Night Skies script

OK now that I'm getting the hang of this blogging business, I thought I'd post something quite cool.

Night Skies is a project Steven Spielberg worked on in the late 1970s and was meant to be an unofficial sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Written by John Sayles, it was the antithesis of the feel-good CE3K formula - basically, When Aliens Go Bad.

The script tells the story of extraterrestrials terrorising the inhabitants of a small farm and would have taken Spielberg back to the scare tactics of Jaws. It never got made though, and Spielberg siphoned off elements of Night Skies in some of his future films - most blatantly in ET (the script ends with the friendliest of the aliens, Buddee, being left behind on earth) but also the suburban terror of Poltergeist and Gremlins.


According to Joseph McBride in his wonderful biography on Spielberg, the film was to have been directed by cartoonist Ron Cobb and preproduction started at Columbia in April 1980.

But in the end the film was never made and Spielberg lost interest in the evil aliens concept (one he wouldn't revisit until War of the Worlds in 2005).

In later years, Spielberg claimed he might have "taken leave of my senses" in attempting to follow-up Close Encounters of the Third Kind with such a dark film.

But read the Night Skies script for yourself and see what you think.