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.