PARASITIC HORROR

It's difficult to view old scifi movies nowadays without comparing their
production design to what's available now. If you aren't in
at least the 50-something age range, you probably never had
a chance to see The Outer Limits in it's native context, and the
makeup and props and models can seem fatally cheesey.
But if you were lucky enough to grow up with The Outer Limits,
there were episodes that pushed you into mental and emotional
regions, both fascinating and horrifying,that you never visited
before in your young life!
For me, "Invisibles" was just such an episode. I wouldn't again
feel that level of horror at the hands of a scifi tale until "Alien" came
along 20+ years later. (In fact, I'll bet "Invisibles" set the stage
for my reaction to "Alien")Maybe it's the idea of a parasite that you can't
just pick off of you with tweezers that gets to me.
As others on this page have said, the performances are convincing, casting
was excellent, and Stephano's prose sets the usual vague, dreamy backdrop.
The unlucky "posessed" ones walking around like torture-survivors with attached-parasite
hunchbacks under their shirts was mighty powerful TV, and the scene where agent
Spain is being sworn into the cult, while an unsuccessful conscript with his new
hunchback watches from the sidelines with darkened, baggy eyes and whispers the words
"I just wanted to see if they gave you uniforms . . ."
took me to the outer limits of what I could process. Apparently, these things didn't
turn you into a blank-stare aneasthetized zombie. You were still you, free to live
the horror of each moment of this godawful thing attached to you,
until your new master had something for you to do. Gut-wrenching.
After watching this episode, I felt as if it had planted parasitic thoughts in my mind-
scenes and feelings and considerations that I couldn't shut off
or get over for days. It wasn't the sight of it, it was the thought of it.

And therein lies the greatness of The Outer Limits television series.
I don't remember OL for it's special effects. Whatever they lacked,
my practiced sci-fi watching brain would provide. What I do remember
is the great writing and the human drama.
"Invisibles" has both - and beware!

Excellent purple prose meets the unbelievably creepy

Joseph Stefano's prose can either fall flat or wonderfully enhance the action on the screen. It's definitely the latter here, whether delivered by George MacReady in his breathless anticipation of power or by Neil Hamilton in what turns out to be a grotesque soliloquy that's somewhere between Mein Kampf and a prolonged mental orgasm. And matching the mental horror generated by the speeches of the alien-possessed is the physical horror of the actual attachment of the symbiots and the contortions created by failed attachments. Effective editing, great use of sound and lighting, and Don Gordon's stoic performance all help the episode.