Bill Mumy Led One Of The Twilight Zone's Darkest Episodes Years Before Lost In Space
This article discusses subject matter related to mental health and suicide. If you or a loved one is in crisis, please reach out to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK or the Crisis Text Line (Text TALK to 741741) to talk to someone who can help.
Now that a majority of us exclusively use phones that double as handheld computers, the horrors of having no idea who could potentially be on the other line have mostly been eliminated. Perhaps this is why films like "Mr. Harrigan's Phone" and "The Black Phone" have been so popular as of late, but these stories of phones connecting mortals to those beyond the grave are certainly nothing new. In fact, one of the earliest examples comes from a season 2 episode of "The Twilight Zone" about a five-year-old boy who is gifted a play phone by his grandmother (Lili Darvas), who soon passes away and uses the phone to contact her grandson Billy from the afterlife. Titled "Long Distance Call," the episode is one of the darkest in the entire series because Billy's grandmother doesn't just want to talk to him, she wants him to join her and spends the episode trying to convince the boy to take his own life.
Yes, "Long Distance Call" is an episode about a ghost encouraging child suicide.
The subject matter is incredibly bleak, even by "The Twilight Zone" standards, so finding a child actor who would be able to handle the material was no easy task. Fortunately, the actor they found was Bill Mumy in one of his earliest roles, a child actor who would make a career for himself in genre series like "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" and most famously, "Lost In Space" as Will Robinson. Understandably, his mother had some serious concerns.
Bill Mumy's mother was worried about the episode's themes
Mumy spoke about his time working on the episode in "The Twilight Zone Companion" by Marc Scott Zicree, where he confessed that it wasn't until he was older that he could truly contextualize the seriousness of the scenes. "I remember my mother was really upset with the suicide scenes," Mumy said, "thinking that it might make some type of weird impression on me to get something out of them by maybe pulling a stunt like that."
Mumy's character is shown running in front of a car following his grandmother's funeral, claiming that she told him to do it. But the true horror takes place when his parents find him face down in the garden pond. "When I tried to [die by suicide] in the pond we shot a whole thing there with me floating in the water," said Mumy. "I don't think that was on camera, but I remember doing it. I was a real good swimmer then."
Fortunately, Billy survives the ordeal in "The Twilight Zone" after his father pleads with the grandma ghost on the other line, but the visual of a drowned child was still jarring nonetheless. In fact, the impassioned speech Billy's father gives over the phone was completely rewritten during filming to put Billy at the center of his father's pleas at the request of Rod Serling. The result was a beautiful monologue performed by Phil Abbott and one of the more optimistic endings for "The Twilight Zone."