Judgment at Hondo Seco
Rawhide

A cattle drive is like a ship or a fleet, towns are ports o’ call, in one of these Jim Quince has a brother who’s a hanging judge and a niece who loves a man no better than a drover.

Things come to a far pass until the lawmen of Hondo Seco have had enough of the letter that killeth and the judge rides out to lick his wounds.

In His Image
The Twilight Zone

Junior Woodchucks and the toy typewriter.

Veni creator spiritus, Dr. Frankenstein and everything else.

The famous fourth season has scope for this, Beaumont takes the full range, Lafferty’s masterpiece results.

The Thirty Fathom Grave
The Twilight Zone

The most austere and terrible of the series, requiring a U.S. Navy destroyer to do it honors.

The brief irruption of surreality is from “King Nine Will Not Return” (dir. Kulik), seaweed for sand.

There is nothing to it, after all, but assigning the blame to circumstances.

In that is everything.

A film as rare as anything, not unique but perfect.

The inspiration is evidently Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Valley of the Shadow
The Twilight Zone

“The capital of the Twilight Zone”, a small town in New Mexico, Pleasant Valley.

Journalists go there, if at all, by misadventure. A place of self-sufficient arts that Kafka would recognize as perfect.

Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading has the escape plan, but the ending simply means that no report is filed at the newspaper where the journalist is already “a day late”.