Archible Ernest "Buck" Houghton was an American television producer and writer best known for producing the first three seasons of The Twilight Zone, as well as many other television programs and independent films from the 1950s through the 1990s. He first entered the film industry as a reader and story editor for David O. Selznick in the 1930s. He moved over to Paramount, working his way up to the casting office and then to the budget department. During World War II, he helped make films for the Office of War Information. Following the war, Houghton assisted executive producers at RKO, and had a two-year stint as a story editor for MGM. He soon became involved in producing early TV dramas such as “China Smith,” “Meet McGraw,” “Yancy Derringer” and “Man with a Camera.”

The Twilight Zone is an American fantasy science fiction horror anthology television series created and presented by Rod Serling, which ran for five seasons on CBS from October 2, 1959, to June 19, 1964. Each episode presents a standalone story in which characters find themselves dealing with often disturbing or unusual events, an experience described as entering "the Twilight Zone", often with a surprise ending and a moral. Although often considered predominantly science-fiction, the show's paranormal and Kafkaesque events leaned the show much closer to fantasy and horror. The phrase "twilight zone" has entered the vernacular, used to describe surreal experiences.