Nightmare Classics is a new monthly series where Bloody-Disgusting re-evaluates and re-introduces classic horror films for a new audience!
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.
Nowadays we call that “smart” technology. It’s in our laptops, our cellular phones, our Amazon Echoes and (if we’re rich enough) our smart houses. 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. Moore – called it The Twonky.
And in The Twonky, all of the technological advancements we take for granted today are the stuff of impossibly futuristic, absurdist nightmares.
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. 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.
As 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). 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 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 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 is an old-fashioned man who never even wanted a television in the first place. He was comfortable with his vinyl record player and his library of books (both of which are quickly vetoed by the Twonky). Then this newfangled contraption comes along and messes everything up by trying to make his life easier.
(The Twonky predicted computer programs that solve solitaire games for you, but this was the 1950s, so somehow that was considered horrifying.)
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.
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. It also brainwashes anybody who tries to turn it off until they’re walking around like zombies, insisting that they have “no complaints.”
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. 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.
Perhaps the most hilarious thing about Oboler’s genre-defying film – which seems equally at home in comedy, sci-fi, horror and fantastical realism, and might have been the toast of festivals like Fantastic Fest if such festivals had existed at the time – is that for all its fear-mongering about technological advances, it was Oboler himself who pushed a brand new technology into the Hollywood mainstream, and changed the whole industry.
Just one year after he finished The Twonky, and was completely unable to find a distributor, Oboler released the first major 3D motion picture: the man-eating lion thriller Bwana Devil. It would be decades before the technology was perfected, but what started out as a cash grab novelty item eventually became an industry standard that made James Cameron’s Avatar the biggest moneymaker ever. And fortunately for us, the success of Bwana Devil also made it possible for The Twonky to finally get distributed in 1953.
Needless to say, a movie as difficult to define as The Twonky didn’t set the box office on fire. Hans Conried is said to have warned the film’s producer that the film wouldn’t make money, to which the producer allegedly replied, “That’s alright. I need a tax write-off this year anyway.”
It’s been nearly 70 years now and The Twonky is not available on home video and only survives in extant copies made from syndicated telecasts (which are low quality, but easy enough to find). It’s a shame too, because it features a delightfully befuddled performance from Hans Conried, charmingly weird visual effects, and an ahead of its time storyline that predicted – within a reasonable margin of error – what technology, and society, would eventually become.
