How Scott Derrickson's 2008 Remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still Led the Director to Sinister

Bagul continues to scare the pants off horror fans more than a decade after his big screen debut, and he's got the scientific metrics to prove it. Last month, BroadbandChoices' Science of Scare Project reaffirmed Sinister as the scariest movie of all time, based on heart rate data from test subjects who watched the 2012 horror film.

It's certainly a vindicating achievement for director and co-writer Scott Derrickson, whose career nearly fizzled out before the Ethan Hawke-led project got made with backing from Blumhouse. Up until that point, the filmmaker had just three features under his belt — Hellraiser: Inferno, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, and a remake of the 1951 sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still (now streaming on Peacock).

How Scott Derrickson's The Day the Earth Stood Still remake led him to Sinister

While it featured a killer cast –– including Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Connelly, Kathy Bates, Jaden Smith, John Cleese, and Jon Hamm –– and made over $200 million worldwide, The Day the Earth Stood Still was a critical misfire, with critics taking exception to the reimagining's murky plot and overblown visual effects. The cautiously optimistic Cold War classic about an alien visitor warning humanity to get its s--t together simply did not fit into the Roland Emmerich-style blockbuster mold. With that said, the modern update of Klaatu's robot companion, Gort, was pretty cool, though admittedly not enough to save the end result for Derrickson.

"[I]t was a horrific experience and the movie did not turn out good," he admitted during a 2022 interview with SlashFilm. "Well, it turned out okay in places at least. But it was one of those movies where it didn't turn out as well as it needed to because of a lot of reasons, the writers' strike being the main one. And so after that movie, I was not really employable as a director for almost two years."

In those two years, the director did pass on some opportunities, including the second Ghost Rider featuring the return of Nicolas Cage as Johnny Blaze. "If I had made that movie, I probably never would've worked again," he continued. "And I was passing on the few things I was getting offered ... When Jason came to me and said, 'I'll give you $3 million and final cut,' I was like, 'Okay, great. Well, if this is the last movie I get to make, I'm going to make a movie that I want to see.'"

That policy of selectivity paid off big-time once Sinister raked in over $80 million at the box office, establishing Derrickson as a rising genre storyteller eagerly sought out by the likes of Marvel Studios (Doctor Strange), Universal Pictures (The Black Phone), and Apple (2025's The Gorge).

"I felt like I had died on somebody else's sword on Day the Earth Stood Still. I found myself at the end of somebody else's movie," he said. "I was like, 'I'm going to make the movie that I want to make.' That's exactly what we did. It was a movie that was totally uncompromising ... The ending is pretty bleak, but it was, I think, a very pure experience for both [me and co-writer C. Robert Cargill]. For me, it was as pure of a filmmaking experience as a person can have, because I wasn't thinking about the success of the movie at all."

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) is now streaming on Peacock. Want more from Derrickson? The Black Phone is now available to own from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment. A direct sequel, The Black Phone 2, is slated to hit theaters next summer.