Before he directed The Omen, Superman, The Goonies, and the Lethal Weapon movies, Richard Donner helmed six episodes of The Twilight Zone. The first of those six, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” is widely deemed the best not only of Donner’s episodes, but of the series as a whole. And, if not the best episode, the adaptation of Richard Matheson’s short story is most certainly the show’s most iconic. It stars William Shatner (a few years shy of playing Captain Kirk) as an incredibly nervous passenger on a commercial flight. He has just been released from a mental health clinic and, even with his wife sitting next to him, just can’t seem to get past his aerophobia.
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To be fair, there is a spooky, furry man peering in through his window whenever it takes a break from tearing apart the plane’s wing. Or is there?
Twilight Zone: The Movie Version
Both the 1963 episode and the version seen in Twilight Zone: The Movie have departures from the source material, but overall, they’re slight. In the original story, his wife isn’t with him and, instead of taking a gun from a sleeping police officer, he smuggled it onto the flight himself.
A larger departure is the hospitalization aspect. That background was absent from the story, though he does take Dramamine because he experiences anxiety during flights.
But what is present is his calling the monster on the wing a “gremlin.” As was explained in both the story and the movie Gremlins, this term originated from World War II, where it was used to describe Allied pilots who had witnessed UFOs.
None of these elements absent in the episode are reinstated for the version seen in Twilight Zone: The Movie, which, like its adaptation of “It’s a Good Life,” primarily sticks to what was seen in the episode that inspired it. The Twilight Zone: The Movie version (helmed by Mad Max creator and director George Miller) stars John Lithgow as John Valentine.
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Like Shatner’s Robert Wilson in the episode, Valentine suffers from aerophobia. He sees the gremlin on the plane and, already suffering from a panic attack, quickly spirals. Also like Wilson in the episode, Valentine grabs an off-duty officer’s (well, security guard here) gun and shoots at the gremlin through the window. But, here, the gremlin snatches the gun away from Valentine and jumps away from the plane into the sky.
The similarities don’t end there, as the final scene of the segment in the film shows real damage to the plane’s wing that looks an awful lot like it was deliberately torn apart as opposed to the result of inclement weather (which was also a factor in both the episode and movie segment).
The Twilight Zone (2019) Version
Jordan Peele’s short-lived 2019 reboot did its own take on the story for its second episode. Stepping into what amounts to the Shatner and Lithgow role is Parks and Recreation‘s Adam Scott, but leaving the narrative entirely is the Gremlin.
Scott plays Justin Sanderson, a magazine journalist who suffers from PTSD. He boards his flight, “Flight 1015,” and, upon taking his seat, discovers an MP3 player playing a podcast called Enigmatique. The podcast is currently covering the topic of a mysteriously lost flight, which just so happens to be “Flight 1015.”
The podcast talks about how it’s a passenger on the flight who was responsible for the plane’s disappearance. Panicked and relaying his story to everyone, Sanderson only finds that one person will believe him: a former pilot he just met at the airport, who is also on the flight. It turns out this former pilot is the one who hijacks the flight, and Sanderson inadvertently helped him do it.
Now he and the other passengers are all stranded on an island. The podcast reveals that the passengers and crew were all rescued on an island, with only one individual missing: Sanderson. The podcast is right, because the passengers and crew murder Sanderson.
It’s an admirable departure from the source material and two previous adaptations, but for the most part, “Nightmare at 30,000 Feet” is a missed opportunity. Even the immense charm of Scott can’t save it from feeling a bit rote. Perhaps the story needs the Gremlin to truly work.
