 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.
