Within Spielberg
Why Children See Spielberg's Aliens Clearly
Spielberg often makes alien contact more moving by showing it through children rather than institutions.
On this page
- Fear and wonder from below
- Adults as systems of control
- Childhood empathy as moral test
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Introduction
Steven Spielberg’s alien films often make first contact feel most truthful when it is seen from a child’s height. Institutions ask whether the alien is a threat, a specimen or a secret; children ask whether it is frightened, lonely or trying to speak. That shift is central to the emotional force of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and, in a darker register, War of the Worlds. Spielberg does not simply add children for sentiment. He uses them as a test of perception: the child’s gaze can register fear and wonder before adult systems turn the encounter into procedure, control or panic.
This matters within Spielberg’s UFO imagination because his aliens are rarely just “things in the sky”. They expose what humans bring to the encounter. In E.T., Elliott’s openness turns the alien from an object of pursuit into a friend; in Close Encounters, Barry’s delighted response to uncanny forces makes the UFO visitation feel both terrifying and inviting; in War of the Worlds, Rachel’s terror strips away spectacle and leaves survival, parenthood and vulnerability at ground level. [BFI Southbank]whatson.bfi.org.ukBFI Southbank Buy cinema tickets for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial | BFI SouthbankBFI Southbank Buy cinema tickets for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial | BFI Southbank [AFI Catalog]catalog.afi.com67160 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KINDAFI CatalogClose Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) - AFI CatalogAn item in the 5 Feb 1976 HR reported that Watch the Skies was the new…
Fear and Wonder from Below
Spielberg’s most famous child-centred alien film, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, works because its science-fiction premise is filtered through the emotional logic of childhood. The alien is not introduced as a geopolitical event. He is found in a shed, hidden in a bedroom, dressed among toys, taught words, protected from grown-ups and loved before he is understood. The British Film Institute’s synopsis catches the essential structure: a stranded alien finds shelter with ten-year-old Elliott, who shows him the world and tries to protect him from adults, while the two develop a sensory bond and a friendship built around getting E.T. home. [BFI Southbank]whatson.bfi.org.ukBFI Southbank Buy cinema tickets for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial | BFI SouthbankBFI Southbank Buy cinema tickets for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial | BFI Southbank
That framing changes the viewer’s questions. A more conventional UFO film might ask where the visitor came from, what its biology is, or what government agencies will do. E.T. asks whether a child can recognise another vulnerable being before adults can classify it. The famous phrase “E.T. phone home” became one of American cinema’s best-known lines, but its power comes from the fact that the sentence is learned in a child’s space: the alien’s wish is not conquest, but reunion. AFI records the line among its major American movie quotations, an indication of how strongly the film’s childlike language entered popular memory. [American Film Institute]afi.comAmerican Film Institute AFI's 100 Years…100 Movie Quoteschild go. After her talk with Rhett, Melanie, who has become pregnant despite… "E.T. phone home." E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)…
The child’s view also allows Spielberg to combine terror and tenderness without resolving the alien too quickly. E.T. is strange, wrinkled, slow-moving and physically vulnerable. Elliott is frightened at first, but his fear does not harden into hostility. The friendship develops through small acts of experimentation: food, hiding, imitation, play, language and touch. This is not childish because it is simple; it is childlike because it treats contact as relational before it is analytical.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind uses the child perspective differently. Barry Guiler is not the protagonist, but his scenes give the film some of its clearest signals about how Spielberg wants the audience to feel. The UFO presence animates toys, opens domestic spaces and draws Barry towards the unknown. AFI’s plot summary notes that three-year-old Barry wakes to find his toys operating on their own and later becomes the child at the centre of Jillian’s terrifying abduction sequence. [AFI Catalog]catalog.afi.com67160 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KINDAFI CatalogClose Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) - AFI CatalogAn item in the 5 Feb 1976 HR reported that Watch the Skies was the new…
Barry’s smallness matters. The encounter is frightening because the door, the light and the unseen visitors are enormous compared with him. Yet his response is not only panic. Spielberg’s visual grammar makes the unknown look like danger and invitation at once. The child does not “solve” the UFO; he feels its pull before the adults can explain it. In that sense, Barry becomes a tuning fork for the film’s larger mood: awe that has not yet been bureaucratised.
