First Frights: ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ (1977)

TV shows had scared me before. But nothing had ever given me the true sense of awe that Close Encounters did (and, largely, still does) the first time I saw it. That’s awe in the Romantic sense of the sublime, in which it borders on terror. Every time I watch the film, there’s some new trick of Spielberg’s to appreciate. I had little idea how films were made when I was a kid, and the process might as well have been magic. I know a little more now, but it’s no less magic*.

I would have been about eight. I remember my Mum yelling at me to get out of the bath because Close Encounters was about to start. I think she was as excited as me; this definitely felt like ‘event TV’. Did I know much about it other than ‘UFOs’? No. This first UK television screening was sometime between 1981 and 1983: I know that because of the house we were living in at the time. If it was 1982 then I knew of Steven Spielberg because of E.T. (and possibly Jaws). But I was crazy about Star Wars (which I didn’t see until its first British TV showing, in October ’82), and this was sci-fi too.

There are things I appreciate now that I didn’t then; but without fail what chilled the eight year-old me chills the forty-nine year-old me, too. It’s tempting to just list all the superb moments – you’ve probably seen the film; you know them yourself – so I’ll try to limit myself to those shots that evoke a sense of the awesome, and of the sublime.

The opening scene in the Mexican desert: yes, the weirdness of the decades-old planes appearing from nowhere is strange, but as ever with Spielberg it’s the little details that do a number on you. The old man, his face burned by the night-time illuminations, has his words translated into English. “He says the sun came out last night. He says it sang to him.” Brrr. Now, if he had said directly (in whichever language) “the sun came out last night. It sang to me,” the effect would not be the same. Somehow the distance between him and us – the reporting of it – is where the creepiness slips in. Chills me every time.

Similarly, the very next scene, in the Indianapolis Air Traffic Control centre, does the same thing. Slowly, Vilmos Zsigmond’s camera moves in close to where one of the controllers (named Harry in the novelization ghostwritten by Leslie Waller under Spielberg’s byline) is overseeing an encounter between two passenger jets and a third, unknown, aircraft. Ultimately the camera has closed down what we can see, and the frame is crammed with curious controllers, each of whom has twigged that something very strange is going on, and come over to listen. There’s a sense of claustrophobia. We only hear the pilots over crackly communications lines, and the only visual representation we have is the wonderfully lo-fi (but presumably state of the art for the mid-70s) green readout screen with its little icons denoting the planes. It’s far more unsettling than seeing anything – or even hearing the pilots clearly – would have been. Spielberg knew from experience – the shark in Jaws, the truck driver in Duel – that much less is much more.

Then we have our first visit to the Guiler household, where four-year-old Barry’s toys begin operating of their own accord. There’s no fear for this little boy – one of the few children in a Hollywood film who’s actually a lovely kid – whoever the visitors are, they mean no harm. As he leads his Mum, Jillian, on a chase up to a hillside bend in the road, the cicadas fall silent. An old man whistles “She’ll be coming round the mountain” and amid the intense eerieness there is a palpable sense of something about to happen. And moments later it does.

After that first encounter and the ensuing chase – Richard Dreyfuss’s Roy Neary and the hapless cops pursue the UFOs – the trio of alien craft (followed by the “red whoosh!”) ascend and separate, vanishing into the clouds. There’s something about that shot I love, too. I think it’s the sense of vastness of the night sky, which earlier shots evoke, too, such as when Roy tears across the darkened Indiana highways just before this, and we see above him a night sky that’s pitch black and studded with stars. Except not all of them are stars; one of them is moving.

Our second visit to the Guiler household is still, for me – a horror film fan of many years standing – one of the scariest scenes in cinema. The landscape is eerie to begin with: even before the clouds begin blossoming from nowhere, the house is alone in the (matte-painted) flat, bare countryside and distant trees exist in a spooky grey haze (again, that lack of clarity). Then the lights emerge from the heavens and everything goes to shit. The screws unscrewing are terrifying (another perfect Spielberg detail); the noise and lights create a sense of chaos. The vacuum cleaner coming on, soundtracked by John Williams’s atonal tuba, is one of those rare I’m-laughing-but-I’m-also-shit-scared moments. But even before Barry is sucked out the dog-flap by their alien visitors, the sense that normality is utterly gone is, again, captured by a tiny detail. Yes, everything in the house has gone insane but for me the crowning moment is the telephone receiver spinning helplessly on the wall. That’s the crucial point, beyond which – for Jillian Guiler – there’s no hope.

The climax at Devil’s Tower has wonderful moments, and there was no way on earth (or off it) Spielberg couldn’t have given us the Mothership with all the bells & whistles, but (certainly in the Special Edition) there’s almost too much. For the first-time viewer, that’s perfect: we crave the revelation, and revel in the hugeness of it all. As an adult, though, I find the early scenes are the most satisfying, perversely because they only tease, and don’t yet deliver on their promise.

*Bob Balaban’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind Diary gives a wry account of the making of this particular film.