Before Directing the Biggest Success of His Career, Steven Spielberg Almost Made an Alien Horror Movie 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.

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