Adults as Systems of Control
Spielberg’s child perspective becomes sharper because adults often enter these films as systems before they enter as people. In E.T., Elliott’s mother Mary is loving but overburdened and unaware; the more threatening adults are the faceless agents, scientists and authorities who close in on the house. A scholarly reading by Ilsa J. Bick, published in Cinema Journal, argues that from the child’s perspective adult males appear as faceless torsos or alien-like figures, a point that captures how strongly the film’s early visual field belongs to children rather than institutions. [JSTOR]jstor.orgThe Look Back in ETBickJune 13, 1992 — by IJ Bick · 1992 · Cited by 15 — Seen from a child's perspective, all of the adult males are either faceless torsos…
This is not merely a camera trick. It is a moral arrangement. The adults have equipment, vehicles, containment procedures and medical authority, but they are late to the truth of the situation. Elliott and his siblings are not scientifically competent, yet they understand the most important fact: E.T. is a person-like being in need of help. AFI’s own Movie Club discussion prompts this contrast directly, asking why the children react differently to E.T. than the adults and why their approach to the alien visitor is so different. [American Film Institute]afi.comAmerican Film Institute AFI's 100 Years…100 Movie Quoteschild go. After her talk with Rhett, Melanie, who has become pregnant despite… "E.T. phone home." E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)…
The production method supported that emotional priority. In a 1983 American Cinematographer interview, Spielberg said he avoided storyboards for most of E.T. because they might “smother the spontaneous reaction” of young children; he wanted to come to the set and respond more instinctively. He made an exception for special-effects work, where technical planning was unavoidable, but the key point is revealing: the film’s child perspective was not just written into the story, it shaped the way performances were captured. [The American Society of Cinematographers]theasc.comSource details in endnotes.
The same interview explains why Spielberg’s fantasy feels domestic rather than decorative. He said he did not want a fairy-tale “Never-Neverland” atmosphere; he wanted viewers to believe E.T. could walk into their own backyards and homes. That decision is crucial to the child’s-eye mechanism. The alien is wondrous not because the world has become unreal, but because the ordinary suburban world is suddenly large enough to contain him. [The American Society of Cinematographers]theasc.comSource details in endnotes.
In Close Encounters, adults are not simply villains. Scientists, interpreters and UFO investigators are necessary to the final act of communication. AFI notes that Spielberg’s title drew on astronomer J. Allen Hynek’s hierarchy of alien encounters, and that Hynek’s book rights were purchased while Hynek served as technical adviser on the film. [AFI Catalog]catalog.afi.com67160 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KINDAFI CatalogClose Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) - AFI CatalogAn item in the 5 Feb 1976 HR reported that Watch the Skies was the new… Yet the film still contrasts institutional management with childlike receptivity. The authorities can build a landing site, manage secrecy and decode signals, but they cannot generate wonder by procedure. Barry’s scenes remind the viewer what the bureaucratic machinery risks losing.
Childhood Empathy as Moral Test
The most important function of children in Spielberg’s alien films is not innocence in a vague sense. It is empathy under pressure. The child sees the alien clearly because the child has less invested in categories of control: citizen and foreigner, human and non-human, specimen and threat. Spielberg’s films repeatedly ask whether adults can recover enough of that openness to respond humanely.
E.T. is the clearest version of this test. Elliott is lonely, bruised by family fracture and hungry for connection. AFI’s production history notes that earlier versions of the project were associated with titles such as Growing Up, A Boy’s Life and E.T. and Me, and that Columbia regarded the project as a “kid’s picture” before it moved to Universal. [AFI Catalog]catalog.afi.com67160 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KINDAFI CatalogClose Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) - AFI CatalogAn item in the 5 Feb 1976 HR reported that Watch the Skies was the new… Those working titles matter because they show how deeply the alien story was tied to childhood before it became a global science-fiction landmark.
The children’s secrecy in E.T. is sometimes comic, but it also has ethical weight. They hide E.T. because disclosure would turn him into property of the adult world. Their house becomes a fragile sanctuary, and the bedroom becomes an alternative first-contact site: not a laboratory, not a military base, not a press conference, but a child’s room. Spielberg’s UFO imagination is at its most moving when the fate of the alien depends on whether a child’s private loyalty can survive public intrusion.
