Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" 2005 is too epic to be scary

  Blender Dumbass
October 28, 2025

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In the recent "lie detector test" video of the legendary Fanning sisters, it was revealed that Elle Fanning was indeed jealous of her sister Dakota Fanning, when Tom Cruise gifted her a fancy mobile phone back in 2005. Why would Tom Cruise gift anything to a ( then ) 10 year old girl? Well Tom and Dakota were the two leads of the 2005 science fiction horror film by Steven Spielberg called War of the Worlds.

In my review of Destry Allyn Spielberg's 2025 horror film Please Don't Feed the Children I observed the utter inability of Steven to produce genuine terror in his horror films, while his daughter Destry appears to be able to do that. That lead me to re-watch one the scariest films by Steven Spielberg, in order to confirm or deny this accusation of mine.

Now, keep in mind. Even though the film isn't as fucked up as what Destry did, War of the Worlds is still plenty scary and rather fucking dark. It is just it seems it operates on a different type of fear. If a regular slasher is about the tension of the killer approaching and then the viscerality and the catharsis of the violence itself, Spielberg's horror films are more Lovecraftian. They are about the fear of the hidden. Of the unknown. And in some cases, like with War of the Worlds they are about the fear of realization how utterly insane the situation is.

I think if Bruce ( the mechanical shark ) had worked on the set of Jaws and Spielberg would have gotten all the gore he wanted to get, he would have had developed a different directorial persona. Based on what I read in his biography by Joseph McBride, he would have become somewhat of an Eli Roth type of character. But because Bruce didn't work, and Spielberg needed to find ways around it somehow, he developed his own way of portraying fear. One that builds the tension. One that holds the tension. But one that doesn't create much violent catharsis. So you end up being emotionally hypnotized by the movie.

I remember I experienced this hypnotic effect for the fist time when I saw the film sometime in 2011. I was 14 or so years old. My mom bought a laptop. And on that laptop I could watch things that my dad wouldn't allow me. Like scary movies. So I watched War of the Worlds because I was fascinated with the work of Steven Spielberg. This was not the first time I saw the film ( that was when I was like 7 on TV in Ukraine ), but it was the first time I could appreciate the movie from a film-making point of view. It was already a few years after I made Сильные Приколы and 2 years after I started learning Blender ( the 3D animation software ). So I knew how hard it would be to film something like this. And more importantly I knew how hard it would be to make all those visual effects.

I remember I couldn't stop watching the film even for simple things like going to the toilet. Thankfully it was a laptop and I could take it with me to the toilet. I was watching this whole thing unfold in-front of me. Those epic scenes with fuck-ton of extras. The scene where the damn tripod gets out of the ground for the first time and starts killing everyone. The scene where the ship sinks under a barrage of lasers from the damn tripods. The scenes in the basement. The crash-site of the airplane. The movie unfolded so masterfully I was in absolute awe the entire runtime.




More than that, I was in awe on all levels. The visual effects in the film must have been painful to do. Steven Spielberg shoots things that will later be CGI like the tripods and the aliens themselves through stuff. Through anti-bug-nets and through tree branches. There are so many utterly insane shots just from the compositing side of things that even today re-watching it, I was in awe. It was painful to look at when I was 14 ( when I started learning how it is done ) and it equally as painful to look at now.

The film has such a grandiose scale to everything that it is barely possible to comprehend. There are massive scenes with insane amounts of extras. For one scene Spielberg and co bought a decommissioned airliner, cut it into pieces and created a crash scene set. For a crash that happens off screen.

The off screen stuff is very important in the film. But it isn't just off screen. The film shows an overwhelming amount of epicness on screen. And then it suggests through things like the airplane crash scene and through things like the train on fire, that there is way more than what you can see that is going on in the film's world. That creates such an overwhelming sense of apocalyptic atmosphere that you are just sitting there hypnotized, unable to comprehend the severity of the situation. At one point Dakota Fanning's character herself even shares a moment of such hypnosis with the audience.




This fear that Steven Spielberg creates here is not your typical horror film scariness. It is not about some psychopath maybe stabbing the main character with a knife. It is not about the fear of seeing guts and blood. If anything War of the Worlds avoids such visceralities. There is a scene where we learn that the aliens suck the blood out of the people to grow blood-plants. It requires showing the alien probe stabbing a person to death. Steven Spielberg avoids showing the point of contact, instead using suggestive cinematic techniques to convey the information without it being mutilation-porn. It is sort of visceral to some extent. You get whats going on. Your empathy system kicks in and you don't like it. But you don't see the probe penetrate anyone. And then Spielberg does one more step. He shows how this blood is being sprayed onto everything to make those blood-plants. Our main character goes outside and he sees that everything for miles around him, all the way to the horizon is sprayed with blood. We don't see any victims. We don't see a hundred or a thousand people go through a meat grinder. But we see the outcome. And it overwhelms us. So many people must have died to spay all this land with blood.

There is a murder in this movie. Tom Cruise's character to protect his daughter needs to kill this creepy motherfucker played by Tim Robbins. In any other horror film this would have been done directly, with blood and guts. But Spielberg made Jaws and he learned that sometimes hiding things makes them more fear-inducing. The whole scene we watch Dakota Fanning's face as she is singing a lullaby while blindfolded and holding her ears shut. She doesn't want to hear or see what her dad is doing right now with that man. And we as the audience, we realize that we don't want to hear or see what he is doing to that man. This is some powerful film-making. But it is not your typical horror film stuff.

I was kind of not really noticing it at first but Destry Spielberg tried using some of that technique on Please Don't Feed the Children. Some of the kills happen off-screen. And she is weaving the story such that it slowly unfolds instead of just shocking you immediately. She is trying to do the same thing. And frankly there is a similar tone to that movie and to War of the Worlds. But she isn't disciplined enough for that yet, it seems. At one point there is a literal blood bath that one of the characters takes to escape the villain. It is visceral. Bloody visceral. Steven Spielberg in War of the Wolds doesn't do that sort of thing.

Yes we have crowds of people vaporized into clouds of smoke by lasers. We have landscapes full of blood-plants. But everything is so immensely huge that what you feel is more akin to existential crisis rather then terror. The film is too epic to be scary in the conventional sense.

Happy Hacking!!!

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  dbbs c:0


It's pretty wild that they bought an airplane, cut it into cross sections, and they didn't even use it on screen. Wild and funny.

... replies ( 1 )

  Blender Dumbass c:1



@dbbs No... the crash happens off screen. We see the aftermath. Which is what they used the airplane for.

Reply

  Blender Dumbass c:1

... c:0

  dbbs c:0


It's pretty wild that they bought an airplane, cut it into cross sections, and they didn't even use it on screen. Wild and funny.

@dbbs No... the crash happens off screen. We see the aftermath. Which is what they used the airplane for.

Reply

  Troler c:2



Horror director Steven Spielberg? No way.


Good that satan-phones didn't exist them. The amount of people who watch movies in the bathroom is unnerving.


I love allegorical story-telling. That's why I am at awe with Vydūnas "Probočių šešėliai". It is one of those unbuildable plays, akin to the German classic "Faust". Although, it is not the length, rather larger-than-live imagery.


"Fear of the unknown is the greatest fear of all." ~ Yvon Chouinard



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