If These Walls Could Talk (The Outer Limits)

"If These Walls Could Talk" is an episode of The Outer Limits television show. It first aired on 30 July 1995, during the first season.

Introduction

A woman asks physicist Dr. Leviticus Mitchell to investigate a "haunted house" where her son and his girlfriend were last seen.

Opening narration

Plot

A young couple spend the night in an old house, and both disappear. The mother of the boy who disappeared, Lynda Tillman, goes to see Dr. Leviticus Mitchell, a physicist, skeptic and debunker of the supernatural. She offers him $5000 to investigate her son, Derek's, disappearance. She claims to have been to the house and heard him crying for help.

Mitchell and Lynda go to the house. She again claims to hear the sound, but Mitchell identifies it as a rattling heating system and fixes the problem. Just as he is about to leave he hears an unambiguous voice crying for help.

Mitchell, his recording equipment and Lynda stay in the house overnight drinking alcohol. Mitchell explains how he got started as a skeptic: he caught a medium faking the voice of his dead wife during a séance. Later, Lynda again hears the voice of her son calling for help and then sees part of the wall morph into his image. Mitchell finds the wall where she saw the image and breaks it open to discover a laboratory full of dusty equipment and an unusual rock. He sends the rock to be analyzed.

They return to the house and investigate the lab further. It used to be owned by Dr. Abrams, a scientist. The house begins to shake and they again see the walls begin to change shape. Suddenly, the police break in and take Mitchell and Lynda to the police station. The police chief explains that they arrested a drunken vagrant in the house, and he was carrying Lynda's son's glasses. He also claims that her son and his girlfriend are dead and buried in the house.

Mitchell and Lynda are released from police custody. Mitchell gets a phone call from the laboratory where he sent the rock to be analyzed. It was a meteorite containing a very unusual enzyme. It appears to be able to absorb and become any object, and it is self-replicating—it may now be making up a large part of the house. Essentially, the house is now alive, and like all living creatures must feed, which it does by absorbing them. Further investigation reveals that the animated material suffers a fatal reaction to alcohol and it was the alcohol that prevented the vagrant, Mitchell and Lynda from being absorbed while spending lots of time in the house.

Meanwhile, the policemen digging in the basement of the house are grabbed and absorbed. Mitchell returns to the house with large quantities of alcohol. He injects it into the house causing it to collapse, and saving himself and Lynda from being absorbed.

Closing narration

See also

• John Carpenter's The Thing

External links

• "If These Walls Could Talk" at the Internet Movie Database
• "If These Walls Could Talk (The Outer Limits)" at Sci Fi