Twilight Zone '85: The Burning Man (aka The Day of The Cicada)

So a funny thing happened a couple of months ago, when I reviewed the 1980s Twilight Zone  episode, "The Elevator", and insisted that it's an installment that gets very little love from fans. I said that, but I had a hard time corroborating it, since most of the fansites and articles I'd found roasting the episode a decade or so ago appear to have vanished without trace. Meanwhile, the few truly positive reviews, such as that of Postcards From The Zone, have stuck around, giving you the impression that the episode perhaps isn't quite as strongly reviled as I made out. You'll just have to take my word for it. What's also been snuffed from existence is an old article purporting to have singled out the ten worst episodes of the 1985 revival that had "The Burning Man" down at the No. 2 spot, comparing it unfavourably to the Night Gallery episode "Big Surprise", which the author also didn't seem to care for very much (I actually don't remember what it ranked as the very worst episode, but it may well have been "The Elevator"). Unlucky, because "The Burning Man" happens to be one of my all-time favourite TZ tales, across any of the program's incarnations. Whereas my feelings on "The Elevator" have remained fairly ambivalent (I have a greater appreciation for that story's subtext than I did several years ago, but it's still not top-tier TZ for me), I've long considered "The Burning Man" to be an extremely underrated short-form horror, not least because it has the distinction of being one of the few episodes of the 1980s Twilight Zone revival to have genuinely scared me. As a story, it's too flat-out weird and discombobulating to be cast aside, and it's in need of someone who's willing to champion the hell out of it.

"The Burning Man" was adapted from the Ray Bradbury short story of the same name, which can be located in Bradbury's 1976 anthology Long After Midnight. The teleplay, written by J.D. Feigelson (who also directed the episode), is extremely faithful to Bradbury's story, with most of the dialogue being transcribed word-for-word. Bradbury, of course, wrote the script for "The Elevator", and while "The Burning Man" is a vastly different Twilight Zone installment, tonally and thematically, the two stories actually have a surprising number of plot points in common. At the very least, the same basic template is there. They each involve two unwary individuals, blood relations in both cases, who venture out into some unknown, where they are menaced and - it's implied - ultimately devoured by an unnaturally gifted creepy-crawly. In that regard, "The Burning Man" is a far freakier tale of an arthropod kingdom out of whack.  The giant spider from "The Elevator" was the stuff of nightmares but it was, at the very least, just a regular dumb spider who happened to get lucky and swell to gargantuan size after stumbling across a bounty of mega-proteins. The bug in "The Burning Man" comes from an altogether darker, more uncanny region of the Zone, in that there's a lot that's grotesquely odd about him. For one, he seems to be in the midst an identity crisis, in that he's not certain whether he's a locust or a cicada and exhibits traits of both. Through some unknown, possibly demonic means, he's also taken on a humanoid form and possesses the gift the gab.

Unlike "The Elevator", "The Burning Man" is not a cautionary tale about mankind's treatment of the natural world. Rather, it's a straightforward horror playing into a number of fundamental primal fears about the dangers of leaving the familiar and traversing the other, the unpredictability of the wilderness versus the safety of the city, the sense that you are an encroacher in a land that operates according to vastly different laws, and that the people you might run into out there are not quite what they appear. If there's a cautionary message to be gleaned from "The Burning Man", it's about not pissing off hitch-hikers. Be nice to the bedraggled stowaways you encounter on the open highway, even if they are incredibly strange and weird you out with their prophetic ramblings, because you never know when you might actually be dealing with the human manifestation of a plague of ravenous locusts. Then again, Albert Brooks didn't do anything which could have conceivably incurred the wrath of Dan Aykroyd's hitch-hiker in Twilight Zone: The Movie and it didn't work out much better for him. So perhaps the Twilight Zone's actual position on the matter is that we'd all do well to simply remain at home. Where Mr Death will come calling for you anyway, as per the classic Twilight Zone episode, "Nothing In The Dark". If there's a universal message to be garnered from The Twilight Zone, it's that we're all screwed no matter what we do.

