Adam Scott & Danielle Deadwyler’s New Sci-Fi Thriller Movie Was Inspired By The Twilight Zone & X-Files

Both Scott and Deadwyler are involved with the newer iterations of these all-time great science-fiction shows. In the 2019-2020 reboot of The Twilight Zone, Scott starred in season 1, episode 2, “Nightmare at 30,000 Feet,” which is inspired by the original series’ episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” featuring William Shatner. As for Deadwyler, she has been cast as one of the two co-leads in Ryan Coogler’s upcoming reboot of The X-Files.

In an interview with ScreenRant‘s Ash Crossan at SXSW for The Saviors, director and writer Kevin Hamedani was asked about the movie’s parallels to The Twilight Zone. He discussed being a longtime fan of The Twilight Zone, The X-Files, and Steven Spielberg, all of which contribute to The Saviors‘ “magical box question” that is meant to take viewers “down this road of paranoia in a darkly comedic way.” Check out Hamedani’s comments below, in which he also breaks down the premise of the film:

I am a huge Twilight Zone fan. That’s stuff deep in my brain. I’m also a big X-Files fan and a Spielberg fan. So that sort of what’s in the box, the magical box question is something I always try to infuse in a good story. And it just seemed to fit in this theme that we were trying to play by having a big mystery feed the audience down this road of paranoia in a darkly comedic way.

Sure. It’s a dark comedy about a seemingly liberal, suburban, interracial couple who proudly rent their Airbnb out to these Middle Eastern immigrants – proudly. But they slowly start to see things that seem a bit suspicious or strange. And unfortunately, those suspicions escalate into a paranoid narrative that their guests might be planning a terrorist attack. They hate thinking that because they’re very liberal, they’re very good folks. But without getting too deep into it, speaking from my own experiences as a Seattleite liberal family, I myself realize that we all have these programs in us that we’ve been programmed from a young age to fear those that we don’t understand. So that’s basically the root of it all.

Despite debuting at SXSW 2026, The Saviors has been in the works for about a decade, with Hamedani and Travis Betz’s script having been on Deadline‘s The Black List rankings in 2017 of top-tier Hollywood screenplays that had not been produced yet. This means that the story was written not only long before The X-Files reboot and Deadwyler’s casting in it were announced, but also before The Twilight Zone reboot and the episode with Scott were released. Nevertheless, Hamedani’s inspiration from the original versions of the two shows was already there and impacting the script in 2017.

Another layer to The Saviors‘ science-fiction connections and casting is Scott’s role as Mark in the hit Apple TV series Severance. It became the most-watched show in the streamer’s history, until being surpassed by Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus. Severance holds a 95% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes and has won 10 Primetime Emmy Awards and received 41 nominations, including two Outstanding Lead Actor nominations for Scott. He is arguably the face of the show and the sci-fi pop culture phenomenon, adding further weight to his casting in The Saviors.

In ScreenRant‘s The Saviors review shared after the SXSW debut, Gregory Nussen gives the film five out of 10 stars and writes that “There are moments where The Saviors is a decently fun time, but it doesn’t lean hard enough in any one direction.​​​​​ Mashable‘s review by Kristy Puchko is more favorable: “Hamedani and company have carefully constructed a film that’s part dark comedy, part sci-fi thriller, part cautionary tale. And yet for all this, it never feels muddled or messy. Keenly helmed and sharply performed, The Saviors is a must-see.” An overall Rotten Tomatoes critics’ score has not been calculated as of this writing.