How would you react to a mysterious force controlling your neighborhood? The short story “The Monsters are due on Maple Street” uses dramatic scenes to emphasize the moments. The story takes the common occurrences of a community and highlights it using unreal happenings. The author takes the emotions of an average person and uses them to indicate how typically calm groups of people react in a situation of fear. In my old neighborhood, if one person wasn’t maintaining their property the others would be aroused and demand for the owner to clean up their area. Therefore the originally friendly neighborhood would form temporary enemies. The story uses an average community and emphasizes it by bringing in unnatural happenings. “And see which one of us are really humans” (361) the …show more content…
The story very clearly states that the monsters did not have to enforce harm on the humans what so ever. When people are in denial that the human mind can be more destructive than a supernatural force, in some ways they are wrong. As said on page 368, the narrator states: “The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fall out. There are weapons that are simply thoughts” Even if monsters can destroy cities, nothing is more harmful than the way of the mind. If chaos breaks out in a peaceful community the populous will search for an answer and will put aside all trust and honesty. Overall, the monsters took advantage of an originally peaceful neighborhood and introduced chaos to the scene. The author did a wonderful job explaining how easy it is to manipulate our simple minds. When people try to cope with a new situation when fear is introduced, it results in losing all trust in others. Although some don’t want to believe it, the human mind is more dangerous than any weapon. It can be manipulated to a point where all sanity is
In both versions there are many differences and few similarities. Rod Serling, changed updates to relate time period to a modern theme. "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street" 1960 version is black and white and the 2002 version is in color. The 1960 version is less violent how the 2002 version is very violent. The characters change for looking and dressing alike to look nothing alike in the 1960 episode everyone is white fancy as where the 2002 episode has people who don’t care who they look like and they don’t have the same skin color.
The plot is unrealistic in “The Monsters are due on Maple Street” because, the power does not just go off without storm presence, cars do not just start by themselves, the Aliens are not real. First things first. Look here. “The Monsters are due on Maple Street” is all about the local town people’s power and electronics going out. They start to panic when Tommy starts talking about the Aliens. Steve and Les Goodman cars starts by themselves. The town people get violent. The plot is unrealistic unrealistic in “The Monsters are due on Maple Street.” They also start accusing each other and in the end someone ends up dead. I believe this plot is unrealistic because the
The series Twilight Zone is a show that combines science fiction with society. Every episode ends with a shocking, unexpected twist. “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street” is an episode that informs society about the fear of prejudice and hysteria. In this episode, a loud shadow in the sky passes through Maple Street. The shadow is actually a meteor. Unexpected and strange things start to happen like the electricity and cars turning off. The people who live on Maple become very curious on what the meteor has done to the neighbors living on the street. A young boy named Tommy tells the adults that everything weird happening is because of the aliens from outer space, which he read about in a comic book. First the
Charlie pulls the trigger and shoots the monster. As the group approaches the monster, the find out that it’s Pete Van Horn… and he’s dead. It “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”, everything stops working and turns off. The people blame aliens and all turn against one another. The plot is not realistic in “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” because the car started by itself, the people blamed the power outage on aliens, and Charlie shoots Pete because he believes he’s a monster.
Boom!! Pete’s dead. Charlie shot Pete. Pete was walking around seeing if everybody's power is off. Pete was walking In the shadow charlie got scared he thought Pete was a alien. This story is not realistic because Charlie shot Pete he said he thought he was a alien. Less Goodman’s car stared out of nowhere. A meteor flew overhead they thought it was a spaceship.
What if someone you knew was not who they were? What if they were aliens or terrorists? That’s what happens in the 1960 and the 2003 version of Rod Serling’5s teleplay. In the 1960 version the neighbors are accusing each other of being aliens and taking away each other’s power from their houses and cars. While in the 2003 version they think terrorists are doing this from the recent 9/11. This shows that fear of the unknown can cause people to turn on each other.
