Movies - TV
How The Twilight Zone Froze An Entire Town’s Worth Of Actors
By RYAN COLEMAN
In a 1960 season one episode of "The Twilight Zone" titled "Elegy," writer Charles Beaumont and director Douglas Heyes froze an entire town of people without using any dummies.
In the episode, it's 2185, and astronauts make an emergency landing on an asteroid that's far, far away from Earth but has a similar atmosphere, climate, and power of gravity.
However, the astronauts find that the entire town, including a farm, town square, and most memorably, a beauty contest, is frozen solid, including all the people.
Eventually, a robot caretaker tells them that life on Earth was zapped in 1985 and that he poisoned them, so they paid to live out their eternal death in a manufactured dreamland.
In Marc Scott Zicree's "The Twilight Zone Companion," Heyes notes, “the camera is almost always in movement” because making extras freeze for long enough to shoot was impossible.
Unlike a still camera, a moving camera blends movement back into the stillness, which helps create the effect that the actors were truly frozen in time.