Season 1, Episode 34
Written by Rod Serling – Directed by Douglas Heyes – Starring Anne Francis, Elizabeth Allen, and James Millhollin
A woman visiting a department store is sent to a mysterious ninth floor that supposedly doesn’t exist.
“The After Hours” is where The Twilight Zone really leans into horror.
Marsha White arrives at a department store to purchase a gift and is directed to the ninth floor. There’s just one problem: the store doesn’t have a ninth floor. What starts as a strange inconvenience quickly becomes something much more unsettling as Marsha tries to figure out what is happening to her.
The episode does an incredible job creating an eerie atmosphere. There’s something immediately wrong about that ninth floor, and the further Marsha gets into the mystery, the more the department store begins to feel like a place operating by rules she doesn’t understand.
The episode also has some remarkably inventive camera work. There are unusual angles, point-of-view shots, and moments where the camera seems to put us directly into Marsha’s increasingly frightened perspective. The visuals aren’t simply showing us that she’s scared; they’re making the environment itself feel threatening and increasingly creepy.
When Marsha finds herself alone in the department store, the episode becomes genuinely frightening. And the tension keeps ratcheting up as she realizes she may not be as alone as she thought.
There is one particular sequence where everything in the scene is working together to create such a remarkable atmosphere that I had to watch it twice.
Anne Francis is excellent throughout. She sells Marsha’s growing fear and paranoia, but there is also this sense of uncertainty. We don’t know what is real, and neither does she.
This is one of the most visually inventive episodes of the series so far, but more importantly, it’s one of the first that feels like straight-up horror. The atmosphere, the camera work, and Anne Francis’ performance combine to create an episode that kept making me wonder what was going to appear around the next corner.
Twilight Zone Verdict: Classic