Fear In The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street

Rod Serling’s message that he was trying to get watchers of “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” to see throughout this episode of the “Twilight Zone” is that fear is a human’s worst enemy. Serlings represents this theme throughout the characters and their actions that fear drove them to take. The theme of fear driving humans to do regrettable things starts to be brought through the story when Charlie shoots Pete Van Horn and kills him. In the text, it says “Charlie slowly raises the gun. As the figure gets closer and closer he suddenly pulls the trigger. The sound of it explodes in the stillness. There is a long shot looking down at the figure, who suddenly lets out a small cry, stumbles forward onto his knees and then falls forward on his face. Don, Charlie, and Steve race forward over to him. Steve is there first and turns the man over. Now the crowd gathers around them.] [Slowly looks up.] ‘It's Pete Van Horn.’” This excerpt represents the theme, by showing how Charlie out of sheer fear shot and killed a random figure because he thought that it was coming to get him, and out of this fearful act he took the life of a man that was innocent.

Serling shows this in the text when “On the front porch as a rock thrown from the group smashes a window alongside him, the broken glass flying past him. A couple of pieces cutting him. He stands there perspiring, rumpled, blood running down from a cut on the cheek.” The theme is shown here because all of the neighbors are trying to get him because they’re afraid that he is the Alien that has come to destroy them, even though Charlie is no