Steven Spielberg Almost Directed an Alien Horror Movie… But Made E.T. Instead

In the late 1970s/early 1980s, Steven Spielberg was developing a movie that ultimately would never get made. And yet, from a different perspective, it actually would get made… as a bunch of other, quite famous films. We’re talking Gremlins. We’re talking Poltergeist. And we’re talking E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

“It was a dream team of people working on this thing. It was going to be a horror movie about these evil aliens, or mischievous aliens, that come to this rural farmstead and really mess with this family – they really fuck with this family,” explains movie journalist and author Max Evry, who just released a book about the film called Stranded on Earth: How Night Skies Became E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

Dream team is putting it lightly, as Night Skies had Spielberg producing, John Sayles scripting, production illustrator Ron Cobb expected to make his directorial debut, and Rick Baker designing the aliens. And of course, Kathleen Kennedy was also onboard, as she was working for Spielberg at this point in her career and would soon get her first full producer credit on E.T.

I recently spoke to Evry, who is also an occasional contributor to IGN – and who you may recall was also the author of that very popular book about David Lynch’s Dune, A Masterpiece in Disarray, from a couple of years back. We discussed how Night Skies went from alien horror movie to the family-friendly mega-hit that was E.T., how Poltergeist and Gremlins were born alongside its development, and how Stranded on Earth is, as the author puts it, “a hard R-rated book about a children’s movie.”

From Close Encounters to a ‘Famous Clusterfuck’… to E.T.

Stranded on Earth begins with a look back at Spielberg’s earliest filmmaking endeavors as a teen, including a film called Firelight which he made for $500 and which actually got a theatrical release – in the wunderkind’s hometown for one night, at least (the director’s semi-autobiographical film The Fabelmans recreates this moment from his life). The film was an early example of Spielberg’s interest in UFOs and the creatures behind them.

“We’re dealing with Spielberg, we’re dealing with aliens, so we got to go all the way back to when he was 15, 16, making his first sort of feature film,” says Evry. “It was like this two-hour epic that he made when he was a teenager, and that story is really fun. It sets up the way that Spielberg deals with aliens throughout his career, because it’s like Martin Scorsese and gangsters. Spielberg has used aliens as a vessel for whatever kind of creative mood he happens to be in. I don’t believe – and there are many people who corroborate this in the book – he has a firm belief one way or the other about alien visitations and things like that. I think it’s just a great tool that he uses to explore different subjects.”

Of course, Spielberg would have great success with 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the book recounts the filmmaker’s less than enthusiastic plans for a direct sequel to that film. That’s where Night Skies comes into the picture.

“They spent close to a million dollars developing this thing. Some people in the book described it as kind of a weird science experiment, like maybe it’ll go, maybe it won’t. But it was heavily developed, and I think would’ve been a great movie,” says Evry.

This was all going on during a very memorable time for Spielberg, because he also had the infamous misfire 1941, a World War II-era comedy starring an ensemble that included John Belushi, hit theaters in 1979. As Evry puts it, the film was “a famous clusterfuck … a nightmare production where he was essentially going crazy with this thing, and it just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. … It hurt his reputation a lot, and it sort of showed he wasn’t bulletproof.”

The fallout from 1941 would impact how Night Skies – and then as it morphed into what would become E.T. – was viewed by the studios.

“There were a lot of people who thought he might be done,” he says. “So even after this project evolved from Night Skies to E.T., it became almost like this nuclear football where Columbia had it and then they just decided they didn’t want it and they gave it to Universal. Universal was kind of like, ‘Eh. We’ll do it, but you have to raise the money through a bond company. We don’t want to directly fund it because we don’t want to be responsible if you go over budget again.’ It was this interesting period where it was like the last time people didn’t trust Steven Spielberg.”

Evolution of an Idea, From Aliens to Ghosts to Gremlins

Spielberg was never going to direct Night Skies, and in fact it was during this period that he began to produce other directors’ films, the earliest examples being Robert Zemeckis’ I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978) and Used Cars (1980). Zemeckis, with his partner Bob Gale, also worked on a script for Spielberg at one point called After School, “and that had a lot of elements that carried forward into E.T. also,” says Evry. “So it’s not just Night Skies. It was sort of [Spielberg] blending After School with Night Skies, and that’s how you get E.T.”

But before that, when Night Skies was still Night Skies, it was Ron Cobb who was going to direct the film.

