Jordan Peele is on board as one of the executive producers of a reboot of The Twilight Zone, apparently coming to CBS All Access. Even without this clear evidence, Peele’s interest in Rod Serling’s classic series, which ran on CBS from 1959-64, is manifest in his 2017 horror film, Get Out. Indeed, The Verge has called Get Out a “Twilight Zone-esque horror thriller.” Any fan of The Twilight Zone will, I’m sure, be able to point to many episodes whose influence seeped into Peele’s film. I want to point out one dramatic predecessor, however, in the season 3 episodes, “The Trade-Ins,” which originally aired on April 13, 1962 and which was written by Serling himself and directed by Elliot Silverstein.
“The Trade-Ins” startlingly anticipates the “Coagula Procedure” invented by the Armitages in Get Out. As a salesman in “The Trade-Ins” takes an elderly couple, John and Marie Holt, around the “exhibition” at “New Life Corp.,” he explains how they have perfected the process of transferring a human’s “memory bank, personality, continuity” into a “replica.” These replicas are physical bodies manufactured to represent the early 60s ideal—early 20s, white, slim, muscular.
Lester and Marie Holt look at “perfect” replica bodies in “The Trade-Ins”
For $5,000 each, the salesman tells the Holts, they can have their personalities “invested” into a replica and can then live for another 100+ years, as themselves, together, in “perfect” health. They can, in short, “trade in” their old bodies for new. Unfortunately, the Holts only have enough money for one of them to undergo the transformation. Since John is sick and in pain, he gets the surgery, only to realize, when he comes out in his new, young body, that he has betrayed his wife by doing so. The episode strongly suggests the wrongness of cheating old age and the natural arc of a human life.
The fantasy at the heart of “The Trade-Ins” is, of course, is exactly the fantasy that drives the elderly white people in Peele’s Get Out, as they bid on Chris’s body in hopes of having their brain—and thus everything they are—transferred to his young, healthy body.
Peele significantly chooses to substitute real human bodies, African American bodies, for the manufactured replicas of The Twilight Zone, in this way intensifying the critique of a process that is not just unnatural in Get Out but profoundly exploitative of others, specifically racial others.
Despite the difference of his message from that of The Twilight Zone, Peele does, I think, draw on a striking visual moment in “The Trade-Ins.” As the Holts enter the “exhibition hall,” which will tempt them to fall for the lure of appropriating other bodies as their own, director Silverstein films them apparently entering—swallowed by—a black void.
The Holts enter the “exhibition hall” in “The Trade-Ins”
This shot is repeated, I think, in the shots Peele gives us of Chris in “the sunken place,” shots that visually represent what will be the sidelining of Chris’s consciousness within his own body were the Coagula procedure to take place. He will be a mere “passenger” in his own body.
Chris in “the Sunken Place” looks up at Missy Armitage
Both shots, with their enveloping darkness, suggest not only the moral and ethical perniciousness of transplanting human consciousness, human brains, into other bodies. They also suggest a dawning awareness that, actually, human consciousness may not be that unique. It may actually just be part of the larger cosmos, the void—matter just like every other particle of the universe, which seems to engulf the human characters in all these shots. Both The Twilight Zone’s “The Trade-Ins” and Get Out, then, certainly indict human evil in this world–the evil of exploiting others. But they also suggest, visually, how, in the end, humans can easily dissolve back into the dark matter of the universe that began, surrounds, and awaits us.
You can read more about Get Out on Horror Homeroom–about its representation of scientific racism, of white privilege, and the way it draws on The Stepford Wives.
You can also find a list of 5 Twilight Zone episodes that influenced modern horror film.
