17 children vanish into the night — ‘Weapons’ is terrific and terrifying

In the prologue of the 1983 film adaptation of The Twilight Zone , two men, played by Albert Brooks and Dan Aykroyd, are driving along a highway at night. They talk about The Twilight Zone and which episodes they think are scariest. Then, Aykroyd playfully asks Brooks, “Do you want to see something really scary?” “You bet,” Brooks says, and Aykroyd says he has to pull over — it will just take a minute. They pull over. A gleeful Aykroyd turns away and hides his face as Brooks, smiling, awaits whatever goofy gag is coming. Aykroyd turns back around as a vicious monster and eats him.

It’s not a very good movie, but this is a great dark joke, because the world in which we talk philosophically about scary things is supposed to be separate from the world in which the scariest things actua