Myca Dinh Le

Landis spoke about the accident in a 1996 interview: "There was absolutely no good aspect about this whole story. The tragedy, which I think about every day, had an enormous impact on my career, from which it may possibly never recover."

Landis, Folsey, Wingo, production manager Allingham, and explosives specialist Paul Stewart were tried and acquitted on charges of manslaughter in a nine-month trial in 1986 and 1987. Morrow's family settled within a year; the children's families collected millions of dollars from several civil lawsuits.

On July 23, 1982, a Bell UH-1 Iroquois helicopter crashed at Indian Dunes in Valencia, Santa Clarita, California, during the making of Twilight Zone: The Movie. The crash killed three people on the ground (actor Vic Morrow and child actors Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen) and injured the six helicopter passengers. The incident led to years of civil and criminal action and was responsible for the introduction of new procedures and safety standards in the filmmaking industry.

The Directors Guild of America's safety committee began publishing regular safety bulletins for its members and established a telephone hotline to "enable directors to get quick answers to safety questions." The guild also began to discipline its members for violations of its safety procedures on sets, which it had not done prior to the crash. The Screen Actors Guild introduced a 24-hour hotline and safety team for its members and "encouraged members to use the right of refusal guaranteed in contracts if they believe a scene is unsafe." Filming accidents fell by 69.6-percent between 1982 and 1986, although there were still six deaths on sets.

The filming location was the ranch Indian Dunes that was used through the 1980s in films and television shows, including The Color Purple, Escape From New York, MacGyver, and China Beach. The location was within the 30-mile zone, its wide-open area permitted more pyrotechnic effects, and it was possible to shoot night scenes without city lights visible in the background. Indian Dunes' 600 acres (2.4 km) also featured a wide topography of green hills, dry desert, dense woods, and jungle-like riverbeds along the Santa Clara River which made it suitable to double for locations around the world, including Afghanistan, Myanmar, Brazil, and Vietnam.

The film featured four sequences, one of which was based on the 1961 Twilight Zone episode "A Quality of Mercy", named in supplementary material as "Time Out". In the script, character Bill Connor (Morrow) is transported back in time to the midst of the Vietnam War, where he has become a Vietnamese man protecting two children from American troops.