The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street

In regard to genre, The Twilight Zone is primarily identified as science fiction and horror. As a staple of mid-century television in its own right, The Twilight Zone also exemplifies a number of sci-fi and horror tropes in popular culture. Perhaps the best example of this is the twist ending: a radical change in a story’s plot or a last-minute reveal that recontextualizes its events. Many of The Twilight Zone’s most popular episodes end in twists, including “To Serve Man,” “Time Enough at Last,” “The Eye of the Beholder,” and “The Invaders,” to name a few. Many of the twist endings that conclude Twilight Zone episodes are specifically “karmic twist endings,” which introduce a moral message at the end of the story.

“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” is a perfect example of a karmic Twilight Zone twist. One moral of the episode—arguably, its main moral—is that a community gripped by paranoia is in danger of collapsing. However, the final exchange between the two unnamed figures recontextualizes the story as a cautionary tale about distinguishing between real and imagined threats. The twist is that residents of Maple Street were right all along: They were indeed being tormented by hostile invaders, but by turning on each other they played right into their attackers’ hands.

With this plot twist comes a twist of genre. “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” is unique among Twilight Zone episodes in that bulk of the episode’s plot reads as contemporary realistic fiction. With very few exceptions, Twilight Zone episodes always include some overt element of horror, sci-fi, fantasy, or absurdism. Though this episode does ultimately include aliens and a flying saucer in its last two minutes, most of the story could take place in reality.

The inclusion of the meddling invaders reframes a suspense story grounded in reality as a sci-fi fable about the long-term consequences of in-fighting. However, this genre switch is alluded to in a few significant ways. Firstly, science fiction is directly discussed at length within the text of the screenplay. Tommy introduces the concept of alien invaders to his neighbors, and this concern becomes the central conflict of the episode. Secondly, the fact that “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” is an episode of The Twilight Zone metatextually implies that science fiction and/or supernatural elements will be woven into the plot. Any viewer familiar with The Twilight Zone will expect (or at least suspect) as much.

There are a few elements of this screenplay that help it to function as a modern fable. Elements that might otherwise be dull or bland—such as the use of stock characters and a generic setting—make “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” more universal. Maple Street is a common name for a street, and it looks just like any other in suburban neighborhood of mid-century America. This, along with the alien’s remark that “their world is full of Maple Streets” (17), suggests that the paranoid breakdown of social structures can occur in any community. Likewise, the inclusion of flat archetypal characters, such as the harassment victim, the naïve child, the voice of reason, and the paranoid crank, makes it easier for the viewer to identify patterns in themselves and their communities. They may ask, “Who would I be in this scenario? Who should I be in scenarios like this?” These story elements work to streamline “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” as a modern Aesopian fable—one which was especially pertinent in the wake of McCarthyism (See: Socio-Historical Context: The McCarthy Era).