Steven Spielberg names his “favourite scary science fiction movie”
Although the master American filmmaker Steven Spielberg has been responsible for making some of the most charming family movies of all time, he can also be blamed for giving children worldwide nightmares for life. He’ll lull you into a false sense of security only to scare you senseless. Yes, we’re looking at you, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, with your strange decision to focus on a heart-ripping cult.
Although Spielberg toed this line quite well most of the time, carefully introducing younger audiences to scary concepts, there were certainly times he took it too far. The director even admitted that Temple of Doom was “too dark”, explaining, “I thought it out-poltered Poltergeist. There’s not an ounce of my own personal feeling in Temple of Doom. The danger in making a sequel is that you can never satisfy everyone.”
Spielberg was doing this at the very start of his career, too, from his debut Duel in 1971 to his blockbuster hit Jaws in 1975, yet he certainly stepped things up in the creepy fantasy department after the turn of the 1980s. This was likely due to the filmmaker’s adoration for Ridley Scott’s seminal sci-fi flick Alien, released in 1979, which changed the world of cinema when it came to all things cosmic and terrifying.
Certainly finding it influential during the making of his own alien flick E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in 1982, Spielberg revealed in Laurent Bouzereau’s book Spielberg: The First Ten Years, “I was really impressed with the insert work on Ridley Scott’s movie Alien, and I just said, ‘I want to be able to see E.T.’s organs. When he turns on his heart light, I want to be able to see the organs around it.’ I think it was Craig Reardon and Robert Short, who worked on E.T.’s puppetry, who said that based on the script, E.T. was a plant. I agreed. I didn’t think he was anything like a mammal, a bird, or a fish, but more like a plant or a vegetable. They came up with the idea for his organs to be plant-like, and I thought that was fantastic.”
But, Scott’s film reared its Xenomorph-shaped head again at the turn of the new millennium when Spielberg was preparing to make another cosmic sci-fi flick, 2005’s War of the Worlds. Starring Tom Cruise, the film was an adaptation of the iconic novel of the same name by H. G. Wells, telling the story of giant creatures who attempt to take over Earth through their mechanical might and firepower.
Speaking to Female in 2005 about why he took on the adaptation, he admitted: “There wasn’t anything hugely changed in my live that made me do a scary alien movie. Maybe it was just the idea that everybody over the years said, ‘Here was the guy who can’t make a scary alien movie’, that goaded me into thinking, ‘Why can’t I try my hand at the kind of film that Ridley Scott made when he made the first Alien which is one of my favourite scary science fiction movies.’”
Almost goaded into making the movie, Spielberg’s film went on to be a great success and one of the most underrated releases in his filmography, earning favourable reviews to go along with its $603million earnings.
