The best Twilight Zone episodes offer a strong mix of sci-fi, horror, fantasy, and speculative fiction shorts that often play out as morality tales. The series was one of the original anthology television shows and is easily the most influential. Every anthology series that followed owes a lot to Rod Sterling's masterful collection of thought-provoking, often frightening, and disturbing tales of terror. Whether it was horror, sci-fi, or the fear of an unknown future, The Twilight Zone mastered it all.

There have been a few reboots of the series, including a critically acclaimed one by Jordan Peele. However, the original remains the best, and that series alone (running from 1959 to 1963) created some of the most haunting, frightening, scary, and sometimes hopeful and empathetic short films in genre television history. With major celebrity names like William Shatner, Jack Klugman, Burgess Meredith, and Jackie Gleason, the best Twilight Zone episodes are as effective today as they were six decades ago.

10 Living Doll

Season 5, Episode 6

There have been many "living doll" horror movies. Child's Play is the most famous. Both M3GAN and Annabelle are new additions to the subgenre. However, all these killer doll movies owe everything to the original killer doll, the Living Doll from The Twilight Zone. This doll was named Talky Tina, and a mother bought the doll for her daughter's birthday one year. She hoped the doll would help the little girl transition better into life with her new strict stepfather but that isn't how things turned out.

The entire way this episode takes the unlikable Erich and turns him into someone the audience fears for is masterful...

Telly Savalas (The Dirty Dozen) plays stepdad Erich, who knows the doll is evil even though his new wife and stepdaughter think she is sweet. When Talky Tina tells Erich, "My name is Talky Tina, and I'm going to kill you," he sets out to find a way to destroy it but fails. The entire way this episode takes the unlikable Erich and turns him into someone the audience fears for is masterful, but when he gets what is coming to him in the end, it makes it all worth the wait.

9 Will The Real Martian Please Stand Up?

Season 2, Episode 28

"Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up" was another episode in which The Twilight Zone tackled prejudice and bigotry by using alien life to tell the story. This episode is mostly described as a whodunnit mystery but was also a good precursor to alien invasion movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and John Carpenter's The Thing. The episode occurs at a roadside diner where a group of strangers is stranded during an extreme weather storm. However, they soon start to realize something isn't right.

The diners believe one of the people there is an alien, and they don't know which one of them it could be. This causes them to turn on each other, show their prejudice in the open, and make threats based on what they see as differences. Even couples start to suspect their partners are not who they claim to be, and the tensions rise until they all finally leave without proving anything. The final twist is that one of them was an alien, believing the planet was ready to attack since humans couldn't even trust each other, slamming the point home.

8 The Invaders

Season 2, Episode 15

"The Invaders" is an amazing Twilight Zone episode that misdirects the viewers into thinking they are watching one thing and then springing the twist that things are not what they seem. Richard Matheson (I Am Legend) wrote this episode with Douglas Hayes directing the horror story about what appears to be a lonely woman fighting for her life as small creatures seem to be trying to kill her in her home. She does everything she can to protect her home and stay alive as she kills these creatures in any way she can.

What makes this episode work so well is that the viewers spend the entire time cheering for the villains without knowing that they are the bad guys and then realize when it is too late that the "monsters" were the victims all along. The twist reveals that the "creatures" are human astronauts who landed on another planet, and the woman is a giant alien protecting her home from the "invading" humans. It is the only time in the episode any dialogue is used, and the fact this is a silent installment adds to the terror.

7 It's A Good Life

Season 3, Episode 8

One of the creepiest Twilight Zone episodes ever made is season 3's "It's A Good Life." That is because it has one of the scariest things in horror flicks - a creepy kid. Rod Sterling wrote the script based on a story by Jerome Bixby, and it all starts off shockingly. The first thing that the audience sees is a group of adults nervously talking to each other, and some of them beg the others to kill a child (played by Billy Mumy). However, these adults are not the bad guys in this story.

A person with great power, but unchecked aggression can destroy everything around him.

Anthony Fremont has godlike mental powers. He can read minds and force people to do anything he wants them to. No one can resist his powers, and everyone in the town is enslaved to this young boy's wishes and desires. He is also vindictive as when he doesn't get his way, he will hurt the adults he feels slighted by. This terrifying episode shows how a person with great power, but unchecked aggression can destroy everything around him and make people scared to do anything to stop him.

6 To Serve Man

Season 3, Episode 24

There are many Twilight Zone episodes from which other shows and movies have borrowed, but few have been as mimicked as "To Serve Man." This episode stars Richard Kiel (Jaws from the James Bond franchise) as an alien. His people are 9-foot-tall telepathic beings who land on Earth and greet humans with a book called To Serve Man. The aliens claim they are there to serve humans in any way possible and share their advanced knowledge, which could solve all of Earth's problems.

