The machines are the titular main antagonists of "A Thing About Machines", the fourth episode of the second season of The Twilight Zone, the episode airing in 1960. They are a collection of seemingly living appliances in the home of Bartlett Finchley, who terrorized him for some time, but only moved when no one other than Finchley was around.
The machines had no actors, but a young woman displayed by the TV was portrayed by Margarita Cordova.
History[]
Throughout his life, Bartlett Finchley, an ill-tempered magazine critic and misanthrope, never got ahold of utilizing modern machinery, and believed that each minor inconvenience they caused was proof of some sort of conspiracy the machines were plotting against him. In the early 1960s, it appears that the machines did start coming to life, and began to purposefully annoy and harass Finchley. For instance, the TV and radio would inexplicably turn themselves on late at night, making Finchley break them in anger, even kicking clean through the screen of his TV, forcing him to call in expensive repairs. However, one day, as Finchley was returning home at night, carefully turning into the garage, the car's wheel abruptly turned and made the car hit the side of a wall, breaking one of its headlights and warranting another costly repair.
The next day, a repairman fixed Finchley's TV, insisting that Finchley treat his appliances better, but just after the man left, a clock in Finchley's house suddenly began to ring, not stopping even when Finchley angrily smashed it against the ground. Finchley managed to get the clock to stop by completely destroying its pieces, but later that day, his secretary quit, fed up with Finchley's paranoid and increasingly rude behavior. However, just after the secretary walked out, the typewriter she was using began typing on its own, repeating 'GET OUT OF HERE FINCHLEY'. Then, the TV turned itself on, showing a program of a dancing woman, manipulating the footage to make the woman repeat the message. Finchley ran upstairs as the typewriter kept typing the same message, screaming that he would not let machines intimidate him.
At night, Finchley attempted to call some old female friends of his to go out to dinner with, but was turned down by each for different reasons, making him get upset at the telephone, accusing it of trying to humiliate him. He then ripped the telephone's wire from the wall and threw it to the floor, going to the bathroom to shave. He got weary of his electric razor when he turned it on, slowly bringing it up to his face, only for the razor to suddenly leap out of his hand, hover in the air, and start moving towards him. Frightened, Finchley ran out of the bathroom, where the broken telephone suddenly began repeating the typewriter's message. The phone then went silent as Finchley heard police sirens outside.
As it turns out, Finchley's car, perhaps on its own, somehow had its emergency brake disengaged and rolled down the street, nearly hitting a child, possibly as an attempt to further frighten Finchley. Finchley, however, rudely dismissed the crowd as he got his keys and returned his car to his driveway. Finchley then began drinking until he passed out, only to be awoken sometime later by the sound of his clock ringing, despite the fact that it was destroyed and disposed of, with no replacement left. As Finchley tried to investigate the empty mantlepiece for the source of the noise, the typewriter began typing its message again, the TV also turning on and demanding that Finchley get out, using distorted images and several different voices. Angered, Finchley smashed the TV with a chair, seemingly making all the appliances deactivate. However, when he tried to run upstairs, he saw his electric razor slithering down the stairs towards him, active and with its blades running, all the appliances reactivating to repeat their messages until Finchley ran outside, finding his car waiting outside his house.
The car then turned itself on and drove away, Finchley following it at first, until the car suddenly turned on him and began chasing him across his property, Finchley briefly escaping it by making it crash through a fence and into several crates, but it quickly drove after him again, where Finchley narrowly hid behind a bush, the car seemingly passing him by. However, when Finchley tried to escape down the road, the car turned around and chased him again, forcing Finchley to a nearby pool, slowly advancing on him until it forced him into the water, where he sank to the bottom and drowned. By morning, Finchley's body was retrieved, the now-inanimate car still by the pool. While there were no witnesses, with neighbors claiming to have heard Finchley alone running around and shouting, the police had no explanations to how Finchley's body sank without being weighted, noting that he died with his eyes wide open and an expression of fear on his face. However, they theorized that he had a heart attack after getting drunk, leaving it ultimately ambiguous if the machines were truly animate or just the result of delusions, although the car's presence at the scene may imply the former is true.
