Reopening ‘The Box’

'Donnie Darko' director Richard Kelly's third (and, to date, last) film expanded a short story into a mystery on a cosmic scale. Resoundingly rejected at the time, it deserves a second look.

On March 7th, 1986, CBS aired the 13th episode of The Twilight Zone, an installment of the classic, Rod Serling-created series’ mid-’80s revival. It’s safe to say that, somewhere in Virginia, future Donnie Darko and Southland Tales director Richard Kelly was watching. The series had debuted with much fanfare the previous fall but had since struggled in the ratings. Though never the cultural force of the original, the revived Twilight Zone remained appointment viewing for those of a certain age and sensibility, impressionable viewers who’d be haunted by, say, the story of a woman who learned how to pause time who ended up trapped in the moment before a nuclear apocalypse or a mathematician who finds a loophole while matching wits with a demon. Or maybe they got stuck on the story of a mysterious man who visited couples after giving them an odd device and an offer that doubled as a moral dilemma. Maybe, years later, they then felt compelled to make a movie that restaged the relatively simple story on a cosmic scale.

“Button, Button” the second of two stories featured in the hour-long episode, adapts a Richard Matheson story first published in Playboy in 1970. In both the story and its adaptation, Norma and Arthur, a married couple, receive a box and a promise that someone named Mr. Steward would be visiting later to explain its contents: a simple device with a push button on top. When he arrives, Steward explains that if they pushed the button, they’d receive an impressive amount of money ($50,000 in the story, $200,ooo in the Twilight Zone version) but, as a consequence, someone they did not know would die. They debate the ethics of the situation before Norma ultimately decides, over Arthur’s objections, to push the button.

It’s here that the two versions diverge. In Matheson’s original story, Arthur dies leaving behind a $50,000 insurance settlement. “My dear lady,” Mr. Steward offers by way of explanation, “Do you really think you knew your husband?” In the Twilight Zone episode, Steward tells the couple “the button unit will be reprogrammed and offered to someone else. […] Someone whom you don’t know.”

It’s worth noting a couple of things at this point: Despite being directed by Peter Medak and starring Brad Davis and Mare Winningham as Arthur and Norma and veteran character actor Basil Hoffman as Steward, “Button, Button” isn’t a particularly strong Twilight Zone outing. (Medak seemingly told everyone but Hoffman to lay it on with the thickness of concrete.) It’s also the sole revival episode scripted by Matheson, who wrote some of the most memorable Twilight Zone episodes. But he chose to be billed under his occasional pen name “Logan Swanson,” unhappy with changes made to the script, including the ending.

Kelly was not allowed to mention The Twilight Zone while promoting The Box for Warner Bros. when the film was released in the fall of 2009. Yet it’s this version that The Box adapts and its notion of a moral dilemma spreading through the populace at the hands of some mysterious organization that propels the film. When the Norma and Arthur of The Box part ways with Mr. Steward after Norma presses the button and receives a suitcase full of money (a million dollars this time), Mr. Steward leaves with the same promise. Whichever version of the story you prefer, it seems like it has nowhere to go after Steward’s final, stinging words end it with a grim twist. But, counting its closing credits, The Box has 77 minutes left, having made its big reveal after a mere 37 minutes.