Werewolves and Watercolors: Another Night Gallery Tour

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. Please step inside. A dark and stormy night may seem ill-suited to an art tour … at least until you see the unsettling works we have in store for you.

As our founder, Rod Serling, once said, “You won’t find the works of the masters here, because in this particular salon we choose our paintings with an eye more towards terror than technique.” Our paintings and sculptures have an unmistakably sinister edge.

I know our museum is more shadow-laden than most, but don’t worry. You should be quite safe. We haven’t lost anyone yet. Well, almost no one.

Those who survived … er, enjoyed our first tour, our second tour, and even our third tour, simply raved. And the doctors at the sanitarium assure us that they’re progressing quite nicely.

So ignore the sound of that icy wind outside, as we take a closer look at 10 more Night Gallery classics (all of which are available on DVD):

“The Man in the Bottle”: Easy Wishes, Hard Lessons

Few lessons on The Twilight Zone come through with more clarity than “be careful what you wish for.”

Want more time to read, Henry Bemis? You may want to rethink that. Hoping for a little immortality, Walter Bedeker? Check the fine print on that diabolical contract. Feeling lonely, Corry? A female robot will seem like an answer to a prayer — at first.

But sometimes TZ gave us a more literal form of wishing. In the case of “The Man in the Bottle”, we even get a genie. Too bad that didn’t mean a better result for Arthur and Edna Castle, the antique-shop owners at the center of this particular tale.

I’m not a huge fan of this episode. Oh, it’s not bad — in some ways, it’s quite good (which I’m about to get to). But it doesn’t quite stick like the more classic episodes. In a series often defined by clever twists, “The Man in the Bottle” gives us exactly what we expect.