Welcome to The Queue — your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web. Today, we’re watching a video that explores Steven Spielberg’s Dark Skies, the Close Encounters sequel that never came to be.
It’s a rarity, but one of my favorite flavors of behind-the-scenes tidbits is the failed film that splintered into more well-known projects. Concrete proof of the liquid state of the creative process, failures are never really failures while re-working stuck ideas can pay off in spades.
One of the great examples of a fruitful disaster is Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune. In the mid-1970s, the avant-garde Chilean director was given a blank check to adapt Frank Herbert’s space epic, and the project quickly bloated and never wound up being made. The 2013 (un)making-of documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune recounts the details, but in short: Jodorowsky’s efforts led to creative partnerships that spawned Alien and Star Wars.
For another example, we can look to Steven Spielberg.
After the success of his 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Columbia Pictures, wanted a sequel. So, Spielberg developed a treatment. And the result was Night Skies, a loose adaptation of an infamous “alien encounter” at a Kentucky farmhouse. While Spielberg got to work on Raiders of the Lost Ark, John Sayles worked on the Close Encounters 2 treatment, and Rick Baker even designed the creatures.
While ultimately Night Skies never came together as a feature film, in a way, it still saw the light of day. All told, the work-in-progress wound up instigating collaborations with Tobe Hooper, Melissa Mathison, and Joe Dante. So: had there been no Nights Skies, there’d have been no Poltergeist, no E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and no Gremlins.
While audiences never got their indirect Closer Encounters follow-up, as the video essay below argues, what they wound up getting was arguably much better.
Watch “The Lost Spielberg Film“:
Who made this?
Andrew J. Wright (a.k.a. Dr. Urdu) is a Canadian video essayist devoted to horror history. The channel aims to shed light on the deeper intricacies of an often derided genre by presenting these films as more than just cheap thrill rides. You can subscribe to Dr. Urdu on YouTube here. You can follow Wright on Twitter here.
More Videos Like This
- Another sample of Dr. Urdu’s work on how Peter Jackson‘s career began with horror films
- And another, on the societal influences and cinematic origins of body horror films
- Here’s Queue favorite Ryan Hollinger on his childhood trauma with Poltergeist
- Entertain the Elk has a breakdown on how Spielberg effectively introduces memorable characters through the use of “Action & Fraction”
- Here’s Patrick (H) Willems on how the way Spielberg hides horror in set pieces may be the key to great blockbusters
- And another Queue favorite: The Nerdwriter on how Spielberg uses sound design can structure a scene
- Fandor on Spielberg’s uncanny ability to build suspense
- This next one requires a Shudder subscription: the incredible horror doc Cursed Films has an episode unpacking the “cursed” status of Poltergeist
- Here’s Every Thing a Painting with an explainer on why Spielberg is the stealth master of the long take
Related Topics: Steven Spielberg, The Queue
