The Outer Limits

The Outer Limits

TV Milestones Series

Series Editor

Barry Keith Grant, Brock University

TV Milestones is part of the Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series

A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu.

The Outer Limits

Joanne Morreale

Wayne State University Press

Detroit

Copyright © 2022 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan, 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America.

ISBN (paperback): 978-0-8143-4745-4

ISBN (e-book): 978-0-8143-4746-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021943179

Cover art © ANDREY-SHA74 / Shutterstock.com.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Highbrow Meets Lowbrow

2. Televisuality in The Outer Limits: Noir Science and Gothic Science Fiction

3. Behind the New Frontier

4. The Outer Limits as Creative Adaptation

5. Beyond The Outer Limits

References

Index

Acknowledgments

In the late 1960s I’d watch The Outer Limits on Saturday afternoons with my brother Frank. It came on right after Candlepins for Cash and right before Creature Feature, which seemed to make some kind of crazy sense. After the somnambulant rhythms of strikes and spares filmed in close-up slow motion, I liked being jolted by The Outer Limits’ scary opening, monsters, and special effects. It wasn’t until much later that I realized that the series was also about ideas. When I found myself teaching Television History a few years ago, I came back to The Outer Limits—and I especially want to thank two students, Julie Ryu and Mariel Segovia, for sharing my enthusiasm for early television and inspiring me to keep exploring it. Penny Sander, Rufus Seder, Paul Rocklin, Bonnie Waltch and Richard Lewis watched episodes with me, kindly shared their insights, and patiently listened to mine. My thanks also to David Schow who generously shared his time and expertise on The Outer Limits.

Annie Martin and Barry Grant gave me initial encouragement to pursue a project on The Outer Limits, and it has been a pleasure to work with editor Marie Sweetman. Thanks too to Carrie Downes Teefey, Emily Shelton, and Lucas Freeman for their help in seeing the manuscript through to completion. A special nod to Rufus Seder for his technical help—he is a magician! I also appreciate the thoughtful suggestions made by Barry Grant and two anonymous reviewers that helped make this a better book.

I am sorry to say goodbye to The Outer Limits’ universe. I can’t help but feel there is still much to learn.

Introduction

The television screen becomes an oscillating sine wave, accompanied by a discordant noise. The picture flickers, suggesting that the set is on the blink. The portentous tone of an off-screen Control Voice assures us this is not the case:

There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to witness the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind . . . to the outer limits.

As the voice proclaims that an unidentified we have the ability to manipulate electronic signals, the images on screen mimic signal interference patterns. This self-reflexive opening to The Outer Limits (ABC, 1963–65) marks it as different from typical television programs on the air in the 1960s. By calling attention to the medium, it disrupts flow and inverts assumptions about the relationship between viewers and television. Instead of reinforcing perceptions of television as a familiar, benevolent technology that provides a window onto the world, the opening reminds viewers that television is in fact an alien object that controls what they see.

Images from The Outer Limits opening credits.

At a time when television was still new, the implication that unknown forces lurking behind the screen could control transmission was disturbing, to say the least. At the same time, the Control Voice tantalizes viewers by promising that those who participate in the great adventure will witness awe and mystery. The segment jolts viewers at the same time that it entices them; in this way, it serves as a metaphor for the series itself, where form and content work to simultaneously unsettle and enthrall.

The Outer Limits was a science fiction/horror anthology series that explored the relationship between humans and technology. In contrast to the array of game shows, crime series, sitcoms, and westerns on television in 1963, The Outer Limits presented fantastical worlds in order to comment upon the real world. Episodes addressed anxieties born of Cold War politics in the post–World War II era, especially as they manifested in concerns about technology and the perennial science fiction question of what it means to be human. As illustrated by the opening credits, television itself represented the threatening nature of technology. Horrock sums up its meaning in this period:

Since the 1950s the television set represented technological competition, electronic surveillance, consumer psychology, the rise of corporate culture, and post-war philosophies of alienation and existence. The anxieties of the arms and space race, and the literature that imagined the future cast as a surveillance state in which technology would dominate, turned the television into an object of suspicion, and a suspicious object. (103)

