Twilight Zone episode review — 1.34 — The After Hours

Episode 1.34 “The After Hours”
Original air date: June 10, 1960
Writer: Rod Serling
Director: Douglas Heyes

Rating: 10/10

“The After Hours” is one of the best of the series. It’s creepy, well acted, and has an unforgettable twist. It’s everything The Twilight Zone was at its first-season best.

Marsha White (Anne Francis, Forbidden Planet) enters a department store and waits in line for an elevator before one to the side opens up for her. She enters alone and tells the elevator attendant what she is looking for. He takes her up to the ninth floor. The camera reveals that there is no ninth floor.

It’s a perfect start to the episode. Very little has happened, and yet it still manages to be mysterious and unsettling.

At the ninth floor, Marsha gets off, and sees that the floor is completely empty. Thinking there is some sort of mistake, she turns to reenter the elevator when it is closed. Left with no other options, she wanders about the empty floor and is met by a peculiar saleswoman who knows her by name (Elizabeth Allen). The only thing that is on the floor is indeed the gold thimble that she’s looking for, so she purchases it, taking in how weird the entire situation is. Of course, the saleswoman curiously asks her the question, “Are you happy?”

She gets back on the elevator with the same attendant and realizes that there is a scratch on the thimble. She wants to go and complain, and we then cut to a nervous sales supervisor, Mr. Armbruster (James Millhollin) explaining the oddities of the situation to his boss. There is no ninth floor, he says, but that Ms. White had been so certain that she was up at the ninth floor.

When trying to explain the situation to the sales supervisor and the store manager, Marsha sees the back of the saleswoman and grows excited. However, someone picks her up and moves her, revealing her to be a mannequin in the likeness of that same saleswoman.

We then move to closing time, where we learn that Marsha had fallen asleep sometime after her shock. However, no one gets the chance to wakes her, and she eventually wakes up on her own in an empty department store. She wanders around and when she finds she can’t get out, she begins to freak out a bit. This gets more dramatic when she finds herself in a room filled with mannequins, and sees one move, and another in the likeness of the elevator attendant from earlier.

She then hears her name called a number of times from a variety of voices. The mannequins, still stationary, start to become accusatory toward her. Crying, she unwittingly steps into the elevator, which heads up to the ninth floor. The door opens to the mannequin of the saleswoman, who then starts talking to her.

The mannequins all begin moving and coming around her. The saleswoman tries to get her to remember that Marsha is herself a mannequin, and that they all get a month to live in the real world as a person. Marsha had gotten wrapped up in it and forgotten that she wasn’t human.

The next day, Mr. Armbruster is walking about the department store as it opens and spots the Marsha mannequin, does a double-take, and walks on by.

What I like most about this episode is the way it plays with tone. It’s a genuinely creepy set-up, as I’ve already discussed, as well as plot. The living mannequin concept could be genuinely terrifying, and it is for a scene or two, but once this is revealed, the episode goes more for bittersweet. We read disappointment from Marsha as she realizes all of what she had been living has been an illusion.

But it’s also a genuinely effective horror episode. The scenes with Marsha wandering around in the closed department store are really well done, utilizing no score in order to build tension. It is only until the reveal that we get music, and that music is very different tonally from something in the horror genre.

Anne Francis is really good, particularly amidst her character’s revelation. Overall, it’s certainly one of the best episodes.