Mumy spoke about his time working on the episode in “The Twilight Zone Companion” by Marc Scott Zicree, where he confessed that it wasn’t until he was older that he could truly contextualize the seriousness of the scenes. “I remember my mother was really upset with the suicide scenes,” Mumy said, “thinking that it might make some type of weird impression on me to get something out of them by maybe pulling a stunt like that.”
Mumy’s character is shown running in front of a car following his grandmother’s funeral, claiming that she told him to do it. But the true horror takes place when his parents find him face down in the garden pond. “When I tried to [die by suicide] in the pond we shot a whole thing there with me floating in the water,” said Mumy. “I don’t think that was on camera, but I remember doing it. I was a real good swimmer then.”
Fortunately, Billy survives the ordeal in “The Twilight Zone” after his father pleads with the grandma ghost on the other line, but the visual of a drowned child was still jarring nonetheless. In fact, the impassioned speech Billy’s father gives over the phone was completely rewritten during filming to put Billy at the center of his father’s pleas at the request of Rod Serling. The result was a beautiful monologue performed by Phil Abbott and one of the more optimistic endings for “The Twilight Zone.”