 Kneale was admired by the film director John Carpenter , who hired Kneale to write the screenplay Halloween III . Carpenter wrote the screenplay for his 1987 film Prince of Darkness under the pseudonym " Martin Quatermass " , a reference to Kneale 's work . The horror fiction writer Stephen King has cited Kneale as an influence , and Kim Newman suggested in 2003 that King had " more or less rewritten Quatermass and the Pit in The Tommyknockers . " Other writers have acclaimed Kneale as an influence on their work including comics writer Grant Morrison and television screenwriter Russell T Davies , who described the Beasts episode " Baby " as " the most frightening thing I 've ever seen ... Powerful stuff . " Film screenwriter and director Dan O 'Bannon was also an admirer of Kneale 's writing , and in 1993 wrote a potential remake of The Quatermass Experiment , of which Kneale approved , but the film was never made . 
