Twilight Zone episode review — 4.13 — The New Exhibit

Episode 4.13 “The New Exhibit”
Original air date: April 4, 1963
Writer: Charles Beaumont
Director: John Brahm

Rating: 8/10

“The New Exhibit” is some entertaining psychological horror from writer Charles Beaumont. It’s sort of like season 3’s “The Dummy,” though not quite as good or as scary.

The episode opens with a wax museum tour run by museum owner Mr. Ferguson (Will Kuluva) that moves into the museum’s most famous and notorious exhibits: one of serial killers Jack the Ripper, Albert W. Hicks, Henri Desire Landru, and Burke and Hare. Martin Senescu (Martin Balsam, Psycho) runs this part of the tour, devoted to these wax figures above all others, particularly interested in the torment that these killers must have experienced to do what they did.

When the tour is done, Mr. Ferguson informs him that the museum is closing. Martin volunteers to house the figures of the killers in his basement, which bothers his wife, Emma (Maggie Mahoney). He installs some air conditioning in the basement so that the figures won’t melt with the heat, and spends all his time down there taking care of them.

Emma’s brother, Dave (William Mims), tells her to shut off the air conditioning so that the figures melt, since her husband isn’t going to sell them. When she goes downstairs to shut it off, the wax figure of Jack the Ripper stabs her. When Martin finds the body, he knows no one would believe that a wax figure did it, so he buries the body under the basement floor. Dave comes over and makes a few remarks about how it must have been a hot night before he notices that the air conditioning is still on.

Martin forces Dave out of his house, but he sneaks back in, suspicious of his sister’s whereabouts. He gets killed by Hicks’s axe.

Eventually, Mr. Ferguson shows up to tell Martin that he’s sold the figures to a wax museum in France. When he goes to take some measurements, he gets strangled by Landru. Martin finds the body and gets very upset with the figures, considering Ferguson was his friend. The figures start moving and speaking to him, saying that he was the one who had killed the three people.

In the next scene, we see a tour in the French wax museum, moving from Jack the Ripper to a figure of Martin Senescu, a recent notorious killer. Serling’s closing narration sums it up nicely: “ The new exhibit became very popular at Marchand’s, but of all the figures none was ever regarded with more dread than that of Martin Lombard Senescu. It was something about the eyes, people said. It’s the look that one often gets after taking a quick walk through the Twilight Zone.”

Like “The Dummy,” the episode works if you think the figures are supernatural, or if you just think that Martin is crazy, which makes it interesting. It’s not as interesting as that episode of course, because it’s much more slow moving, and there’s no singular sequence that really stands out.