“It was going to be his debut, and he developed it from the ground up,” says Evry. “There’s some false information out there that it was between Cobb and Tobe Hooper. That is not true. Basically, Tobe Hooper came in much later when Cobb was ensconced in Spain doing the production design for Conan the Barbarian, and he couldn’t come back and work on Night Skies. Rick Baker’s doing storyboards for the film without him. I think at that point, Spielberg calls up Tobe Hooper and is like, ‘Hey, I’ve got this alien project. Are you interested in directing it?’ Tobe Hooper was like, ‘Nah, but I’d like to do a movie about ghosts.’”

And of course, that project became Poltergeist. Evry explains that while many film fans think that Night Skies fed into Poltergeist, the two projects were really in parallel development.

“They were happening at the exact same time, and that’s interesting because they’re both about essentially these families with the same makeup, like mom, dad, three kids, one older, one younger, one very young,” he says. “And the focal point is on the youngest one, and you’ve got this supernatural force encroaching upon their house. In one case, it’s ghosts. In one case, it’s aliens.”

There are even some lines from the Night Skies scripts which can be found in Poltergeist – “They’re here…” for example.

In Evry’s view, Gremlins has a lot more of Night Skies in it though. While Gremlins originated as a spec script by Chris Columbus, John Sayles took over as a ghost writer after Columbus. And Sayles was also the main writer behind Night Skies.

“So that is where you start to see some crossover and some of the similar ideas,” says Evry. “I mean, even down to the fact that Night Skies was inspired by this ‘real incident’ called the Kelly-Hopkinsville Incident of 1955, which was aliens attacking a farm. It’s a famous thing in UFO-logy, and there’s a whole chapter about it in the book.” (Evry even visited Hopkinsville for his research.)

That’s where the term “little green men” comes from, and as Evry points out, at the end of Gremlins they refer to the little creatures as little green men.

“If you look at the actual eyewitness drawings of the aliens from Kelly-Hopkinsville, they look a hell of a lot like the Gremlins,” adds the author.

A Painful Memory

For Evry, the key creative force behind Night Skies that he wanted to talk to was legendary makeup effects creator Rick Baker. But for Baker, this was a project that elicited a lot of painful memories.

“In some ways, he’s the central figure and it’s the most dramatic element of the book,” says Evry. “John Sayles and Ron Cobb, they both came out of it just fine. But for Rick, it was a really tough experience, which we talk about – for whatever reason, he and Spielberg just had this tremendous falling out, very dramatic. And it was a trauma for him. And it’s like, I never wanted to portray seven-time Oscar winner Rick Baker as some kind of victim, but the thing you have to remember is at that time he was zero-Oscar winner Rick Baker. He was still kind of new to the business.”

It seems Spielberg has his own take on what went down between him and Baker on Night Skies, and it doesn’t necessarily match with how Baker remembers it.

“There’s another book about E.T. where Spielberg – I didn’t put this in my book because I thought it was embarrassing – his quote was, ‘Rick and I decided this was not the project we were going to work on,’” says Evry. “If you read [my] book, you’ll have a different feeling about that quote. But Rick, he was very honest and he was very candid, which was so great to hear him talk about it. And I talked to other people who were in his studio as well, and they corroborate everything he says.”

Baker was actually working on An American Werewolf in London at the same time that he was on Night Skies, and of course that film would go on to be an incredible breakthrough success in large part due to Baker’s effects work.

“An important thing to note is you’ve seen American Werewolf, and you know how innovative that was,” says Evry. “And I am here to tell you that his work on Night Skies was just as good, if not better. I actually discovered the original VHS Night Skies alien test that he did that he sent to Spielberg, and it’s unbelievable. If you did it today, it would still stand up. And this is far and away ahead of anything being done in makeup effects in 1980. The alien was so expressive, so versatile. It was really cool. It was really eerie.” (You can check out a glimpse of it here.)

Of course, that’s the trick with any history lesson – whose memories are correct, who has embellished a story, knowingly or not, and where does what really happened come to the forefront? Evry says that’s part of the fun of his book, as it gets into a sort of “Rashomon, where there’s a chapter on John Sayles, there’s a chapter on Ron Cobb, there’s a chapter on Rick Baker, and you start to see the story from different angles.”

Of course, one undeniable aspect to it all is that at some point, Spielberg decided to make E.T. instead.

“Spielberg has this intuitive creativity where he just said, ‘You know what? I think I can do something else with this,’” says Evry. “I’m really excited for horror fans, science fiction fans, but especially Spielberg fans to come away from this book with just a totally different perspective on what E.T. is, on what it could have been, and on what came after.”

Talk to Scott Collura @scottcollura.bsky.social, or listen to his Star Trek podcast, Transporter Room 3. Or do both!