Our two hapless protagonists are Neva (Piper Laurie, best known for playing Margaret White in Brian De Palma's 1976 adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie) and her young nephew Doug (Andre Gower), who are looking to escape an intense summer heatwave by driving to a remote lake for an afternoon's swimming. Along the way they get flagged down by a spooky and disheveled old man who seems awfully rattled about something and wants a ride as fast away from his present location as possible. He's played by Roberts Blossom, a pretty wonderful character actor who built a career specialising in roles as kooky and eccentric loners - where you've almost certainly seen him is as Marley the South Bend Shovel Slayer from Home Alone. There, he spent much of the film manifesting the protagonist's worst fears - having free reign of your household is a lot less fun when the local serial killer has their eye on you - but he turned out to be entirely benevolent when Kevin actually spoke to him. Don't expect the same outcome here. From the go, his character in "The Burning Man" is insufferably garrulous, talking a lot but ostensibly making little sense. First, he rambles on about the intense heat and how it makes people behave strangely. Then he talks about the locusts who come about once every seventeen years and whether or not there could be such a thing as people who follow a similar cycle. Then he talks about what he defines as "genetic evil" - that is, people who have malevolence weaved so finely into their DNA that they are incapable of being anything but malevolent from the day they're born until they die. Then he starts talking about a terrible genetic evil that could crawl from the earth like a locust on an abnormally hot day like today and devour everything in sight. As his ramblings become increasingly frenzied and nonsensical, Neva grows ever less thrilled about having him along for the ride, but the guileless Doug is soon hanging on his every unhinged word. It's not surprising; he's the kind of unwanted travel companion who would either bug you out of your wits or scare you witless with his doom-laden monologues:

"Eat me some summer boy, summer, ma'am. Just devour it whole. Look at them trees, ain't they a whole dinner? Look at them fields of wheat, ain't that a feast? Them sunflowers by the road, by golly, there's breakfast. Tarpaper on the top of that house, there's lunch. And the lake, way up ahead, Jehoshaphat, that's dinner wine, drink it all!

Finally, when the old man starts raving about how this genetically evil human-locust will turn his insatiable appetite to dogs, cats and people (all entrees enjoyed by the spider in "The Elevator", incidentally), Neva reaches the end of her tether and boots him out of her car, warning him that she has all manner of religious artifacts that will protect her from demonic forces (this is a bluff, as she later admits to Doug). She and Doug then drive off, leaving the old man by the wayside, and enjoy a blissful afternoon at the lake. When the time comes for them to head back, Doug has second thoughts about what they might encounter on the return journey, remembering the old man's prophecy, but Neva assures him that no harm will come to them. As they drive along the road in the evening sun, they are stopped by a small boy in an immaculately clean white suit (Danny Cooksey), who claims to have been deserted by his family, and agree to give him a ride back into town. Further down the road, after darkness has completely set in, the boy leans over and whispers something into Neva's ear (inaudible to Doug and the viewer) which causes Neva to lose her composure. The car then inexplicably breaks down, leaving the occupants stranded by the roadside in the dead of night. The story ends with the young boy grinning with undisguised malevolence, and asking Neva and Doug if they've ever considered the possibility that there might be genetic evil in the world. The final image shows the car headlights fading to black as the sounds of cicadas in the outside world become overpowering and drown out all other sounds.

To understand this macabre story, it helps if you know something about the life cycle of the cicada, which is referenced prominently throughout, although this also leads us into our very first nitpick. The old man explicitly identifies the creatures as locusts, not cicadas, but these are two very different insects and only the cicada has the unique periodical lifestyle that involves spending thirteen or seventeen years (depending on the specific species) underground as an immature nymph and emerging en masse for a significantly shorter shot at life in adult form. The cicada's curious love of prime numbers is thought to be an anti-predation mechanism, evolved to prevent their life cycle from syncing up with those of other animals and giving cicada-eaters regular nourishment and population boosts. By contrast, locusts have a shorter life cycle of only a few months. Bradbury has conflated the two creatures, although this is something of a necessary evil, given that the locust carries a weighty symbolism all of its own. Although they are solitary insects for much of the time, certain environmental conditions can cause locusts congregate into ravenous, crop-devouring swarms of Biblical proportions. Blossom's character has characteristics of both insects - he's spent seventeen years underground, like a cicada, yet when he turns his attentions to the surrounding vegetation and starts raving about eating everything around him, he's pure locust; it's that hunger that signifies the terrible disaster looming on the horizon. At the same time, he remains recognisably a cicada, notably in his tendency to drive everyone around him to distraction with his incessant buzzing.

