The 5 Best Movies Inspired By Twilight Zone Episodes, Ranked

The cool thing about “The Twilight Zone” is that, although its original run technically ended in the 1960s, the show has never really gone away. Not only are there constant reboots, but you can see the show’s influence in basically every major anthology TV series and a metric ton of the horror films that’ve come out since. Viewers love a good “Twilight Zone”-style twist ending, and Hollywood screenwriters love trying to deliver a doozy. 

For these picks of some of the best “Twilight Zone”-esque films, I’ve limited my choices to movies that not only feel tonally similar to the series, but which have a premise that feels close to an actual episode that aired on the show. These five movies are hardly the only ones that feel like extended “TZ” episodes, but they’re definitely five that are worth checking out. 

Warning: Mild spoilers for each movie and “Twilight Zone” episode mentioned below.

In the 1959 “TZ” episode “And When The Sky Was Opened,” three astronauts miraculously survive an accident in outer space and land safely back on Earth, only to start disappearing one by one. It’s a particularly dark premise because there’s not really a lesson to be learned here — the episode simply plays into the Space Race-era fear that maybe mankind is not supposed to meddle outside of Earth’s atmosphere, and maybe we’re taunting fate by doing so and we’ll be punished for it. 

“Final Destination” is hardly a one-to-one recreation of this episode, but it does recreate that feeling of relief-turned-dread. Its main characters initially feel lucky for having left a passenger flight before it exploded mid-air, but as they start dying one by one, they soon realize that it probably would’ve been better to just die the way they were “supposed” to. Better to die quickly than to have a vengeful Death constantly trying to track you down. 

Some of the characters in “Final Destination” do manage to survive Death’s wrath, but that last sequence makes it clear that death can only be stalled, not vanquished. It doesn’t just make for an unsettling closing note, but it makes for some true-to-life commentary: death is still hovering over all of us, after all. The only difference is that real-life death isn’t as clever about the whole thing, usually planning to take us out via something boring like slow-moving heart disease rather than some of the elaborate, Rube Goldberg-esque scenarios seen here. 

I’ve never liked the “Final Destination” sequels that much, as they’ve often veered too far into the gore aspect, but the first movie is great in that it’s fun-scary, not gross-scary. The film’s morbid, ironic sense of humor is entertaining while still having the sort of heart and empathy that Rod Serling’s writing often contained. It’s also worth noting that most “Final Destination” films have a fun, “Twilight Zone”-esque twist at the end, especially the (surprisingly good) fifth one. 

“10 Cloverfield Lane” was caught in a bit of a marketing Catch-22. The title (and its clear connection to the 2008 film “Cloverfield”) got extra eyes on the film, but it also brought in expectations the movie couldn’t match. If you wanted a movie about aliens, you were disappointed by everything except this movie’s final few minutes; if you didn’t care about the “Cloverfield” connections, then you were treated to a gripping psychological drama that had aliens thrown in at the last moment. 

Still, there’s a lot to love here, especially for “Twilight Zone” fans who remember “One More Pallbearer,” the (not very popular) 1962 episode about a man who brings three strangers down into a bunker and tells them they need to stay with him to survive an imminent nuclear Armageddon. Like most people who build underground bunkers, this guy is not quite right in the head, and the people he’s lying to quickly realize they’re better off taking their chances outside. 

For Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), however, getting out of the bunker proves more difficult. The layers to the bunker-owner’s insanity go much deeper than the guy in “One More Pallbearer,” and “10 Cloverfield Lane” gets to take its time unpacking her captor’s craziness and letting Michelle figure out how to deal with him. The result is a tense, thought-provoking thriller. There are aliens, sure, but like all good “Twilight Zone” episodes, this story is really all about the humans. The movie’s an allegory for how difficult it can be to escape an abusive relationship, and about how there’s a wider range of abusive behavior than many might think. 

Another fun “Twilight Zone”-esque quality of this movie is how low-budget it feels for most of its runtime. It takes place almost entirely within one location with very little CGI, reminiscent of how “The Twilight Zone” often had to work its speculative premises around a tight network budget. A lot of “10 Cloverfield Lane” feels like it can easily be adapted to a stage play, which is how a ton of the best “Twilight Zone” episodes often feel.

