The Hunt for Disney+: Steven Spielberg’s unfilmed horror film is (quietly) resurrected after more than 40 years

Disney+’s new sci-fi horror film, The Hunt, appears to be taken from an unreleased Steven Spielberg film from four decades ago. The feature film was written and directed by Brian Duffield, screenwriter of The Babysitter. Hunted combines an alien abduction story with a home invasion plot. A young woman living alone in her childhood home is attacked by aliens. The excellent Caitlin Dever plays Brian, the film’s agoraphobic protagonist. And if some elements of this story sound familiar to you, there may be a good reason for that.

The basic script of Trachée can be recalled in certain aspects of the script of Critters and Les Zintrus. However, Brian Duffield’s film takes a more dramatic approach with an atmosphere that echoes M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs. But it’s not from these films that Hunted borrows its central concept. The film’s biggest inspiration is an unrealized Steven Spielberg project that shaped pop culture for decades, even though the film was never made.

Hunted recreates Spielberg’s night sky

The Hunt seems to take up the original premise of Night Sky, Spielberg’s famously unfilmable horror film, which featured the heroine on an isolated rural farm under siege by aliens. Night Skies would be the first collaboration between Texas Chainsaw Massacre director Tobe Hooper and Spielberg, but the two ended up working on Poltergeist in 1982 when Spielberg lost interest in Night Skies.

Below is an overview of UFOs imagined for the night sky:

“This is an eerie first design for Steven Spielberg’s Alien ET, as the director developed a dark version of the film called Night Skies..”

Steven Spielberg then split the Night Sky idea into two films: one about a child who befriends an alien and another about a family plagued by unexplained paranormal activity in their new home.

and extraterrestrial and Poltergeist Both were huge hits upon release, meaning that the legacy of Spielberg’s unfilmed Night Sky was significant, even though the film itself never went into production. Hunted borrowed heavily from Spielberg with its 60s-looking aliens and flying saucers. But Hunted isn’t content with simply copying and pasting the story of The Night Sky and offers a modernized version.

The heroine of the hunt is a lonely and homely woman, while Spielberg’s film shows the whole family against the invaders. There are two possible reasons for this change. On the one hand, the premise of the latter was already well established in Signess, and on the other hand, this heroine taking on the ‘final girl’ trope gives the film a more edgy aspect.

A huge success in any case, and an unrecognized form of payback for Spielberg’s unfinished project.