As with all the best Twilight Zone episodes, this one has a twist - one of the best in the entire franchise's run. They do everything they promised and turn the Earth into a utopia with all the problems, including pollution, world hunger, and more solved. The twist was also a perfect joke, as the book's title - To Serve Man - was literal in the sense that the aliens were taking humans to visit their planet, where they then served them as meals to their race. The joke helped elevate this to masterpiece status.

5 Nightmare At 20,000 Feet

Season 5, Episode 13

This Twilight Zone episode might be the most famous one in the original run. The main reasons are two-fold. First, this was one of William Shatner's appearances in the anthology series, and he was on top form in this performance. Second, the story itself was creepy and memorable - one that most fans can almost every detail about. Shatner is a man who is scared of flying but has to take a flight anyway. It doesn't help that a storm is ongoing, and the plane hits turbulence.

Richard Donner (Superman) directed the episode in one of his early credits.

What sends this man over the edge is when he looks out the window and sees a "gremlin" on the plane's wing. No one believes him, and he is considered an unruly enger, all while the gremlin tries to bring down the plane. Richard Donner (Superman) directed the episode in one of his early credits, and while the gremlin is clearly a man in a furry suit, the entire thing is just creepy enough to remain one of the most memorable and beloved Twilight Zone episodes in history.

4 The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street

Season 1, Episode 22

One of the most popular Twilight Zone episodes ever made, "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street," tells a story that was important in the 1960s and might be even more vital in today's society. The episode starts with the electricity going out in a neighborhood, and no one can get it back on. However, when one car can still start, the people who live on Maple Street begin to believe there is an alien invasion ongoing and start to point fingers at each other, accusing neighbors of being aliens.

This episode is one of the best allegories during The Twilight Zone's run about fear-mongering and xenophobia.

While the prejudice laid out in this episode is not based on gender, race, ethnicity, or religion, it does show that humans will often find reasons to segregate and hate people unlike them, even if there is no reason to do so. This episode is one of the best allegories during The Twilight Zone's run about fear-mongering and xenophobia in small, close-minded communities. When it turns out aliens caused it, but only as a way to turn humanity against each other by provoking fear, it is a message that remains frighteningly real.

3 Five Characters In Search Of A Exit

Season 3, Episode 14

The plot of "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" is clearly one that many horror movies have played off of over the years. A group of five people are stuck together with no reason or explanation. They all need to find a way out before they all die. These people include a clown, a hobo, a ballet dancer, a bagpiper, and an army major, and they need to figure out why they are there, what each of them represents, and how to escape before the nightmare finally ends.

This is a story of five random strangers who don't how they got there or even who they are. Rod Sterling wrote this episode and set it up like a deranged whodunnit, an Agatha Christie-styled mystery without a brilliant detective to help these people escape trouble. What really helps this entire episode stick the landing is that they are not in "hell," as they surmised, but it is something a lot more innocent and also terrifying that explains their predicament.

2 Time Enough At Last

Season 1, Episode 8

"Time Enough At Last" is a Twilight Zone episode that seems to have a happy ending after a worldwide tragedy but then twists the knife in the viewer's mind when it destroys all hope in the episode's last shot. Burgess Meredith stars in this episode as a bank teller who doesn't like to be around people and prefers to spend all his time reading by himself. However, he never finds the time, and people continue to get in his way. When a global catastrophe delivers the world via a nuclear bombing, this man survives.

When he comes out of his bomb shelter and sees the entire world seems to have been destroyed, he realizes he has "time enough" to do what he wants to do in life. Things get even better when he finds the library wasn't destroyed and all the books he could ever want to read are still there. However, this episode does not have a happy ending, and it is a twist that offers up the worst tragedy imaginable for this man when his glasses break. This installment seems playfully mischievous and is a perfect tragic comedy.

1 Eye Of The Beholder

Season 2, Episode 6

One of the most shocking and brilliantly executed Twilight Zone installments is the season 2 episode "Eye of the Beholder." In it, a woman learns she is so "ugly" that she doesn't have a chance at a normal life unless she undergoes several experimental plastic surgeries. It seems sad, but she seems more than willing to undergo this to live a normal life. Director Douglas Heyes films the episode so that viewers can't see vital information until the shocking twist at the end.

The main theme of the episode remains prevalent in today's society. With so many people believing they have to change their appearance to please others, it has made plastic surgery commonplace, especially for the rich and famous who always want to retain their youth. The episode's title is a spin on "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." When the twist comes, and the beautiful Maxine Stuart realizes she has to be made to look like the pig-snouted creatures in this world, it delivers everything The Twilight Zone stands for.