How The Twilight Zone Pulled Off The Impossible For The Eye Of The Beholder

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BY MICHAEL BOYLE/JULY 29, 2023 10:00 AM EST

As beloved as "The Twilight Zone" is, it often gets made fun of for its occasionally shoddy twists. Sometimes the twist is so obvious everyone could see it coming from a mile away, and sometimes the twist feels random and arbitrary. There's a balancing act to making a plot twist both well-foreshadowed yet still surprising, and not all of the series' 156 episodes managed to pull it off.

Then there are the revered episodes like "Eye of the Beholder," which manages a twist that's obvious in hindsight, yet somehow still a total shock on first viewing. The episode follows a bunch of doctors who try to "fix" an ugly patient whose face is bandaged up for the whole first half. "Ever since I was a little girl, people have turned away when they looked at me," the masked woman, Janet, laments. "Funny, the very first thing I can remember is another little child screaming when she looked at me."

There's so much build-up to what we'll see when the bandages are taken off, so much emphasis on how ugly this woman supposedly is, it's easy not to notice that the camera isn't showing us any of the nurses' or doctors' faces. They certainly sound like normal, sympathetic people, so the assumption is that they are. It's only once Janet's bandages are taken off, revealing her as a beautiful woman by the audience's standards, that we get to see what the hospital staff look like.

"The idea was to make them look like pigs, with the big nostrils and piglike nose," said the show's make-up artist William Tuttle in "The Twilight Zone Companion," and he certainly succeeded. By our standards, these doctors and nurses are hideous, but those are not the standards Janet (Donna Douglas) is used to.