The Outer Limits - The Architects Of Fear!

Most television shows don't scare me, even when I was a small kid the tension and suspense of most TV shows was so diminished by its serial status that one didn't really worry about the main protagonists who you knew would be back once again the next week. And by and large TV is watched in the light, the light of day or the glowing light of lamps. That said such shows as The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits don't have continuing characters so it is much easier to allow the unknown fate of such individuals to bet beneath the skin. Of these two, The Twilight Zone was not a show designed to scare so much as to provoke, to provoke thought and compassion in the appropriate places. But rarely if ever fear. In the case of The Twilight Zone, there always seems to be a whisper of a fairy tale which makes the stories often profound but not especially spooky. The Outer Limits went for the jugular, eschewing too much moralizing for creepy images packed into bizarre circumstances with regret and death often the result. 

"The Architects of Fear" is for my money the scariest episode of the show, though I find "The Sixth Finger" (about another man who ceases to be "human")  to be in the running also. What "Architects" has is a premise which curdles the blood. A cabal of men decide the world needs a mutual enemy from the depths of space and select one of their own to be transformed utterly into an alien, a creature unrecognizable as part of the environment of Earth. The make a "monster" but for weirdly skewed and imagined noble reasons. The destroy a man and make of him a "scarecrow" to frighten others to do what's necessary. They fail and the result is the destruction of a man and an ideal. The creature they make is hokey if seen too efficiently, so the trick is to keep it off screen and just toss the audience bits and pieces. The imagination will fill the necessary gaps and each viewer will flesh out the "scarecrow" with their own monster. We eventually do see it, but only after the threat is ended, and if it didn't match up to our imagination, that was fine since the image in the mind remained. 

The show makes us build our own nightmare in broad dayling and put it shambling through the rushes of a swamp, all the while knowing it's a human being like us, with all the longings and passions that come with that designation. Like the members of the cabal, we become the "architects" of our own fear. The Twilight Zone never did that. 

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