The unearthly twist in the story's tail is that the old man played by Blossom and the young boy who appears at the end are one and the same - he's a cicada/locust in human form, so the implication is that he's shed his nymph exoskeleton and revealed the fresh body lurking underneath (an outcome he'd previously hinted at when he mentioned to Doug that the hot weather makes you "feel as if you're gonna split wide open", and later explicitly described in the midst of his deranged, "Eat me some summer" monologue). What's curious is that the cycle seems to have happened in reverse for him - unlike the nymph cicada who emerges after many years underground and acquires a new adult form, the old man sheds his skin in order to become a juvenile; hence, there's a sense that he's able to keep on perpetuating himself and this is part of a highly preternatural cycle. The aspect of the story that has long puzzled me, however, has to do with just how much self-awareness our buggy friend possesses, at least in his initial form. When he first encounters Neva and Doug, the implication is that he's just crawled his way up from the ground after being submerged for all that time (in one of the few modifications to Bradbury's original story, we hear Neva specify that "it's the hottest July in sixteen or seventeen years", providing our first hint that we're up against something cyclic) hence why his clothes are so ragged. In the Twilight Zone episode, we good as see him emerging from the ground (rather, we hear the sounds of the earth shifting as he looms into view and surveys his surroundings quizzically), while in Bradbury's original text it's hinted that this wayward stranger has not had far to travel:

"For you could see where the old man had come across a field high with yellow grass baked and burnt by eight weeks of no rain. There was a path where the man had broken the grass and cleaved a passage to the road. The path went as far as one could see down to a dry swamp and an empty creek bed with nothing but baked hot stones in it and fried rock and melting sand."

The old man is the seventeen year evil he keeps raving about, begging the question as to whether he's aware that he's describing himself this entire time and, if so, is he genuinely afraid of what he's destined to come? And what are his reasons for hitching a ride with the two human passers-by, other than getting a giddy little kick out of watching them squirm before all hell inevitably breaks loose? There is definitely a startling change in the old man's demeanor when he launches into his "Eat me some summer" bit; thanks to Blossom's performance, he sounds as if he's savouring each individual mouthful as he goes, to the point that you can practically feel the flecks of saliva dripping from his tongue. For the first part of the story, there's meant to be ambiguity as to whether Blossom's character is a legitimate harbinger of doom or if he's simply a crazy lunatic whose brains are slowly frying in the heat, and the reality, by the end, looks to be a mixture of both. His character starts out confused and disorientated - he is, after all, a human-shaped bug who's emerged from after seventeen years (or longer) underground and into a particularly stifling heatwave. He possesses an innate knowledge of his uncanny life cycle and what this means for the world around him, but it's only as he begins surveying the local landscape and anticipating the impending destruction that the pieces appear to click into place and he falls in line with his voracious nature. It's the depraved, feverish energy that Blossom brings to the roles that makes "The Burning Man" so authentically terrifying; you get a sense that he's less a man than a terrible malignance rattling away inside an increasingly rickety human shell, becoming ever more frenzied as it attempts to claw its way into being. What is frighteningly evident is that at the very end of the story, when he returns in his rejuvenated form, he remembers his previous encounter with Neva and Doug - his final utterance of, "Have you ever wondered if there's such a thing as genetic evil in the world?", coupled with that extremely unpleasant grin he flashes, is way too pointed for him not to - and looks to have been lying in wait for them this entire time. Not only is he about to turn his insatiable cravings on the world around him, the implication is that he's deliberately targeting Neva and Doug for their previous transgression. And whereas as an old man our human cicada/locust was completely out of his frazzled insect mind, as a young boy he seems frighteningly calm, calculating and in control. He may be the human manifestation of a swarm of locusts poised upon the brink of an all-out Biblical disaster, but he's chillingly adept at keeping his true nature concealed well beneath the surface.

