On Tue, Jul 17, 2018 at 02:37 PM, David Hess wrote:
I found some of the old Twilight Zone and Outer Limits episodes to be
terrifying as a child. The Zanti Misfits comes to mind.
Something lost with youth. They were better when young and can really get scared. Later they lose some of their bite, or more aptly we lose the ability to feel it. It's almost impossible for a show to even "move" me slightly. Even young it eventually becomes clear that the good guys are not going to die, it is in their contract :-) well there was an exception, if you're Black and a new character on Star Trek, but not Uhura, you are dead within the hour. At least it seemed so.
Had an argument online a while back about the original airing of War Of The Worlds. People got so scared that some of them killed themselves. A guy was claiming there were adequate announcements that it was fiction and there was an argument about it, I wasn't in it yet but it piqued my curiosity. I downloaded the original and scrutinized and I can see why people might think it was real. There were only a couple of announcements it was Wells, they made it look like it was a music show and these were news interruptions. So if you go to the bathroom or something and miss that...
Star Trek had set and setting in the distant future, but much of the Twilight Zone and Outer Limits was set in the present. That probably contributed to its scariness.
I wonder just how much scifi contributed to our interest in science and technology.
Jeff Urban