Movies - TV
The Twilight Zone: How The Eye Of The Beholder Pulled Off The Impossible
By MICHAEL BOYLE
The "Eye of the Beholder" episode of "The Twilight Zone" effectively delivers a twist that's obvious in hindsight, yet somehow still a total shock on first viewing.
In the episode, doctors "fix" an ugly patient whose face is bandaged. "Ever since I was a little girl, people have turned away when they looked at me," the woman, Janet, laments.
There's so much build-up to what we'll see when the bandages are taken off, it's easy not to notice that the camera isn't showing us any of the nurses' or doctors' faces.
Only once Janet's bandages are taken off, revealing her as a beautiful woman by the audience's standards, do we get to see what the hospital staff look like.
"The idea was to make them look like pigs, with the big nostrils and piglike nose," said the show's make-up artist William Tuttle.
The most impressive part of the episode is the way that it avoids showing the doctors' faces without calling much attention to what it's doing.
The blocking of the hospital staff's faces is impossible not to notice, but it's done gracefully enough that the average first-time viewer wouldn't be clued in.