Behind the aliens and the invasion lies the nightmare: that’s why Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise’s War of the Worlds is a pure horror film.
When Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg decided to remake a movie after the success of Minority Report, it was already big news. When they chose to adapt The War of the Worlds, HG Wells’s cult novel that changed the face of science fiction, that was the idea of the century.
In this monumental tale, an army of alien invaders attacks humanity with massively powerful machines, and that in itself is terrifying enough. But in Spielberg’s hands, War of the Worlds grew even more radical: ultimately a major modern horror film, especially because it subverts Tom Cruise’s heroic persona.
Yes, it’s a science fiction film, an alien invasion movie, a catastrophe movie. But above all, it’s the story of a pure nightmare, where humanity is hunted, decimated, destroyed and ground to pulp, facing a threat that nothing seems able to stop. And this terror doesn’t come from nowhere, since Spielberg uses it to tell very real horrors. Explanations.
If you’re interested in Spielberg’s subject matter, there’s our video on A.I. Intelligence Artificielle :
