The Scariest Twilight Zone Episodes to Watch This Halloween

There are few series as scary and memorable as Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone. And with Halloween creeping around the corner, we thought we'd suggest five episodes of various incarnations of the show to watch this year — even if you have to watch them through your fingers.

The chilling episodes listed below (in order of airdate) capture the best of The Twilight Zone in all of its spooky, morality-play glory, with unforgettable twist endings and social commentary that helped make the series a load-bearing column of television's early foray into more genre storytelling. Buckle up. Next stop is The Twilight Zone.

1. "The Invaders" (Original air date: January 27, 1961)

Some Twilight Zone episodes are a triumph of performance, others are conceptual highpoints that offer exemplary designs. "The Invaders" has it all.The episode stars Agnes Moorehead (Ednora on Bewitched) as a backwoods woman terrorized by tiny, space-age beings.

The episode is almost completely silent, with Moorehead giving a performance defined mostly by her physicality, and it's a sight to behold. (The episode is also aided tremendously by Jerry Goldsmith's evocative score.) This all leads to one of the more devastating and surprising Twilight Zone twist endings ever. And like some of the best episodes, its influence endures today, in everything from the Quiet Place movies to the recent Hulu original film No One Will Save You.
 

2. "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" (Original air date: October 11, 1963)

In perhaps the most famous episode of The Twilight Zone (it has been remade twice and gained immortality by being spoofed by The Simpsons), William Shatner stars as a man who is afraid of flying and who makes a terrifying discovery on his voyage: a small gremlin is on the wing of the plane. But will it be his paranoia that causes the jet to crash? Or the actual creature on the wing? This is a question that can only be answered ... in the Twilight Zone.

Directed by future Superman and Lethal Weapon filmmaker Richard Donner from a script by Richard Matheson, adapting his own story, this episode taps into one of our most primordial fears and comes up with something even more terrifying. There's a reason it's considered an all-timer for the series, and one of its most riveting half-hours.
 

3. "The Masks" (Original air date: March 20, 1964)

One of the scariest episodes of television, period, and the first episode on our list to be written by the man himself, Rod Serling. In New Orleans, an aging, wealthy businessman (Robert Keith), calls his family to his bedside. That's when he hands them the titular masks (designed by the legendary William Tuttle), which reflect their inner ugliness.

You can probably see the twist coming even before the episode concludes, but that doesn't make "The Masks" any less powerful or disturbing. What makes this episode even more incredible is that, even five seasons into the original series' run, Sterling and his collaborators were able to mine new narrative ground to make bona-fide classics. "The Masks" is also notable for being directed by Ida Lupino, the only woman to direct episodes of The Twilight Zone (and she only directed two).
 

4. "Button, Button" (Original air date: March 7, 1986)

The 1980s revival of The Twilight Zone doesn't get enough credit, perhaps because it premiered alongside a glut of other horror anthology series spurred on by the arrival of Steven Spielberg's highly anticipated Amazing Stories. (Other series included Darkroom, Monsters and Tales from the Dark Side.) But some of these episodes really stuck in your frontal cortex; among them is "Button Button," the second segment from the twentieth episode of the first season.

Based on a short story by "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" writer Matheson, the episode hinges on a haunting concept: a box is delivered to your home, and if you push it, you get $1 million. But somebody you don't know dies. Naturally, the episode (directed by The Changeling filmmaker Peter Medak) ends on a truly devastating twist that will leave you reeling.
 

5. "Blurryman" (Original air date: May 30, 2019)

The Jordan Peele-led revival of The Twilight Zone truly made its mark with the first season finale, "Blurryman." This episode, written by Alex Rubens and directed by Simon Kinberg (who developed this version of the show alongside Peele), is highly meta, concerning a new version of The Twilight Zone.

It also pulls from real-life scenarios like "The Slender Man," as a young writer (Zazie Beetz) starts seeing a ghostly figure in the background of shots from the show-within-a-show. It all ends with one of the more shocking moments in Twilight Zone history, one that is far too juicy to give away here.
 

Select episodes of The Twilight Zone are now available on Paramount+.