I don’t know what it is, but I love myself a good doppelgänger story. That’s why one of my favorite “Twilight Zone” episodes is “Mirror Image,” about a woman at a bus terminal station who finds herself being tormented by what appears to be her evil twin. By the end of the episode, her evil twin has fully taken over her life, while she has been designated a crazy woman and dragged off to the nearest mental hospital.

Something similar happens in Jordan Peele’s “Us,” a movie all about doppelgängers and the havoc they wreak. Like “Mirror Image,” this is an eerie, liminal story, one that works best if you don’t try to interpret it too much through a literal lens. “Us” received a lot of flak when it first came out for not being as tightly-written as Peele’s first film, “Get Out,” but I think the fact that it’s so messy and ambitious is what it makes it the more interesting film overall. Like with “Mirror Image,” you get something new out of “Us” every time you watch it. It’s no surprise that Peele himself was so closely involved with the 2019 “Twilight Zone” revival series. 

Whereas the “Twilight Zone” connections for most of the films on this list are ambiguous, Jordan Peele has been very open about how much he took from the show when making “Us.” In a 2019 interview, he specifically cited “Mirror Image” as his inspiration: “It’s terrifying, beautiful, really elegant storytelling,” Peele said. “And it opens up a world. It opens up your imagination.”

Director M. Night Shyamalan’s work has long been compared to “The Twilight Zone,” mainly because he loves to get a little spooky (but not too spooky) and throw in a giant twist at the end. This reputation has been a blessing and a curse: It made him popular with mainstream audiences, but it also perhaps gave audiences unfair expectations going into his post-“Signs” filmography, to the point where people somehow thought “The Village” was a bad movie. 

“The Sixth Sense” is still easily the best film of Shyamalan’s career, with a twist so iconic that even people who’ve never seen the film already know exactly what is. Bruce Willis realizing he’s a ghost is up there with the “It’s a cookbook!” reveal, or the doctors from “Eye of the Beholder” turning out to be ugly pig-like people. It’s a twist that’s both thrilling and surprising, while still feeling completely consistent with everything that came before. And unlike plenty of other big twist movies, knowing the surprise doesn’t actually lessen this film at all. If there is a clear parallel here to any “Twilight Zone” episodes, it’s gotta be the 1960 classic “The Hitch-Hiker.”

“I think I wanted to make feature-length ‘Twilight Zones,’ you know, where something amazing happens in the last second and you realize you weren’t watching what you thought you were watching,” Shyamalan said in a 2021 interview, “And then inevitably when you go back and look back at the movie the second time, everything should have that feeling that it was inevitable.” He tried this approach plenty of times throughout his career, but never pulled it off quite as well as he did here. 

Although Stephen King, the author of the novella, was more inspired by H.P. Lovecraft than Rod Serling, director Frank Darabont drew a lot from “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” the 1960 “Twilight Zone” episode about a small town suddenly trapped in a scary, isolating apocalyptic event. 

The parallels to “The Mist” are obvious, but the episode that most comes to mind here is “Time Enough At Last.” That’s the episode where a man who always wanted more time to read books survives the apocalypse, gets excited that he finally has time to read all the books he wants, but then his glasses break, leaving him forever blinded and alone. It’s an ending that seemingly serves no other purpose but to hurt the viewer. “Wouldn’t it suck if that happened?” the episode asks, and all we can do is agree that yeah, it certainly would.

Although the novella “The Mist” ended on a somewhat hopeful note, director Frank Darabont choice to end his adaptation on the world’s biggest bummer. It’s not total sadism — there’s a nice little lesson here about the importance of not giving up hope even in the most dire situations — but it sure does hurt when you reach the end of it. It’s like if someone took “Time Enough At Last” and dialed the cruelty up even further. Would “The Twilight Zone” have even gotten away with a finale this twisted in its original run? Probably not, but Rod Serling probably would’ve respected Darabont’s big swing.