“But afterward the townspeople, theretofore sufficiently unfearful of each other to seldom trouble to lock their doors, found fantasy re-creating them over and over again—those somber explosions that stimulated fires of mistrust in the glare of which many old neighbors viewed each other strangely, and as strangers.”
One thing that people do when they do not know a certain objective is that they might start to get enraged or frightened and they can start to turn very violent. The show called The Twilight Zone, is a series of short stories that follow different groups of people that face different problems. They all come back to the main theme that humans are really monsters. In the short story, Monsters are Due on Maple Street by Rod Serling a group of people soon find out that the power is cut and they are suspicious that an alien is behind this. It shows two weapons of humanity which are suspicion and scapegoating. There are some ways that suspicion led the humans to turn on each other and how it is shown to go against humans.
“Sheer mayhem breaks out, neighbor battling neighbor, grabbing for rifles, bricks, even the hammer from Pete Van Horn’s body,” (Serling, page 15). This describes the final scene of a provocative short story in The Twilight Zone. The Twilight Zone is a televised show set in the 1960s with short episodes in no specific order. These stories all have the darkest of themes to share about humanity’s true nature. In the short story, “Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” by Rod Serling, the author contributes to the theme that prejudice and scapegoating are weapons of humanity. When the idea of prejudice first kicks in, Maple Street gets a little taste of madness.
“Fear and euphoria are dominant forces, and fear is many multiples the size of euphoria” - Alan Greenspan. New York author, Alan Greenspan, here is explaining that the threat fear presents is really no different than the state of intensity caused by euphoria. In Andrew J. Hoffman’s anthology, Monsters, there is substantial evidence that both fear and euphoria are inflicted upon men, by female monsters. The two threats men typically face against women are temptation and emasculation. Thus, in mythology and folklore, female monsters exemplify the impulse of desire (sexually) for men, and male weakness. These are creature that are lusted after and yet, still feared because of their power. Men find female monsters both fearsome and euphoric and will always threaten their dominance and control.
In the article “Monsters and the Moral Imagination,” Stephen Asma, a professor of Philosophy and Distinguished Scholar at Columbia College Chicago, argues that the existence of monsters have a purpose in our lives. It is not only to reveal our deepest fears, but to question our moral instincts. Being attacked by fictional monsters seems impractical, however, chaos and disasters do happen and exist in the real world. The creation of monsters is due to our reaction of our fears and the inability to control the world we live in.
Connecting the fact that the kids are living in fear to that London is big, the kids are constantly moving. The possibilities of adults attacking the kids at any point are endless. “And when it had gotten really bad, when those adults who’d gotten sick but hadn’t died had started to turn on the kids, attacking them like wild animals,” (8). These kids start to constantly move because of their fear. This causes
The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” is a screenplay by Rod Serling that was televised as part of the Twilight Zone television series, a popular series that began in 1959 and is still televised today. After reading and then watching the selection, I prefer the teleplay over the episode.
“The community broke into complete chaos. Everybody and everything was out of order. When the wave of painful memories hit, the people dropped to the floor and held their heads in excruciating pain. We should have thought this through more carefully Jonas. I would never have believed that such anarchy could become in such a peaceful community. But the memories were too harsh. Riots were started. Fires burnt down the buildings. Some jumped into the river and died just
In the drama, ¨The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street¨ by Rod Serling, the plot is advanced by the importance of the events and characters’ actions by giving it interest and dimension. Tommy tells everyone about the monsters/aliens, but nobody believes him;¨They don't want us to leave.That's why they shut everything off,¨Tommy explains about the aliens, but no one believed him but soon after, it sparked the cause of the weird things happening.Charlie killed Pete Van Horn,¨You killed him, Charlie. You shot him dead!¨Charlie grabbed the gun and shot it at a dark figure that turned out to be Pete Van Horn, after that they begin to suspect Charlie is the monster. They all blame each other more intensely,¨I tell you, it's the kid.¨As the stress