One thing I would note is that both locusts and cicadas are vegetarian and do not eat people. So obviously there is something far more malefic going on with this uncanny being than his simply being a locust/cicada in human skin. In other words, what twisted kind of energy is lurking beneath the insect lurking beneath the man? Although the old man does say something about Lucifer being born on a day like this, and the small grinning boy at the end of the story seems eerily reminiscent of Damien from The Omen, I don't believe that he's an Anti-Christ figure or that he's come to bring about the full-scale Apocalypse. What he old man describes sounds like a truly cataclysmic natural disaster, but not actually The End. Neva and Doug are certainly goners and it doesn't look good for the surrounding landscape, but I think the implication is that this all part of a cycle, the genetic evil having previously emerged on a scalding hot summer much like this seventeen years ago, and once its gorged itself it will go back underground and wait another seventeen years, before reemerging and directing his renewed frenzy at some other unsuspecting passers-by. So what are we really up against here? I think the clue to that lies in the old man's initial warning to Neva and Doug when he first hops aboard their car and cries out, "It's after us!" Neva asks him to elaborate, and he responds, "The sun, what do you think?" The sun is of course what Neva and Doug were initially looking to flee when first they set out for the lake, but its repressive glare follows them everywhere. I think it's accurate to suppose that the old man is the embodiment of, if not actually the sun itself, then the punishing heat that's slowly baking away the Earth and its inhabitants. This much is hinted when he reveals his especially baleful lust for the different kinds of flavours of humans incinerating - "Fried, cooked, boiled and parpoiled people! Sunburnt beauties of people!" he exclaims, almost as if he were reading from the menu options at a truck-stop cafe. He is the "burning" alluded to within the title, a white-hot intensity that threatens to engulf the land around him in a hideous blaze. He's a combination of so many disagreeable natural elements - the delirium of the sweltering heatwave, the ruinous gluttony of a plague of locusts, the incessant droning of cicadas - that in the end he comes across as the embodiment of a nature out of balance and warped to its most monstrous extreme.

 

Our burning man (or bug) is the malevolent spirit of a cruel, cruel summer, although what ultimately makes him disturbing is the seemingly contradictory means by which he launches his hotly-anticipated attack. The young boy we meet at the finale is, after all, the polar opposite of his former self - clean and neatly presented, quiet, peaceful and, until the very end, entirely unimposing. What's more is that he strikes in the hours of darkness, when the overpowering sunlight that fueled his voracious energy has vanished from the sky. He is no longer "burning", and yet he's reached the peak of his malignance. To that end, he is a twisted inversion on Rod Serling's narration at the conclusion of the aforementioned "Nothing In The Dark", in which we are assured that "there was nothing in the darkness that wasn't there when the lights were on". However raw, freakish and exposed the dementia of the world appears in the broad daylight, in the darkness that dementia does not dissipate, it merely lingers out of sight. The cyclic nature of things means that we have never obtained permanent safety; rather, we are only ever between states, and that whatever undesirable forces stalked us in one stage of the cycle will sooner or later come calling for us again. This is something that Doug understands when, having reached the ostensible safety of the lake, he contemplates the return journey that will have to made and asks Neva if there is an alternative route back into town. The danger will still be lying dormant, even if it has to wait another seventeen years.

To end on another nitpick, Fiegelson's teleplay does, unfortunately, retain by far the most bothersome portion of Bradbury's original text - specifically, when the old man starts talking about the possibility of seventeen year people, and then poses, "how about twenty-four year people, or fifty-seven year people?" That's just crazy talk, and I'll tell you why. Those are not prime numbers! Then again, the man in both the original story and the TZ episode is inconsistent and repeatedly changes the total number of years he's been underground, so his numerical understanding may be open to question.