Apple TV+/CBSSeverance fans have discovered another big connection to The Twilight Zone: if you listen closely in one of the episodes, you can hear part of the show’s theme.
The Twilight Zone walked so Severance could run. The original series had a simple, deviously unsettling premise: each episode would tell a standalone story, often set in a world not too dissimilar to our own – but there’d be something… off.
You could argue it paved the way for Black Mirror, and Severance is one of its most esteemed descendants.
Season 2 Episode 9 is even named after one of the show’s creepiest episodes, The After Hours – and it may be the direct inspiration for the show’s eerie motif.
Severance fans find theme song in The Twilight Zone’s The After Hours
If you watch this clip from The Twilight Zone’s The After Hours (which aired in June 1960), listen to the opening notes of the score:
As Sarah Rowan has pointed out, it sounds exactly like the Severance theme; specifically the first three notes, played on a piano rather than the violin in The Twilight Zone’s score.
If you want to listen even closer, the clip’s music is part of a larger composition by Bernard Herrmann, originally created for ‘Where is Everybody?’, the first-ever episode of the series.
“The Severance title credits theme is so similar to the score at the beginning of this clip like woah,” one user reacted. “Also when she suddenly remembers, the chime/bell whatever it is goes off and sounds like the elevator at Lumon,” another viewer pointed out.
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“THE SCORE???? THEODORE SHAPIRO YOU SLY DOG,” another fan tweeted. If you’re not convinced, listen to the Severance score again:
Speaking to Slash Film, Shapiro didn’t mention being inspired by The Twilight Zone, so it could just be a coincidence.
“It actually had a serendipitous route to coming into being, which is when [Ben Stiller] and I started talking about the show, I just started writing themes,” he said, explaining how he came up with the theme.
“I knew that there was going to be some sort of an electronic component to the music. I wrote a piece that was largely electronic, and it had this middle section that he really liked. And so I made a mental note: Let’s try to expand on that idea. It was based around four chords and I thought, ‘I wonder what would happen if I took those same four chords and just tried a different palette?’
“I sat down at the piano and started playing the idea that ultimately became the theme.”
Make sure you know when the finale drops with our guide to the Severance Season 2 release schedule, and check out our guides on the Nine, the Glasgow Block, and the Lexington Letter. There’s another big theory you should read up on too: Helly might be pregnant.
