The Twilight Zone Reboot: 10 Classic Episodes It Should Remake

The Story:

An angry young man, abused and neglected as a child and struggling for respect as an adult, leads a fringe far-right group in 1960s America, but is mostly mocked and belittled. That is until he gains a shadowy mentor who teaches him how to fire up a crowd with nationalist, racist rhetoric, and conspire to murder a follower to create a martyr for his cause.

Why Remake It?

Featuring an impressive performance from Dennis Hopper as a distressingly convincing angry young fascist, He's Alive feels worryingly plausible even with its terribly Twilight Zone twist. (I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to reveal that the shadowy mentor is the ghost of Hitler himself).

Honestly, that twist feels a little silly for what's quite a serious subject (even if the metaphorical point - expressed in Serling's narration as "any place where there's hate, where there's prejudice, where there's bigotry, he's alive" - is a sound one), so may be better just built in from the start rather than as a big reveal. In fact, you could almost play "Hitler's back" as a bit of a silly joke at first before building to show quite how chilling that would be.

The story, which shows how quickly populist rhetoric can turn modern far-right racist politics from something that lives in the past into a very real threatening power today, is unfortunately more fitting to the political situation of today than it has been in almost any time since Serling wrote it. For that reason alone, He's Alive is worth revisiting.