Cancel your New Year’s Eve plans, because you’ve got an appointment with some evil dolls, plane-dwelling gremlins, and enlisted men who are about to discover there are far worse things than dodging enemy fire. The SyFy Channel brings back its annual New Year’s Twilight Zone marathon on December 31, 2025, giving viewers more than 48 hours of TV’s best classic horror and sci-fi anthology series. Beginning at 5am EST, SyFy will air both popular and less-known episodes, giving fans dozens of chances to catch Rod Serling‘s groundbreaking series at its very best.

The show has been revived three times as a series, in 1985, 2002 and 2019, as well as a 1983 feature film, and even a Disney theme park ride — and, as you’ll see below, the series went on to influence and even directly inspire some of the greatest works for sci-fi and horror filmmaking over the last 65-plus years.

Wednesday, Dec. 31, 2025

5am: “Come Wander with Me” – 5:00 a.m.

Kicking off the marathon is this tale of a folk singer in search of a new tune — the final episode ever produced for the original series. It also stands out as the single Twilight Zone episode to have spawned its own song — Bonnie Beecher’s “Come Wander With Me” has been used in films, commercials, and the 2024 Netflix series Baby Reindeer.

5:30 am: “The Mirror”

6 am: “Death’s Head Revisited”

6:30 am: “The Brain Center at Whipple’s”

7 am: “The Bewitchin’ Pool”

7:30 am: “A World of Difference”

8 am: “Execution”

An 1880s cowboy about to be executed is instead transported to 1960s America — and a possibly grimmer fate.

8:30 am: “Mr Bevis”

9 am: “A Passage for Trumpet”

9:30 am: “The Fever”

10 am: “King Nine Will Not Return”

10:30 am: “A Thing About Machines”

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11 am: “Back There”

This season two episode, written by Rod Serling himself, stars Russell Johnson (yes, the Professor from Gilligan’s Island!) as a time traveler whose plans to stop the assassination of Abraham Lincoln turn pear-shaped.

11:30 am: “Walking Distance”

12 pm: “In His Image”

1 pm: “The Thirty-Fathom Grave”

2 pm: “Mute”

3 pm: “Jesse-Belle”

In this episode, written by Earl Hamner Jr. (creator of The Waltons!), Anne Francis stars as a sexy mountain witch who turns into a leopard each night.

4 pm: “Death Ship”

5 pm: “Valley of the Shadow”

6 pm: “The Masks”

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6:30 pm: “A Stop at Willoughby”

7 pm: “Living Doll”

7:30 pm: “It’s a Good Life”

In one of the series’ most infamous episodes, a little boy (future Lost in Space star Bill Mumy) holds his small town hostage with his frightening psychic powers. This episode wasn’t just recreated for the 1983 film — it got a sequel during the show’s 2002 revival, and was one of many Twilight Zone episodes parodied by The Simpsons in their annual “Treehouse of Horror” Halloween specials.

8 pm: “Where is Everybody?”

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8:30 pm: “Mirror Image”

9 pm: “The After Hours”

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9:30 pm: “Nick of Time”

10 pm: “The Four of Us Are Dying”

10:30 pm: “Perchance to Dream”

In this season one episode — the first in the series to not be written by Serling — a man with a weak heart and an overactive imagination believes that if he falls asleep, he’ll die.

11 pm: “The Midnight Sun”

11:30 pm: “The Hitchhiker”

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A young woman on a cross country road trip is bedeviled by a hitchhiker who seems to want more than just a ride to the next exit. This episode, which some believe inspired the horror classic Carnival of Souls, stars Inger Stevens, a beautiful actress who had many real-life near misses with tragedy before passing away at just 35.

Thursday, Jan. 1, 2026

12 am: “Two”

12:30 am: “The Lonely”

1 am: “One for the Angels”

1:30 am: “Mr. Denton on Doomsday”

The town drunk was once the best shot in an Old West town — but he isn’t so sure that the restoration of his abilities is a gift.

2 am: “Escape Clause”

2:30 am: “The Purple Testament”

3 am: “Long Live Walter Jameson”

3:30 am: “The Howling Man”

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In post-World War I Europe, a tourist comes across an order of monks with a most unusual profession. Almost 60 years later, it inspired the 2019 horror film I Trapped the Devil.

4 am: “The Whole Truth”

4:30 am: “Twenty-Two”

5 am: “Shadow Play”

5:30 am: “The Passerby”

6 am: “I Dream of Genie”

7 am: “The New Exhibit”

Martin Balsam plays a waxworks employee who becomes a little too attached to the wax figures of famous murderers shown at his museum. When the museum goes out of business, he takes them home … but this is the Twilight Zone, so you know he’s not just gonna have a nice time setting up a diorama in his basement.

8 am: “The Bard”

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9 am: “Of Late I Think of Cliffordville”

10 am: “The Incredible World of Horace Ford”

11 am: “On Thursday We Leave for Home”

12 “He’s Alive”

A young Dennis Hopper plays a neo-Nazi punk who begins to have a lot more luck with his speeches and rallies after he begins getting nocturnal visits from the ghost of Adolf Hitler. Serling has originally hoped for this story to become a feature film script.

1 pm: “The Miniature”

2 pm: “Printer’s Devil”

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3 pm: “No Time Like the Past”

4 pm: “The Parallel”

5 pm: “I Shot an Arrow into the Air”

In this episode, a group of astronauts crash land on a distant asteroid and begin to fight, with a twist ending reminiscent of another of Serling’s famous screenplays.

5:30 pm: “The Prime Mover”

6 pm: “Long Distance Call”

6:30 pm: “Time Enough at Last”

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7 pm:  “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”

7:30 pm: “To Serve Man”

Richard Kiel, who would go on to fame as James Bond nemesis Jaws, stars as a group of aliens who arrive on earth to solve all our problems (yeah, right). This episode has been parodied all over including, once again, on The Simpsons.

8 pm: “The Invaders”

8:30 pm: “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?”

And you think you’ve had awkward dinners! A group of bus passengers stuck in a diner during a snowstorm try to figure out which one to them is an alien.

9 pm: “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”

9:30 pm: “Eye of the Beholder”

TWILIGHT ZONE, episode entitled ‘The Eye of the Beholder’, 1959-64, Season 2

10 pm: “Five Characters in Search of an Exit”

10:30 pm: “A Game of Pool”

11 pm: “A Nice Place to Visit”

11:30 pm: “The Dummy”

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Just six years before winning his Oscar for Best Actor, Cliff Robertson starred as Jerry, a ventriloquist convinced that his dummy is alive.

Friday, Jan. 2, 2026

12 am: “Passage on the Lady Anne”

1 am: “The Odyssey of Flight 33”

1:30 am: “The Silence” 

2 am: “The Mind and the Matter”

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2:30 am: “The Obsolete Man”

Burgess Meredith stars as a librarian who is put on trial in a totalitarian future where books are illegal. This is, of course, Meredith’s second literature-related role on the show; he previously played a bookworm in the apocalypse in season one’s “Time Enough at Last.”

3 am: “The Shelter”

3:30 am: “The Grave”

4 am: “Still Valley”

4:30 am: “The Jungle”

A businessman building a dam abroad finds that the resistance of the locals is not so easy to shake off.

5 am: “Once Upon a Time”

5:30 am: “A Quality of Mercy”

6 am: “Nothing in the Dark”

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In the final episode of the marathon, young Robert Redford plays an injured young policeman…or does he?