12 Things You Probably Never Knew About E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
8. The Story Was Born Out Of An Abandoned Close Encounters Follow-Up
According to Spielberg, E.T. was actually born from a character
that he created as part of an entirely different, much darker project. After Columbia asked for a sequel to Close Encounters of
the Third Kind that Spielberg had no interest in making, he was worried that if he didn't play ball the studio would go ahead and make a sub-standard second film without him, so he offered an alternative.
Instead of a direct sequel, Spielberg created a treatment for a horror inspired follow-up in which eleven malicious alien scientists attempt to discover which of Earth's animal species are sentient, picking a family farm as the perfect place to carry out their experiments. The story was inspired by the Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter, in which a Kentucky family claimed to have been terrorised by gremlin-like extra-terrestrials.
Spielberg scrapped the project whilst on location in Tunisia filming Raiders of the Lost Ark after deciding that he had “taken leave of his senses” and needed to get “back to the tranquillity, or at least the spirituality, of Close Encounters”. In the end, half of the story was reworked into Poltergeist and the only alien invader in Night Skies that wasn't an evil little sh*t became the basis of E.T.