28 Years Later Review: Danny Boyle and Alex Garland Go Medieval

Editorial Staff / 26 seconds
June 19, 2025
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3 min read

Artistic figure amidst field of yellow flowers.

The first and only time I visited the Catacombs of Paris, I was overwhelmed by the ignominy of the mass tomb. There below the bowels of the City of Lights, hundreds of thousands of those who lived, laughed, loved, and most certainly died found their final resting place not beneath markers of the people they […]

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For Dean DeBlois, it all started with the eyes. Even as a working class kid in the Canadian suburbs of Quebec—which is about a million miles away from the life he would lead as an artist and filmmaker, writer and director—he could immediately understand the innocence of an extraterrestrial’s gaze in Steven Spielberg’s seminal 1982 film, E.T.: The Extraterrestrial.

“I think that childlike quality that you [pair] with the distributing proportions of his body just makes you want to reach out and hug him,” DeBlois says about both Carlo Rambaldi’s creature design and the overall effect of E.T. as a touchstone memory. “He is a strange design with a telescoping neck, but I think it’s the chubby body and the squat little feet that make him feel like something that Charles Schulz might have designed. And the big eyes. We’ve leaned into that with every character that we’ve designed, really, because there’s just something so appealing.”

DeBlois is referring to Toothless, of course, the huggable dragon with feline pupils in every one of the How to Train Your Dragon movies DeBlois has worked on as a writer and director—with Chris Sanderson in the original 2010 animated film—as well as Stitch, whom DeBlois also co-created with Sanderson in the original 2002 Disney film. But when he stops by our Den of Geek Studio for the latest episode of In the Den, it is to discuss how all of these characters—Toothless, Stitch, and maybe even Cri-Kee in the animated Mulan (1998)—owe something to seeing E.T. in theaters as a kid.

DeBlois was 12 years old when E.T. came out, and despite not having money to see many films in theaters more than once, he made a special exception for the film about a boy finding friendship and magic with a creature no one else knew about.

“I grew up in a suburb that was built in the 1970s and it looks like it,” DeBlois says. “It’s a conservative, quiet little environment. And being a kid who was gay, that was also something that was this bizarre thing I had to hide and struggle with. There was no representation of what that looked like in a successful adult life, which caused me to be quite insular and rely upon stories and rely upon drawing, and being this odd little kid. I was always out of sorts, cut of a different cloth than all of my sporty friends.”

DeBlois saw himself in young Henry Thomas’ Elliott in E.T., as well as the alien who felt the need to hide away from the world. At least until he could take off and fly over the moon.

“That’s maximum wish fulfillment right there, to be able to take to the skies and fly around with your best friend,” says DeBlois, “I feel like that crosses culture