Steven Spielberg has spent decades dancing along the edges of horror without ever quite planting his flag in the genre. The funny part? The scariest thing with his fingerprints on it isn’t a movie at all. It’s a network show from 2015 that most people barely remember: The Whispers.
Spielberg and the horror line he won’t cross (well, mostly)
Yes, you can argue Jaws is horror, but it works like a pressure-cooker thriller. Same with Duel, Jurassic Park, and War of the Worlds — loaded with dread, staged like rollercoasters, not out-and-out horror. The exception, sort of, is a film he didn’t direct: Poltergeist. That 1982 fright classic was credited to Tobe Hooper, from a script Spielberg co-wrote with Michael Grais and Mark Victor. And long before that, he delivered one of the more unsettling TV movies of the era with 1972’s Something Evil, which is far creepier than its reputation suggests.
He’s never hidden his diet, either. He has cited The Shining and Psycho as touchstones, and during his heavy producing runs he shepherded all kinds of horror-adjacent projects. On the TV side, he put his weight behind shows that flirted with nightmares as much as wonder.
- Horror-adjacent films under his umbrella: Gremlins, Arachnophobia
- TV with a spooky streak: Amazing Stories, The River, Under the Dome
- The one that actually gets under your skin: ABC’s The Whispers (2015)
The Whispers: the one that slipped past you
Created by Soo Hugh (Pachinko, The Terror), The Whispers starts small and mean: a cluster of kids all whispering to the same imaginary friend they call 'Drill.' This voice in the dark coaxes them into risky, escalating stunts. As the accidents pile up, FBI agent Claire Bennigan steps in, trying to figure out why these children — from different families — are carrying out the same unnerving instructions. The deeper she digs, the stranger it gets, pulling in threads that touch her own fractured marriage and an operation that might be much bigger than a playground haunt.
The casting leans right into Spielberg’s long-running gift with young performers. Milo Ventimiglia and Lily Rabe anchor the adult side of the story, but it’s the kids who sell the chill — straight faces, small hands, terrible ideas. It’s the kind of premise that sounds simple until it isn’t.
When the mask finally drops
The show takes its time revealing what Drill actually is doing — and why. When it clicks, it lands with a very Spielberg flavor of awe curdled into dread. If you know his range with alien encounters — from the hug-it-out warmth of E.T. to the burn-it-all-down invasion of War of the Worlds — you’ll clock the DNA here. The Whispers shares more than a few connective tissues with those flavors of first contact, and the twist is a good one.
ABC pulled the plug after one season, but Season 1 runs a full 13 episodes and tells a complete story. No half-finished cliffhanger, no loose-ends graveyard. The final scene goes for the throat; it sticks with you after the credits.
So, was it actually good?
It landed well with both viewers and critics — it still hovers in the low-70s on Rotten Tomatoes — and it plays like a sturdy, propulsive binge. The show puts its most fragile characters in real danger and does not flinch at the idea that kids can be the scariest people in the room. That’s rare on network TV. And the Spielberg touch — the kid-centered POV, the hush before the jump, the way home and family get haunted first — is everywhere.
Where to find it now
There’s a catch. The Whispers isn’t streaming on any subscription service at the moment. If you want in, you’ll need to rent or buy it digitally. Worth the few bucks if your weekend needs 10 hours of goosebumps that actually pay off.
Meanwhile, on Planet Spielberg
He’s circled back to extraterrestrial stories more than once, and he’s not done. He is due back in the alien lane soon with Disclosure Day. Too early to call whether the visitors are friendly or the run-for-your-life kind — but if The Whispers scratched that particular itch for you, you’ll want to keep an eye on that one.
