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With the long Fourth of July weekend still two months away, SYFY will help scratch that nagging Twilight Zone marathon itch with an entire day of back-to-back episodes this weekend in honor of National Twilight Zone Day.

SYFY Twilight Zone Marathon in Honor of National Twilight Zone Day

The mini-marathon kicks off Saturday, May 11 at 8:00 a.m. ET with “And When the Sky Was Opened.” Written by series creator Rod Serling and directed by Douglas Heyes, the classic Season 1 episode follows three test pilots (Rod Taylor, Charles Aidman, and Jim Hutton), who begin to mysteriously vanish from the very fabric of reality after their experimental ship crashes in the desert.

The script was adapted from the short story “Disappearing Act” from prolific sci-fi scribe Richard Matheson and plays on the universal human phobia of the unexplainable. “The worst fear of all is the fear of the unknown working on you, which you cannot share with others,” Serling once said (via Marc Scott Zicree’s Twilight Zone Companion). “To me, that’s the most nightmarish of the stimuli.”

Things will wrap up in the wee hours of Sunday, May 12 with “Sounds And Silences,” a Season 5 tale about a man obsessed with loud noises. It was also one of six episodes directed by future Superman and The Goonies filmmaker, Richard Donner.

For More on The Twilight Zone:
Why Six Episodes of The Twilight Zone Season 2 Look Very Different
How The Twilight Zone Created a Self-Driving Car in the 1960s for “You Drive”
Did You Know The Twilight Zone Had a Different Narrator Before Series Creator Rod Serling?

And, of course, super-iconic episodes like “To Serve Man,” “The After Hours,” “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” “People Are Alike All Over,” and “The Hitch-Hiker” are on the programming docket as well.

“Rod was extremely proud of The Twilight Zone,” the creator’s brother, Robert, states in Zicree’s companion book. “You can watch them now and see how professional they were, what a beautiful thing, compared to some of the other anthologies. So many of them really had a message, very subtle — it was a pill with sugar all over it — but you swallowed it and you learned something.

For more SYFY scheduling info, click here.