- 10.0/101 votes
#1 - Pamela's Voice / Lone Survivor / The Doll
Season 1 Episode 5 - Aired 1/13/1971
A harried husband murders his magpie wife only to find the arrangement less permanent than he'd hoped. A passing ship rescues an unconscious man in a lifeboat labeled "Titanic", three years after the liner sank. A hideous doll becomes an agent of revenge against an officer in Queen Victoria's colonial forces.
Director: Richard Benedict
Writer: Rod Serling
- 9.0/102 votes
#2 - They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar / The Last Laurel
Season 1 Episode 6 - Aired 1/20/1971
A has-been salesman is haunted by phantoms from a happier past. Astral projection is the key to a crippled athlete's bid for revenge.
Director: Don Taylor
Writer: Rod Serling
- 9.0/101 votes
#3 - The Boy Who Predicted Earthquakes / Miss Lovecraft Sent Me / The Hand of Borgus Weems / Phantom of What Opera?
Season 2 Episode 1 - Aired 9/15/1971
A phenomenally successful young seer suddenly refuses to make further predictions. A vignette about a babysitter and her latest client. A desperate man seeks a surgeon's help when he discovers a presence that controls his right hand. The Phantom of the Opera gets the shock of his life when he menaces a beautiful young singer.
Director: John Badham
Writer: Rod Serling
- 9.0/101 votes
#4 - The Caterpillar / Little Girl Lost
Season 2 Episode 22 - Aired 3/1/1972
A bored colonial on a Malaysian plantation employs an exotic accomplice, an earwig, in his gruesome plot to assassinate a romantic rival. Military strategists unwittingly plant the seeds of the apocalypse when they humor a scientific genius unbalanced by his daughter's death.
Director: Jeannot Szwarc
Writer: Rod Serling
- 8.5/1025 votes
#5 - To Serve Man
Season 3 Episode 24 - Aired 3/2/1962
The Kanamits, 9 foot tall aliens, arrive on Earth with one lofty goal: To Serve Man.
Director: Richard L. Bare
Writer: Rod Serling
- 8.4/1037 votes
#6 - Eye of the Beholder
Season 2 Episode 6 - Aired 11/11/1960
A young woman lying in a hospital bed awaits the outcome of an experimental treatment in an attempt to make her look normal.
Director: Douglas Heyes
Writer: Rod Serling
- 8.3/1015 votes
#7 - The Masks
Season 5 Episode 25 - Aired 3/20/1964
A wealthy dying man invites his family to a Mardi Gras party and insists that they wear masks specially made for them, threatening to cut off their inheritance if they refuse.
Director: Ida Lupino
Writer: Rod Serling
- 8.3/1023 votes
#8 - The Shelter
Season 3 Episode 3 - Aired 9/29/1961
When a nuclear attack appears imminent, several suburban friends and neighbors fight over control of a single bomb shelter.
Director: Lamont Johnson
Writer: Rod Serling
- 8.1/1024 votes
#9 - Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?
Season 2 Episode 28 - Aired 5/26/1961
State Troopers follow the tracks from a frozen pond, into a diner. Inside they find a soda jerk, a bus driver and his seven passengers. The bus driver is certain only six people boarded his bus…
Director: Montgomery Pittman
Writer: Rod Serling
- 8.0/1053 votes
#10 - Time Enough at Last
Season 1 Episode 8 - Aired 11/20/1959
A bank teller, obsessed with reading, faces conflicts at work and home because of his passion for literature.
Director: John Brahm
Writer: Rod Serling
- 8.0/1019 votes
#11 - The Silence
Season 2 Episode 25 - Aired 4/28/1961
A talkative man takes an offer to keep silent for a year for $500,000.
Director: Boris Sagal
Writer: Rod Serling
- 8.0/1022 votes
#12 - It's a Good Life
Season 3 Episode 8 - Aired 11/3/1961
Little Anthony Fremont controls an entire town with his ability to read minds and make people do as he wishes. Which is a real good thing.
Director: James Sheldon
Writer: Rod Serling
- 8.0/102 votes
#13 - The House / Certain Shadows on the Wall
Season 1 Episode 3 - Aired 12/30/1970
A former sanitarium patient discovers a house she has known all her life, but never dared enter, in a recurring dream. An ailing woman dies under the care of her sinister brother, but her accusing shadow remains indelibly cast on the parlor wall.
