Steven Spielberg's Favorite Sci-Fi Horror Movie Inspired One Of His Most Terrifying Projects

One can see Steven Spielberg's career take a major shift in the early 2000s. The famed director had long rotated between large-scale, crowd-pleasing films and soulful, intense prestige projects. He made both "Jurassic Park" and "Schindler's List" in the same year, for example. Not long after that, he doubled up again with "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" and "Amistad." He also started to tell more adult stories, directing the likes of "Saving Private Ryan." Spielberg then kicked off the 21st century by taking over Stanley Kubrick's abandoned project "A.I. Artificial Intelligence," and nothing was ever the same after that. The filmmaker's photographic choices changed, as did the way he paced and edited his movies. Perhaps getting into Kubrick's head forced him to evolve as a director.

And while Spielberg made other sci-fi action films after 2000 ("Minority Report" is a standout), he seemed to lose interest in mainstream adventure movies. He started making broader, more thoughtful character pieces like "Catch Me If You Can" and "The Terminal." Spielberg was also clearly marked by the events of 9/11, releasing both "Munich" and "War of the Worlds" in 2005. "War of the Worlds," both a remake of the 1953 film of the same name and a new adaptation of H.G. Wells' source novel, was not a movie about stalwart humans holding out against invading outsiders. It was a litany of unchecked destruction. The characters all seemed doomed. Earth seemed doomed. Everything was bleak and sad and washed-out. It's one of Spielberg's bleakest, bitterest films.

That was, as he once confessed, by design. In a 2005 interview with Blackfilm, Spielberg noted that he had always loved Wells' book. However, when it came to his "War of the Worlds" adaptation, he wanted to emulate the tone of Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-fi horror classic "Alien."

One can see the similarities between "War of the Worlds" and "Alien" pretty easily. Both are dark, horrific tales of survival about unprepared humans being beset by aliens that they cannot understand or control. "Alien," in contrast, is set on a spaceship and only following a handful of characters. "War of the Worlds," on the other hand, tells its story through the eyes of a pathetic divorced dad (Tom Cruise), but the destruction is on a global scale. The aliens in "War of the Worlds" seem keen on killing everyone on Earth. 

When "War of the Worlds" came out in 2005, there was a mild outcry from some of Spielberg's longtime fans that it wasn't going to be like his films "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" or "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (both from decades earlier). Spielberg, the thinking went, was the "friendly alien" filmmaker and not the "scary alien" filmmaker. But Spielberg wanted to prove that he had the chops to do both, explaining to Blackfilm: 

"There wasn't anything huge that changed in my life that made me do a scary alien movie. Maybe even the idea that everybody over here said, 'Well, he's the guy that only does scary alien movies. [...] I thought, well, why can't I try my hand at the kind of film? That Ridley Scott made when he did the first 'Alien?' Which was my favorite scary science fiction movies of all time. It was just something that I had always wanted to do." 

He was never the "friendly alien" guy, it seems. Indeed, one might recall that "E.T." was originally going to be a horror movie. Rather, Spielberg just hadn't made his "scary alien" film until 2005 came along.

As mentioned, Spielberg was always a fan of Wells' novel, which was first published in 1898. When he first began to brainstorm the project, he worked closely with Cruise, who had starred in "Minority Report" a few years earlier. It seems that Spielberg has been fantasizing about remaking "War of the Worlds" since he was a teenager. It was a college pipe dream, conceived before he even considered being a professional filmmaker. The movie just never really came together in any cogent way until 2005. 

Spielberg continued to refuse the notion that "War of the Worlds" was the antithesis of "E.T.," stating instead that it was a great story and a great film before he ever got around to it. As he put it:

"It's a great piece of 19th Century classic literature. It began an entire revolution in science-fiction and fantasy in my opinion; Jules Verne and H.G. Wells — and it was a film that was something that I really respected when it was first made by George Pal in 1953 [...] and I just thought that we could make a version a little closer and darker toward the original novel." 

Spielberg updated the time frame (his film takes place in the present, not 1898), but the tone is definitely correct. 

In a later interview on the TV series "The Movies that Made Us," Spielberg noted that he still loved "Alien" and spitballed a fun idea about how he would add to the franchise. His suggestion, though, proves that he may be a sentimentalist at heart. He felt that his potential "Alien" film would star a creature that was not a killer monster, but a fearful and misunderstood visitor. He wanted to sweeten it a little.