pound again at the saucer, the officer’s voice warns against any type of counter-attack, for
these creatures are “too powerful,” and his dying words, repeated several times, constitute the
ultimate warning: “Stay away!” As the woman, exhausted, collapses over to one side, the
camera focuses upon the tiny spaceship deformed by the impacts of the hatchet, on one side
of which we can read the following caption: “U.S. Air Force Space Probe No.1.” Just as the
final narrative twist of “Third from the Sun” reveals that what we thought to be our Earth is in
reality another world, that of “The Invaders” shows that who we thought was human is in
actuality a gigantic monster from a different world, identical to ours except for its unfathomable
dimensions. In both instances, we are provided with hyper-realistic elements which work
towards the manipulation of the receptor in accepting the represented universe as his or her
own: the interactions and the activities of the families from “Third from the Sun" are indeed
typical of a bourgeois evening, and the protagonist of “The Invaders” chases the minute flying
saucer in her chamber robe; in this sense, both episodes correspond structurally to the
mechanism of the fantastic, for they introduce a direct clash between semiotic dimensions only that in these two cases, the other dimension happens to be our reality.
Towards the climax of the narration, the protagonist of the ambitious albeit problematic
film, De Sade, of which Matheson wrote the script, states that he can no longer distinguish
reality from fantasy; however, it remains unclear whether he considers this to be a good or a
bad thing. Our analysis of Matheson’s fantastic contribution to the Twilight Zone seems to
reveal a similar intent: reality is definitely not enough and imagination must be able to push its
limits in order for us to escape into another dimension, following the good advice of Rod
Selling. And this other dimension might be strange, dark and scary - but it is always
entertaining.
West Virginia University
Daniel Ferreras Savoye
Works Cited
Armitt, Lucie. Theorising the Fantastic. London: Hodder Arnold, 1996.
— . Contemporary Women’s Fiction and the Fantastic. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.
Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.
Derrida, Jacques. De la grammatologie. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967.
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