Director: John Astin
Writer: Rod Serling
- 7.9/1033 votes
#14 - The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street
Season 1 Episode 22 - Aired 3/4/1960
Paranoia strikes the residents of Maple Street when they believe human-looking aliens have invaded the neighborhood.
Director: Ron Winston
Writer: Rod Serling
- 7.8/1018 votes
#15 - Five Characters in Search of an Exit
Season 3 Episode 14 - Aired 12/22/1961
A hobo, clown, bagpipe player, ballerina and military officer are trapped in a huge cylinder.
Director: Lamont Johnson
Writer: Rod Serling
- 7.8/1011 votes
#16 - He's Alive
Season 4 Episode 4 - Aired 1/24/1963
Peter Vollmer, a small-time neo-Nazi leader, yearns for more power. Advised by a shadowy benefactor, Vollmer's following grows, as does his ego...
Director: Stuart Rosenberg
Writer: Rod Serling
- 7.7/1036 votes
#17 - And When the Sky Was Opened
Season 1 Episode 11 - Aired 12/11/1959
Recovering in the hospital after a space mission, Major William Gart is visited by his co-pilot Lieutenant Colonel Clegg Forbes, who insists on the existence of a third astronaut.
Director: Douglas Heyes
Writer: Rod Serling
- 7.7/1026 votes
#18 - A Stop at Willoughby
Season 1 Episode 30 - Aired 5/6/1960
Riding home on the train one day, a stressed businessman falls asleep and dreams it is 1888, and he is entering a small, idyllic town called Willoughby.
Director: Robert Parrish
Writer: Rod Serling
- 7.7/1018 votes
#19 - The Midnight Sun
Season 3 Episode 10 - Aired 11/17/1961
The Earth's orbit has been changed, drawing ever closer to the sun and promising eminent destruction.
Director: Anton Leader
Writer: Rod Serling
- 7.7/103 votes
#20 - The Time Element
Season 1 Episode 6 - Aired 11/10/1958
A patient visiting a psychiatrist complains of recurrent dreams in which he imagines he is living in Hawaii just before the attack on Pearl Harbor. A series of flashbacks shows him living with his knowledge of what has happened in the seventeen years since, betting on sure winners in sports events, but also seeking to warn a newly-married couple, newspaper editors, and anyone else who will listen that they will be attacked by the Japanese. Everyone is either too interested in a good time or too determinedly patriotic to give heed; the man only gets punched on the jaw. In the end the psychiatrist is left looking at a blank couch, and to steady his own nerves he goes to a bar to get a drink. There he learns his patient was killed at Pearl Harbor.
Director: Allen Reisner
Writer: Rod Serling
- 7.6/108 votes
#21 - The Long Morrow
Season 5 Episode 15 - Aired 1/10/1964
Before leaving on a decades long mission, astronaut Douglas Stansfield meets a woman and falls in love.
Director: Robert Florey
Writer: Rod Serling
- 7.6/1067 votes
#22 - Where Is Everybody?
Season 1 Episode 1 - Aired 10/2/1959
Mike Ferris finds himself in a town strangely devoid of people. But despite the emptiness, he has the odd feeling that he's being watched...
Director: Robert Stevens
Writer: Rod Serling
- 7.6/1049 votes
#23 - Walking Distance
Season 1 Episode 5 - Aired 10/30/1959
A stressed advertising executive, driving through the country, leaves his car and starts to walk toward his hometown, Homewood. He finds things exactly as they were when he was a child.
Director: Robert Stevens
Writer: Rod Serling
- 7.6/1030 votes
#24 - What You Need
Season 1 Episode 12 - Aired 12/25/1959
A two-bit thug thinks he's found the key to a better life in an old sidewalk salesman who has the uncanny ability to tell people what they need the most.
Director: Alvin Ganzer
Writer: Rod Serling
- 7.6/1025 votes
#25 - The Hitch-Hiker
Season 1 Episode 16 - Aired 1/22/1960
Alone on a cross-country trip, a woman continually encounters the same mysterious hitch-hiker who inexplicably reappears at various points in her journey.
Director: Alvin Ganzer
Writer: Rod Serling