Horrorfest 2015: Cravenfest - The Twilight Zone: The Road Less Travelled

Now we jump ahead to season 2 of THE TWILIGHT ZONE for ROAD LESS TRAVELLED. By this time the series had given up the multiple segments per episode approach, so this episode marks Craven’s only full-length segment of the series. It’s nice he has more room to work here but ultimately this installment isn’t one of his better ones.

Cliff De Young stars as a family man whose daughter (Jackie Bernstein) has started to claim a man in a wheelchair has been visiting her in her room. There’s no evidence of the man at first, so De Young writes it off as a dream or imagination, but soon finds himself sucked into strange, super-real visions of combat in Vietnam.

De Young’s been living with guilt since dodging the draft by moving to Canada, and the visions of Vietnam are making things worse. The twist comes when it turns out the mysterious man in the wheelchair is him – from a parallel universe in which he DID go to Vietnam.

So it’s fitting that Craven’s last story in the TWILIGHT ZONE universe echoes his first story, about a man who meets another version of himself. Unfortunately the first attempt at this story, SHATTERDAY, was much better, more emotional and more haunting, even without the benefit of being about an “issue.”

All right, now we’re done with THE TWILIGHT ZONE, I promise.