Let's begin with the pre-history: the horror film that never was, John Sayles' script for "Night Skies," Steven Spielberg's first idea for a sort of spiritual sequel to "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," intended as a fright feature based loosely on the real-life 1955 Kelly UFO encounter in rural Western Kentucky, with its infamous little green men waging war on local farmers. Except maybe in reality they were just territorial owls dodging shotgun blasts, the supposed invading spaceships nothing more or less miraculous than a meteor shower. Who's to say? One person's terror is another's farce.
The Kelly Encounter did get its movie, kind of, a few years after Sayles' "Night Skies" script was scrapped (to be reimagined as the standalone story "E.T. the Extraterrestrial," which premiered 40 years ago on June 11, 1982). The 1986 horror-comedy "Critters" borrowed some of its premise from the Kelly Encounter and became a cult classic, spawning four sequels and a TV series reboot.
