One of Spielberg’s Darkest Movies Is Also One of His Biggest Hits. (Hint: It Involves Aliens.)

Movies

E.T. Pwned Home

With War of the Worlds , Spielberg finally made his horror take on alien encounters. It was shockingly bleak—and a smash.

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Sam Adams

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June 09, 2026 5:40 AM

Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Frank Masi/Paramount Pictures.

This article is part of Spielberg Week , Slate’s seven-day celebration of Steven Spielberg.

Steven Spielberg has never directed a horror movie, but he’s come close more times than it’s possible to count. His first major directing credit was a 1969 segment of the dark-toned TV anthology Night Gallery , in which a wealthy blind woman, played by Joan Crawford, pays a desperate gambler to give her his eyes, and it’s as if he’s been trying to make his way back to the genre ever since.* Even E.T. , the apex of Spielberg’s tendency toward childlike wonder, began life as Night Skies , a movie in which malevolent aliens terrorize a helpless family. But the idea essentially got split in two, with Spielberg laying claim to the sentimental tale of a young boy who meets a friendly extraterrestrial, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre director Tobe Hooper taking up the thread of a family attacked by mysterious forces, which became Poltergeist . As Spielberg said of the two movies, released a week apart in the summer of 1982, “ Poltergeist is what I fear and E.T. is what I love .”

The list of Spielberg’s unrealized projects is littered with horror movies that never came to fruition, or else got reassigned to other directors with Spielberg staying on as an executive producer. He flirted, sometimes for years, with the idea of adapting Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes or remaking Robert Wise’s The Haunting , and as recently as 2019 announced plans to create a horror series for the short-form service Quibi that could be viewed only after dark. (We all remember how that turned out .) “ I haven’t directed a horror film yet, and I’ve always wanted to, and someday I may ,” he recently told the movie magazine Empire. But he went on to add that watching great horror made by others dulls the impulse to do it himself. “I see Weapons , and it doesn’t make me want to make a horror film that’s as scary or scarier than Weapons ,” he said. “It satisfies me so completely, it actually arrests my desire to someday make a really, really scary movie.”

Movies from Jaws to Minority Report so effectively invoke the creeping dread in which the best horror movies are rooted that it can feel as if Spielberg has already tried his hand at the form; the melting faces of Raiders of the Lost Ark and the gory human sacrifice of Temple of Doom spawned enough childhood nightmares to make the distinction between what technically is and isn’t “horror” seem academic. But he almost inevitably pulls back from the bloody-minded ruthlessness the genre needs, the sense that anyone involved might meet a horrible end, and even the characters who survive will never feel safe again. We know that the children of Jurassic Park are in no danger of being eaten by a T. Rex, and that even if it does happen to chow down on the occasional family pet , we won’t have to be witness to the act. When Spielberg re-created scenes from The Shining in Ready Player One , he turned Stanley Kubrick’s sublime creeper into an amusement-park ride.

Spielberg has made movies about real-life horrors, from the terrorist attack at the Munich Olympics to the Holocaust, though even there he’s been accused of pulling his punches . But that only makes it more remarkable that Spielberg’s most unrelentingly downbeat movie, and the one that comes closest to fulfilling his lifelong promise to direct an honest-to-goodness horror movie, is a $130 million action movie starring Tom Cruise. War of the Worlds was positioned as a summer blockbuster in June 2005, with Cruise as Ray Ferrier, a divorced dockworker who has to protect his children, Rachel (Dakota Fanning) and Robbie (Justin Chatwin), from an alien invasion. But the movie is at times shockingly brutal, from an opening in which Ray finds himself covered in the ashes of the dead to a climax in which he discovers that the planet has become infested with an alien weed that must be watered with human blood. The screenplay, by Josh Friedman and David Koepp, draws heavily on both the imagery and the reality of the Sept. 11 attacks, and in footage from the set, Spielberg sports a baseball cap with the words Lest We Forget and 9/11 stitched on the side. But the fears the movie taps into are deeper and more primal than recent history can account for, mixing traumas personal and world-historical.

Some critics (including in Slate ) were put off by Spielberg’s attempt to inject elements of a national tragedy into a movie about deadly creatures from outer space; one industry…