Revisting the Twilight Zone Episode That Inspired Ryan Coogler’s Sinners

Earlier today, we got a fresh look at Ryan Coogler’s Sinners: a movie with vampires in it that is not strictly a vampire movie (to paraphrase its writer-director). While speaking about Sinners in a press event timed to the new trailer release, Coogler shared some of the inspirations and influences behind his first supernatural horror project.

While many were unexpected (the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis is near the top of his list—speaking to Sinners’ musical themes, perhaps), some were not, especially Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, a book about a small town infected by a spreading evil that takes the form of vicious vampires. Salem’s Lot is such a touchstone for horror fans it’s been adapted multiple times with varying success; while Sinners isn’t an adaptation, we can guess Coogler’s script draws on similar themes, not to mention the same type of monster.

However, maybe the most startling hat-tip he cited was what he called a “deep-cut influence”—his favorite episode of his all-time favorite show, Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone. You can easily access “The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank” on Paramount+, which hosts all five seasons of the show’s classic first run from 1959 to 1964.

First airing in 1962, “Last Rites” was written and directed by show regular Montgomery Pittman. It falls in season three, which is stuffed with now-iconic entries: “It’s a Good Life,” “To Serve Man,” Five Characters in Search of an Exit,” “The Midnight Sun,” “Kick the Can,” and more. 

The first scene is immediately evocative of imagery we’ve seen in Sinners’ trailers: a small church in a small town in the 1920s, in what Serling tells us is “the southernmost section of the Midwest.” Everyone’s got a twang in their accent; it really could be Mayberry, the setting for the contemporaneous Andy Griffith Show. Except in Mayberry they never had “a funeral that didn’t come off exactly as planned… due to a slight fallout from the Twilight Zone.”

The opening of “Last Rites” is memorably jarring—a young man who seemingly died from the flu a few days prior pops up out of his coffin in the middle of his own memorial service. (He’s played by James Best, later to be immortalized as the comedically incompetent Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane on The Dukes of Hazzard.) All the mourners, including the doctor who declared him dead, his family, and his sweetheart, are understandably petrified by this apparent medical miracle.

“We was real certain that you died, day before yesterday,” he’s told, and Jeff Myrtlebank can’t believe what he’s hearing. It’s awkward for everybody, so the doctor tries to smooth things over by giving a name to Jeff’s amazing recovery (“epso suspendo animation,” an extremely rare and obviously made-up condition)—and it works, at least at first.

A few weeks later, Jeff is somehow living his very best life, stronger and with more energy and a better work ethic than ever before. His parents, while ostensibly glad their son has returned, can’t shake the feeling that something about him has changed, and that might not be such a good thing. (In a wry moment, they agree his new level of motivation is suspicious; prior to his return from the grave, he hovered somewhere between “shiftless” and “lazy.”) 

His girlfriend, who has the almost improbably wholesome first name of “Comfort,” is also rattled, especially when he shows up with a bouquet of fresh roses that’ve somehow withered into dead blooms on the short distance between their homes. But she’s more tender toward him than the townspeople, whose gossip over their strange neighbor—he looks like Jeff, but something is off—soon turns hostile.

Fear, however, is the dominating emotion. “Where was he them 48 hours he was supposed to be dead?” a good ol’ boy wonders, and the community begins to entertain the possibility that perhaps an evil spirit has taken over Jeff’s body, a phenomenon from the stories their grandmothers used to tell. 

“I’m getting sick and tired of the way everybody treats me like a vampire,” Jeff complains to Comfort—ringing another of Sinners‘ bells—not long before the locals decide “something evil” is in their midst and that they better do something about it. 

Unlike some Twilight Zone episodes that build up to a twist that provides both a shock and a definitive payoff—in “To Serve Man,” there’s zero confusion about what’s on that alien menu at the end—”The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank” leaves a little room for the audience to make up their own minds about its central mystery. But there’s no question that something sinister has shifted in Jeff, and as Serling’s final narration tells us, it’s the kind of sinister that hangs around for generations.

Sinners hits theaters April 18; you can stream The Twilight Zone on Paramount+. 

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