The Odd Yet Totally Fitting Souvenir Anne Francis Took from The Set of Iconic Twilight Zone Episode
The Twilight Zone's first season featured such classic episodes as "The After Hours," which starred Anne Francis as a young woman faced with an existential crisis inside a spooky department store.
Only The Twilight Zone could make something as innocuous as a department store creepy as all get out.
We are, of course, referring to season one's "The After Hours," an iconic episode written by series creator and host Rod Serling, which starred Anne Francis as a young woman embroiled in a mannequin-based nightmare.
After trying to return a golden thimble she purchased on the desolate ninth floor of her local department store, Ms. Marsha White is shocked to learn from management that no such place exists in the building. What's more, the woman who sold her the thimble (Elizabeth Allen) appears to be an inanimate showroom model. Marsha faints and is accidentally locked inside the store when it closes.
As she tries to find a way out, Marsha nearly suffers a nervous breakdown when the collection of clothes-displaying dummies call out her name. Back on the ninth floor, our spooked heroine finally remembers that she is really a mannequin herself who overstayed her one-month excursion into the outside world (the life-sized figure in the store take turns over the course of the year). No longer frightened, Marsha returns to non-being on the showroom floor, causing manager Mr. Armbruster (James Millhollin) to briefly question his own sanity.
Why, that mannequin over there looks exactly like the woman raving about a ninth floor yesterday. But...what if...? Nah, couldn't be!
The odd souvenir Anne Francis kept from The Twilight Zone's "After Hours" episode
When filming was over, Anne Francis took home an odd, yet totally appropriate, souvenir: the head of her lifeless counterpart. According to Steven Jay Rubin's 2017 book, The Twilight Zone Encyclopedia, the actress used the hollow noggin "as a receptacle for her straw hats."
Per Marc Scott Zicree's The Twilight Zone Companion, molds were made from the faces of the episode's three principal actors: Francis, Allen, and John Conwell (the elevator operator dressed in maritime apparel).
"From these, duplicate heads were cast in plaster and painted with acrylics," wrote Zicree. "The heads were then affixed to mannequin bodies. With that, 'The After Hours' had three superb-looking props."
The remaining figures on the ninth floor were simply actors standing still until cued to walk off their plinths. But even the relatively smaller job of approximating the faces of three performers was a major worry for Twilight Zone producer Buck Houghton.
"I was very concerned about that one being technically good," he recalled in the Companion. "Because I felt like it would fall right on its face if those models weren't awfully good. And we debated whether to have Anne Francis do it herself in some sort of frozen pose and we talked about waxing her face and doing a lot of things to make her look like a mannequin, but we felt that wouldn't work. I remember going round and round on how to make that so solid that nobody would laugh at it or say, 'Oh, I caught them doing their tricks.'"
Classic episodes of The Twilight Zone air regularly on SYFY. Click here for complete scheduling info!
