The late 1970s and early 1980s had seen a huge upsurge in interest in horror fiction, thanks primarily to the success of Stephen King and those who soon followed, notably Dean R. Koontz, James Herbert, Robert R. McCammon, Peter Straub and Clive Barker. Quite often the basis of their horror fiction was some aspect of scientific extrapolation or alternative science (as in psi powers, the basis of King's first successful novel Carrie), and even traditional stories of werewolves and vampires might receive a scientific rationale. So while these works were marketed as horror fiction, they were often science fiction. Science fiction that was written to evoke horror came to be called, by some, ‘dark sf’ or ‘dark fantasy’. Stories of mutants, postapocalyptic horrors and alien abduction, just to cite three examples, would all be science fiction, but in the 1980s their marketing label shifted to horror fiction because it sold more books. The same happened with magazines, and a number that are generally grouped with horror fiction in fact ran quite a high proportion of science fiction.

Twilight Zone

The Twilight Zone had been one of the most popular and best-remembered TV series of the late 1950s/early 1960s dealing with science fiction and the unexplained, with Rod Serling's presentation becoming iconic. Long after the series had finished, its imagery lived on, particularly in the concept of ‘the twilight zone’ being something close to but just beyond our awareness, where the unexpected or inexplicable can happen.

In the early 1970s, with Serling's agreement, literary agent Kirby McCauley had put together a proposal for a magazine that would be a market for stories in the Weird Tales tradition which he had endeavoured to sell to various publishers. After Serling died in 1975, McCauley persevered, with a new agreement with Serling's widow, Carol. In 1980, McCauley secured a deal with Montcalm Publishing, the publisher of the men's magazine Gallery, to which McCauley had already agented several stories. The magazine became Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine (hereinafter Twilight Zone).

Eric Protter, the editorial director of Gallery, had a liking for strange tales and had compiled a couple of anthologies in that vein, most recently A Harvest of Horrors (1980).