The Twilight Zone Reboot: 10 Classic Episodes It Should Remake

The Story:

Alone in a remote run-down shack, an impoverished old woman lives in rustic simplicity, lacking in any modern conveniences or appliances. A tiny flying saucer crashes into her roof and little robotic-looking figures emerge and attack her with miniature radiation guns. Now she must use the simple tools around her to survive.

Why Remake It?

Unlike some iconic episodes, which are so pop culturally familiar that their every twist has been spoilt by a Treehouse Of Horror parody, The Invaders is a more under-the-radar classic. Nevertheless, it represents The Twilight Zone at its very peak. Everything that made the show great is here distilled down into a highly focused, unusual and original survival story.

With essentially just one proper character and no dialogue, the episode relies on the brilliant physical performance of its central actor (Agnes Moorhead) and sound design. A new reworking of The Invaders would be a brilliant vehicle for an ambitious and talented actor, and would be a piece of stark, experimental television that would be at least a match for some of the highly original, single-location speculative stories on Inside No. 9. Could the original half-hour story be stretched out to a full hour? That would be part of the interest in doing it again.

And, yes, The Invaders does have a predictably Twilight Zone ending (the tiny rounded figures are really human astronauts, and the woman desperate to survive is a giant that they see as a threat), but there's no reason not to subvert that with an entirely different twist in this tale.