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How a Real-Life Parenting Scare Led to One of Richard Matheson's Best Twilight Zone Episodes
In "Little Girl Lost," Richard Matheson channeled a real-life moment of parental fear into Twilight Zone gold.
Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone (airing regularly on SYFY) endures for a lot of reasons, but one of the most important is the show's ability to take relatable bits of human life and twist them into unexpected genre masterpieces. Not all of us have seen a creature outside of an airplane, but we've all been anxious on an airplane for one reason or another, and that feeling carries over in episode after episode.
It's no wonder, then, that some of the best Twilight Zone episodes were inspired by real fears. We've talked before about how writer Charles Beaumont's real phobias played a part in his episodes, but fellow Twilight Zone legend Richard Matheson also mined his personal life for tales of terror, including one incident that produced a series classic.
How The Twilight Zone episode "Little Girl Lost" grew out of Richard Matheson's own parenting fears
In "Little Girl Lost," the 26th episode of The Twilight Zone's third season, a father grows terrified when he realizes his young daughter rolled under her bed and disappeared without a trace. Desperate for help, he reaches out to a friend who's a physicist, who theorizes that the girl may have fallen into a hole that led not underground, but into another dimension. It's a fun premise that allowed the show to play with all kinds of trippy visuals, but according to Matheson, it had its roots in a very ordinary parenting scare.
According to Marc Scott Zicree's The Twilight Zone Companion, here's how Matheson remembered the story's origins: "That was based on an occurrence that happened to our daughter. She didn't go into the fourth dimension, but she cried one night and I went to where she was and couldn't find her anywhere. I couldn't find her on the bed, I couldn't find her on the ground. She had fallen off and rolled all the way under the bed against the wall. At first, even when I felt under the bed, I couldn't reach her. It was bizarre, and that's where I got the idea."
Using the parental anxiety of hearing your child in distress but being unable to find them, Matheson wrote "Little Girl Lost" first as a short story, written in 1953 and later collected in his 1957 anthology The Shores of Space. Nearly a decade after its original composition, Matheson dusted off the story for The Twilight Zone, and while he wasn't always happy with how adaptations of his work turned out on the show, he was quite pleased with this one.
"It was pretty nice," Matheson said, according to The Twilight Zone Companion. "[Charles] Aidman is a marvelous actor, and Paul Stewart directed it well. It had a nice feeling to it. The fourth dimension could have been a little stranger, but it wasn't bad at all; I was very pleased with it."
The Twilight Zone airs regularly on SYFY. Check the schedule for more info.
