Holy shit, Nightcrawlers...
I'm a huge fan of the 80's Twilight Zone reboot, but I've only seen a handful of them. One of these days, I'll get my hands on the DVD set and plow through them.
But man, this story...fuck. I actually read it for the first time a few years ago in the horror anthology Masques which, if you aren't familiar, is one of the single best horror anthology collections ever committed to paper. But the whole time I was reading it, I could not shake the feeling that I'd seen this on the screen somewhere.
I chalked it up to its minor similarity to an episode of The X-Files from season 2 called Sleepless, where Tony Todd (Candyman) plays a Vietnam veteran who hasn't slept in over two decades thanks to an experiment conducted on him and other members of his platoon to turn them into super soldiers.
But I never thought that was quite right. I had distinct memories of scenes taking place in a small-town diner with a ferocious gun battle and helicopters, none of which appear in Sleepless. I must have caught this episode, or at least part of it, as a kid when it ran on TV, and just repressed the memory.
Because, yeah, Nightcrawlers is one savage-as-fuck story, and this is easily one of the most savage episodes of Twilight Zone I've ever seen. Viewed as an adult, it's pretty easy to enjoy on its own merits, but man, I know this gave me nightmares as a child. :)
Agreed. I love the way Friedkin made no concessions to prime time television and treated that massacre scene like it was a scene from The French Connection. Lol!
I own the first and second seasons, but not the third. The third wasn't part of the original series -- it was filmed to fill out a syndication package. Nevertheless, there's some good eps in the third, like The Cold Equations. A lot of the eps of all three seasons are posted on YouTube, along with Nightcrawlers.
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