In War of the Worlds, Spielberg darkens the same moral structure. Rachel is not a bridge to a friendly visitor; she is a child trying to survive an invasion she cannot interpret. The film’s emotional centre is not curiosity but terror, and that difference reflects Spielberg’s changed mode. Hannah Hamad’s study of the film argues that War of the Worlds is framed as a domestic crisis in which Ray Ferrier begins as a failing father and undergoes a form of paternal rehabilitation through the catastrophe. [ORCA]orca.cardiff.ac.ukWar of the Worlds HHExtreme Parenting: Recuperating Fatherhood in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005)…
Rachel’s child perspective matters because it prevents the invasion from becoming a clean spectacle. She asks practical, frightened questions. She sees adults fail. She experiences the alien attack through noise, crowds, panic, hiding and the collapse of parental certainty. Spielberg praised Dakota Fanning’s performance by saying she quickly understood how she would react in a real situation and “tells you the truth” when the camera rolls; he also said he did not talk to child actors as though they were lesser participants in the work. [CHUD]chud.comINTERVIEW: TOM CRUISE AND STEVEN SPIELBERG (WAR OF THE WORLDS) | CHUD.comINTERVIEW: TOM CRUISE AND STEVEN SPIELBERG (WAR OF THE WORLDS) | CHUD.com
That comment helps explain the continuity between E.T. and War of the Worlds. The films have opposite alien ethics — one visitor is vulnerable, the others are annihilating — but both depend on taking a child’s response seriously. Elliott’s empathy reveals E.T.’s personhood. Rachel’s fear reveals Ray’s inadequacy and forces his transformation. In both cases, the child is not decoration around the alien plot; the child is the measure of whether the adult world is behaving well.
The Child View Changes Spielberg’s UFO Myth
Spielberg’s wider UFO storytelling is often associated with light, music, skyward gazes and the possibility of contact. The child perspective gives those images their emotional grounding. Without children, Spielberg’s aliens might remain majestic, frightening or technically impressive. With children, the encounter becomes intimate. It asks what the unknown does to a bedroom, a kitchen, a family car, a sibling bond, a frightened parent or a child’s trust.
This is why the child view should not be reduced to sentimentality. It performs several precise jobs:
- It lowers the scale. A UFO event becomes legible through toys, bicycles, torches, cupboards, doors and frightened breathing.
- It exposes adult overreach. Institutions may be necessary, but they often arrive with containment before compassion.
- It makes wonder vulnerable. The alien is moving because it can be hurt, misunderstood, captured or lost.
- It tests family bonds. Contact reveals whether parents protect, listen, dismiss or fail their children.
- It keeps ambiguity alive. A child can be terrified and entranced at the same time, which is exactly the emotional range Spielberg wants from alien contact.
The pattern is especially distinctive because Spielberg does not treat children as automatically correct about everything. Elliott is secretive and impulsive. Barry is drawn towards danger. Rachel’s fear can be overwhelming. But their perceptions are morally clarifying. They notice the emotional truth of the encounter before adults have finished naming it.
In Close Encounters, that truth is wonder before explanation. In E.T., it is friendship before classification. In War of the Worlds, it is vulnerability before strategy. Across those films, Spielberg’s child perspective turns UFO cinema away from pure hardware and towards human response. His aliens are memorable not only because they descend from the sky, but because children are there to show what their arrival feels like from the ground.
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Further Reading
Books and field guides related to Why Children See Spielberg's Aliens Clearly. Use these as the next step if you want deeper reading beyond the article.
E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial
First published 1982. Subjects: Fiction, Human-alien encounters, Juvenile fiction, Life on other planets, Fiction, media tie-in.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Covers Barry and other child perspectives that shape the film's sense of wonder.
The child that books built
First published 2002. Subjects: Psychological aspects of Young adult literature, Psychological aspects of Fiction, Psychological aspects...
Steven Spielberg
First published 2008. Subjects: Motion picture producers and directors, Motion pictures, production and direction, Motion pictures, biogr...
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Endnotes
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AFI CatalogClose Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) - AFI CatalogAn item in the 5 Feb 1976 HR reported that Watch the Skies was the new...
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Title: War of the Worlds HH
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Extreme Parenting: Recuperating Fatherhood in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005)...
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Title: American Film Institute AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movie Quotes
Link: https://www.afi.com/afis-100-years-100-movie-quotes/Source snippet
child go. After her talk with Rhett, Melanie, who has become pregnant despite... "E.T. phone home." E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)...
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Title: The Look Back in ET
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BickJune 13, 1992 — by IJ Bick · 1992 · Cited by 15 — Seen from a child's perspective, all of the adult males are either faceless torsos...
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