By taking control of the television set, The Outer Limits aroused fears of the power of the medium that were exacerbated by individual episodes. Producer Joseph Stefano’s fifteen-page guide for writers, "The Canons of Please Stand By" (Please Stand By was the original title of the show), described it as a one-hour, dramatic television series whose dramas are woven upon the inventive and imaginative loom of Science Fiction; most important, he added that some of the loom’s threads were themes such as conformity, discrimination, politics, censorship, disarmament, man’s inaccessibility to man, moral-physical slavery, mass culture, and peace (Schow, 1998, 353). Its themes illustrated how science fiction could serve as a source of socioeconomic, political, and cultural critique, while its aesthetic strategies demonstrated the way form and content worked together. As Booker observes, At its best, it was as literate, thought-provoking, and multi-layered as anything ever to appear on network tv (2004, 21).

Despite attracting a core of devoted viewers during its initial run, The Outer Limits became more popular after it went off the air. Over the years, it developed a cult following, due to its near-constant syndication in the United States as well as the UK, Canada, and Australia. There have been several DVD releases, most recently a digitally remastered Blu-ray edition in 2018, and, as of this writing, the series is available on popular streaming sites such as iTunes, Amazon, and Hulu. A reboot aired on Showtime from 1995 to 2001, with a final season on the SYFY network from 2001 to 2002. As I argue in chapter 5, the later version was primarily an exercise in branding, designed to attract fans of the original along with new viewers, and as such it was essentially a different program that did not reproduce the artistic vision of its source text. But still today the original Outer Limits maintains a social media presence on platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Reddit, as well as on blogs and fan websites. As with all television programs with an avid fan base, through the years brand extensions have expanded upon or remediated The Outer Limits’ story world—critical guides and companions, novelizations of episodes, a children’s book series, comic books, trading cards, T-shirts, a board game, a music soundtrack, and collector’s-item replicas of monsters.

Despite its longevity and importance to television history, The Outer Limits has received little scholarly attention. David Schow’s The Outer Limits Companion (1998) provides extensive information on the production background and various episodes; this book owes a great debt to it, but Schow does not endeavor to locate The Outer Limits as a television milestone. More recently, Reba A. Wissner’s We Will Control All That Your Hear (2016) provides an extraordinary account of sound and music in the series, though her work primarily focuses on that aspect. Indeed, there have been scant studies of science fiction television, with the bulk of the work devoted to The Twilight Zone (CBS, 1959–64), the show to which The Outer Limits is often compared (episodes of the two series are often confused).

While The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits share thematic similarities, The Outer Limits is more firmly rooted in science fiction, though it simultaneously engages with a variety of styles and genres, particularly Gothic horror. The Outer Limits typically heightens anxieties; in contrast, as Grant observes, Twilight Zone episodes are often morality tales that ultimately resolve the anxieties they raise (86). The Twilight Zone frequently relies on twist endings to foster critical thought, while episodes of The Outer Limits aim to shock and frighten viewers, whether through the opening credits, startling and inventive special effects, monsters and aliens, eerie sonics, or narratives that end on an unresolved or pessimistic note. The Outer Limits is also more formally experimental than The Twilight Zone. As Stefano asserts in The Canons, A high literary style encompassing the bold use of poetic imagery and stunning language is entirely fitting and not unnatural to the Science Fiction form (Schow 1998, 353). Its aesthetics draw from theater and cinema, particularly expressionism, the Gothic, and surrealism, all of which are employed to convey an atmosphere of pervasive dread, attempting to disrupt and unsettle rather than reassure viewers. In The Outer Limits, unbridled science and faith in technology create horror; science and technology exceed our ability to control them, and human fear of the unknown and propensity to destroy what it does not understand has dire consequences.

Production Background

The Outer Limits was an anomaly in the context of television in the early 1960s. It combined science fiction and horror at a time when family-friendly programs dominated the airwaves; it was an anthology at a time when television had largely transitioned to series with recurring characters and formulaic plots; and its bleak narratives contrasted with the upbeat episodes that typified the majority of programs on the air. As I elaborate upon in chapter 1, producers Leslie Stevens and Joseph Stefano took advantage of popular perceptions that science fiction and horror were not serious, which enabled them—for a time—to keep under the radar of network executives and sponsors.

The