![]() ![]() What holds Arch Oboler’s twee, winking yarn together is an overwhelming anxiety that the modern world will only more overwhelming and ubiquitous, robbing us of our free will, mucking up our finances, and driving us to do unthinkable things. There’s no body count to speak of in The Twonky, but in a way, it’s just as much about a man losing his mind in isolation, as he’s poked and prodded by a powerful creature he cannot begin to understand, as Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II. It also brainwashes anybody who tries to turn it off until they’re walking around like zombies, insisting that they have “no complaints.” In the present day 1950s, however, the Twonky’s efforts to help its master get him raided by two different police squads – at the same time – for solicitation and counterfeiting. In quick measure, the Twonky counterfeits money to pay Professor West’s bills and, when he seems stressed out by the whole Twonking business, tries to use a telephone to order him a sex worker, which is – if the Twonky is to be believed – a fairly normal practice in the future. ( The Twonky predicted computer programs that solve solitaire games for you, but this was the 1950s, so somehow that was considered horrifying.) Then this newfangled contraption comes along and messes everything up by trying to make his life easier. He was comfortable with his vinyl record player and his library of books (both of which are quickly vetoed by the Twonky). Professor West is an old-fashioned man who never even wanted a television in the first place. It sounds like a good idea, but The Twonky hails from an era when television sets were relatively new devices to have around the home, and as with any new technology, it came with certain anxieties. Professor West has no idea what this device is doing, or even what it is, until his alcoholic colleague Coach Trout calls it a “Twonky,” which is a fancy word for “something you do not know what it is.” Eventually, Coach Trout – an unstable individual who associates his sexual attraction to women with, for no discernible reason, french fries – stumbles upon the idea that this Twonky is a robot from the future, and it serves the needs of its master. It’s an intriguing convergence, that a film that so closely presages the Bluetooth horrors of the Child’s Play remake would also presage one of the most iconic moments from the original, which had nothing to do with that futuristic subplot. Professor West has no interest in such a gizmo, until it starts lighting his cigarettes for him, and zapping cups of coffee out of his hand.Īs if that wasn’t shocking enough, Professor West soon discovers that the television – which has also started walking around the house all by itself – isn’t even plugged in, in a dramatic beat that would later be revisited in Tom Holland’s Child’s Play (1988). The Twonky stars voice-over luminary Hans Conried (he played Captain Hook in Disney’s Peter Pan, and Thorin Oakenshield in the Rankin/Bass version of The Hobbit) as a mild-mannered college professor whose wife goes away to visit relatives, and who leaves behind – to keep him company – a brand new television set. Moore – called it The Twonky.Īnd in The Twonky, all of the technological advancements we take for granted today are the stuff of impossibly futuristic, absurdist nightmares. But in 1951, writer/director Arch Oboler – adapting a short story by Lewis Padgett, the pseudonym of husband and wife writing team Henry Kuttner and C.L. It’s in our laptops, our cellular phones, our Amazon Echoes and (if we’re rich enough) our smart houses. Nowadays we call that “smart” technology. Imagine it: an electronic device that serves your every whim, making purchases, recommending books and music, and even making phone calls, but which also collects your personal data, runs up your credit card bills, brainwashes your community and spies on you. Nightmare Classics is a new monthly series where Bloody-Disgusting re-evaluates and re-introduces classic horror films for a new audience! ![]()
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