucial role in the events of "The Elevator" has perfectly noble intentions for doing what he does, but in the end that may not matter. For nature is entirely indifferent to such things.
"The Elevator" follows two young brothers, Will (Stephen Geoffreys) and Roger (Robert Prescott), who arrive at a derelict old factory after dark in the hopes of locating their father, an eccentric scientist who has been conducting illicit experiments with the goal of manufacturing a nutritious and inexpensive foodstuff that will eradicate world hunger. Will and Roger break into the building and, noticing their father's footprints in the dusty factory floor, deduce that he has been there tonight and is likely still in the vicinity. As the brothers make their way through the darkened factory, they stumble across the carcasses of several freakishly large rats, each one bigger than the last. They then find the body of a monstrously large house cat, followed by the body of an even bigger dog. Continuing their search, they find the supply of foodstuff that their father was developing - long, icky strands of concentrated protein. The brothers deduce that the animals became huge after gorging on the protein-rich foodstuff, and that the dog and the cat might have killed the rats, but what in turn killed both of them? Obviously, no sensible person would want to stick around and find out, but the brothers, being evident dimwits, decide to keep venturing ever deeper into the building, until they reach the elevator at the back and manage to get it working again. The elevator doors open up to reveal...a humongous spider, which proceeds to drag the screaming brothers upwards while mauling them into bloody pulps - although I only realised that the creature in question was a spider because one of the brothers is considerate enough to shout out "My god, it's a spider!" right before it kills him. The spider is represented largely as an obscure shadowy shape with a multitude of legs, which is fairly unconvincing and leads us into one of the obvious shortcomings of "The Elevator" - that is, the visual effects in general are hilariously ropy. This is as true for the various dead animals seen throughout as the climactic arachnid; the giant rats look like plush toys, the giant "house cat" is blatantly a moth-eaten stuffed cougar plucked from the back of someone's attic, and we don't even get a semi-decent look at the giant dog.
Anyway, that's the end. The fate of the boys' father is never explicitly revealed, but it can be assumed that he also fell victim to the giant spider that predated everything else.
The first time I saw "The Elevator" I really didn't take to it, in part because I was absolutely flabbergasted by the perceived cheapness of its ending. I didn't get why Bradbury had chosen to sacrifice such a macabre, skin-crawling and devilishly disgusting scenario on something as moronic and out of left field as a giant spider. The whole thing actually reminded me a lot of the opening sequence to Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) with Albert Brooks and Dan Aykroyd, in that it's an enjoyable segment that looks as if it's building up toward something worthwhile, only to close suddenly and randomly on a crude shock moment that emerges seemingly from nowhere. Say what you will about the ending to "The Nature of The Enemy", but it is an actual punchline. You might not think that it's a particularly good punchline or that the joke in question works, but the segment has clearly been laying the ground for it from the start. The conclusion to the Brooks/Aykroyd opener, on the other hand, feels less like a punchline than a straight-up non-sequitur and, initially, that's how I felt about "The Elevator" too - in fact, "The Elevator" went a step further, in playing like an anti-narrative, deliberately short-circuiting just when you think it's about to get started. Such was my frustration with "The Elevator" that I wound up giving it a lot more thought than I did a great many stronger installments from the series. The more I kept turning it over and over in my mind, the more I began to wonder if I had perhaps misjudged the segment; that the spider element wasn't quite as moronic or out of left field as I'd initially assumed. And before I knew it I had convinced myself that, to the contrary, it was total genius. Well-played, Bradbury, well-played.
I'm still not saying that "The Elevator" is a great segment, mind. There's an awful lot that doesn't work about it. But its failures rest largely with the execution - the inferior visual effects, the flatness of the final spider reveal, the hamminess of some of the dialogue delivery (for an example of that, see Geoffreys' reaction when he sees the dead cat). It all adds up to produce a short which, superficially, seems shoddily put-together (although the eerie atmosphere at the factory is well-sustained throughout). But Bradbury did his bit and delivered a fun and macabre story with a meaningful sting in the tail.
