Thanks to the wonderful digital terrestrial channel Talking Pictures TV, I’ve recently become a little fixated on the classic 1960s sci-fi anthology series The Outer Limits. When I was a kid, the 1990s remake series was something that I dimly recall watching, and I think enjoying? Certainly the legendary Control Voice introduction has stuck around in my memory, but not much beyond this. But on a lazy weekday afternoon, searching for something to watch in the background while sketching, I came across an episode from the show’s original series and I was, first and foremost, absolutely floored by the incredible lighting in the episode – so much so I dropped the pencils and watched the full hour. Objects and characters glowed like pearls, within spartan, functional sets that helped to emphasise an almost dreamlike strangeness. It turns out, these wonderful visuals were the work of Conrad Hall, ace cinematographer of Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man and more. Hall worked on 15 of the original run of 49 episodes, alongside TV veteran John M. Nickolaus Jr. and Kenneth D. Peach, Sr. (who, remarkably, started out on the legendary 1933 King Kong before working with Laurel and Hardy on a number of features), and his episodes, with all respect to those fine technicians, really do stand out.

The 2nd thing that drew me to the episode was the truly hypnotic Joanna Frank as the beautiful Regina – whom the story immediately imparts is a queen bee who has been transformed by some sort of baffling bee science to attempt to seduce a stoic scientist into coupling with her to produce a superhybrid race of Api-Humans. She is, quite simply, one of the most striking actresses I’ve ever seen on TV or film. Her scant list of other appearances only served to highten the mystery of her strange, mannered performance, peering up past a sweep of dark hair that hides half of her face, studying the kindly couple that take her in as a live-in assistant in the lab of Ben, the avuncular husband who is hard at work building a machine that can talk to bees. His wife, Francesca, quickly cottons onto the weirdness, but is perhaps too late in identifying the danger of her young would-be usurper.

I’ve quickly become extremely fond of the series – I adore the sturdy writing that quaintly seeks to stick the landing of its coherent, if sometimes familiar, premises, each episode methodically doling out pertinent information in a recognisable act-structure. So here I present what I hope is an era-appropriate poster homage to this odd little tale. Using some extremely poor resolution screenshots from the show, and a stock photo of a bee’s head, I had to go a little heavy on the texture-making to disguise the pixellation and flaws, but I hope in a way that looks authentic. It’s a little intentionally schlockier than perhaps a genuine ad would have been at the time, but I liked the idea of juxtaposing the conflicted expression of old scientist Ben as he ponders the mysterious Regina, while his wife clocks her for what she really is – a giant usurping bee. Hopefully the similar shapes of the face of Regina and the bee help sell the overall image layout – it was quite a challenge to find a macro photo of a bee that so closely matched the angle of her cheek and jaw.