It doesn’t matter how much potential a shot has — no frame is worth risking the lives of crew members. Director Alvin Ganzer came very close to learning that lesson the hard way during production on the classic Twilight Zone installment entitled “The Hitch-Hiker.”
Based on the radio play of the same name by Lucille Fletcher, the episode stars Inger Stevens as Nan Adams, a young woman on a road trip from New York to Los Angeles, who begins to find herself stalked by a strange man (Leonard Strong) holding out his thumb in the classic hitchhiker fashion, clearly trying to get himself a ride somewhere.
He seems to be one step ahead of our increasingly nervous protagonist, mysteriously popping up on busy highways and, in one instance, near a set of railroad tracks, upon which Nan’s vehicle stalls out as a locomotive charges her way.
Thankfully, the engine starts back up just in time and Nan is able to reverse before she’s run down, but the close call gives rise to a sinister theory: for some inscrutable reason, the relentless hitchhiker wants her dead.
For more on The Twilight Zone:
How a Classic Episode of The Twilight Zone was Marred By Real-Life Tragedy
The Classic Twilight Zone Episode Inspired by “One of the Greatest Mysteries in Aviation History”
How The Twilight Zone’s Unofficial Pilot Almost Became a Movie
Nan Adams (Inger Stevens) sticks her head our a car window in The Twilight Zone Episode 116.
How a Twilight Zone episode nearly killed its crew members with a speeding train
According to Marc Scott Zicree’s The Twilight Zone Companion, there was no room in the shoestring budget to rent a train, so Gazner and his crew had to wait by an actual crossing in order to get the shot. His initial hope was to film the train head-on. “We had the camera on the tracks,” Gazner recalled in the book, “and we were going to pull it off.”
As they were waiting, they saw another train rush by on an opposite track and realized just how fast they can move at full speed. “When we saw that,” Ganzer added, “we thought three times and put the camera on the side of the tracks.”
In the episode’s final moments, it’s revealed that the hitchhiker doesn’t want Nan dead — she’s already deceased! Nan died as the result of an accident along her road trip and the stranger is the Grim Reaper, attempting to shepherd her into the next life.
On-set tragedy involving a helicopter crash would befall a Twilight Zone production a little more than two decades later when actor Vic Morrow and two children, Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen, were killed during a night shoot for the John Landis-directed segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie. The incident remains one of the worst and most notorious disasters in Hollywood history.
Classic episodes of The Twilight Zone air regularly on SYFY. Click here for complete scheduling info!
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