Marisou, covering "The Elevator" on TZ review blog Postcards From The Zone, observes that, "this episode probably lost a lot of its punch outside the original airing slot - if you watched this when it aired, you probably expected the brothers to climb to the second floor first and got pleasantly shocked...watching on DVD, the timer feature tells you clearly something is gonna happen as they call the elevator mere seconds before the episode ends." I agree that Bradbury's sleight of hand, in manipulating and subverting our narrative expectations, is integral to the success of the story, but I think it amounts to more than a simple "gotcha!" moment that swings in marginally sooner than we expect it. The key to that, I'd say, is to consider the array of dead animals we'd encountered up until that point. The order of discovery goes rats, cat, dog. Notice a pattern there? Of course you do. It's a food chain. And what sits higher than a dog on the ladder of consumption? Certainly not a spider. Obviously, when that monstrous arachnid appears we know that something's gone very badly wrong here (the first hint of food chain subversion occurs earlier on, when Roger remarks that perhaps their father was looking to breed giant rats in order to get back at the cats). At first, the spider seems like a baffling non-sequitur, since it completely defies the logical progress we'd been making with our furry foodies, but I'd say that's precisely the point. The food chain is severely out of whack and, thanks to the reckless (albeit well-intentioned) experimentation of that unseen crackpot, that unassuming spider has managed to rocket its way right to the top. You might even say that it was elevated, no? Sure, the literal elevator had its part to play, but the real elevator to which the title alludes was the modified foodstuff that enabled the spider to get well ahead of the assorted mammalians in whose shadows it had previously dwelled.
The spider represents a sharp disturbance to our narrative and logical assumptions, prompting the question as to what exactly we did expect the brothers to find on the second, or even third floor? Again, what comes after dog in the natural progression? Obviously, there's man. Were we supposed to assume that the boys' father had been sampling his own foodstuff and was mutating beyond recognition? I don't recall if I expected the father to actually be the final monster encountered, but I certainly expected him to play a more direct role in the story's conclusion, and for there to be some exploration of the implications of feeding his modified foodstuff to humans. In the end, though, that particular story thread is rendered entirely irrelevant, as our place atop the natural order is usurped by that eight-legged freak.
Curiously, while researching for this piece I came across multiple online synopses for "The Elevator" claiming that our protagonists break into their father's factory with the intention of stealing his anti-famine foodstuff and selling it for profit. Even the official DVD synopsis states that "two brothers stealing their father's growth serum developed to ensure a plentiful food supply may have bitten off more than they can chew." Really now, I will not allow Will and Roger's names to be sullied, because there's nothing in the segment itself to indicate that they have any intention of stealing their father's work and selling it for their own gain. As far as I can tell, they're just there to find their father - one of the brothers, Roger, doesn't even believe that his dad's experimentation is of any value. I can only assume that some viewers feel uneasy about the gruesome end these characters meet and need to factor in some sense of karmic justice, as to reassure themselves that the brothers got what they deserved because they were avaricious little shits. "The Elevator" does well to avoid such on-the-nose moralising; it's a cautionary tale, for sure, but a good part of that caution comes from its rude reminders that nature doesn't actually give a damn about human morality - the innocent taste as good as the guilty to a hungry predator, and that the boys' father may have had the purest of intentions ultimately doesn't alter the fact that his hubristic attempts to fiddle around with nature spelled disaster for both himself and his sons. It's fair to say that, if nothing else, Will and Roger pay the price for their stupidity - the cat and dog, if alive, were certainly large enough to have killed them, so I'm not sure why they suppose they'd have any chance against whatever killed the cat and dog - and yet I get the sense that that stupidity is intended to translate into a naivety emblematic of humankind's general complacency in assuming that it has the inherent privilege of sitting atop the natural order come what may. One tip too far in that delicate balance, and we might discover that we're as fair game as anything else. When Roger runs his hand across the grotesque mutated proteins his father has been spawning, he remarks that, "It's like raw meat...it's food, for them," gesturing toward the multitude of dead creatures. Plainly, it never occurs to him that he himself is composed of raw meat, and therefore food for something.
In the end, I cannot claim to like "The Elevator" half as much as I do "The Nature of The Enemy", but then I suppose my personal biases are leaking through (since rat horror happens to be my specialty). And for all my criticisms regarding the execution of "The Elevator", I would be lying if I said that it didn't disturb me on some raw, fundamental level. There's something about the entire notion of a giant spider that taps into a very visceral fear of mine, and trust me when I say that I'm no arachnophobe. I'm certainly not one of one of those people who freaks out every time I see a spider hanging from my lampshade. And yet, of all the members of the animal kingdom, a giant spider is one that my gut instincts tell me I least want to be killed by. I need to trust my gut on that.
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