How M. Night Shyamalan Came Back From the Dead

John du Pont, heir to the eponymous chemical fortune, lived on an 800-acre estate west of Philadelphia known as Foxcatcher Farm. Du Pont was an eccentric: He collected stuffed birds and mollusk shells and patrolled his property in an armored tank. His great passion was amateur wrestling, and though he was largely cut off from society, he would invite wrestlers to live in guesthouses on the Foxcatcher grounds and pay for their training. One such guest was Dave Schultz, who won a gold medal at the 1984 Olympics. On a January afternoon in 1996, du Pont pulled up to Schultz’s guesthouse in a silver Lincoln Town Car, rolled down his window, and fired a .44-caliber Magnum revolver into Schultz’s chest. Schultz collapsed, bleeding, into the snow. A motive for the murder was never established.

In 2002, the filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan bought a farm down the road from Foxcatcher. Shyamalan and his wife, Bhavna, were living with their two young daughters in the Philadelphia suburbs. The new farm was only 30 minutes away, but its rolling hills and wide pastures made it feel like a different world. Shyamalan began going there regularly to write.

On his way, he’d drive past du Pont’s former home, its iron fence now rusted and covered in ivy. When Shyamalan learned of the grisly local history, he became fascinated by it. Foxcatcher seemed to him, he told me recently, like “a mythical land.” He started working on a new script.

A more conventional filmmaker might have written a psychological thriller about du Pont, the cosseted scion of enormous wealth who descends into madness and ultimately murder; later, the 2014 movie Foxcatcher would be just that. Shyamalan, characteristically, took the story in a stranger direction. He set his film in a rural 19th-century community that has shut itself off from outsiders, for fear of the monsters that roam the surrounding woods. The twist arrives reliably in the third act: The movie is set not in the 19th century, but in the present day—town elders had founded the community as an escape from the modern world. Parents perpetuate the ruse by donning monster costumes and haunting the woods to keep their kids “safe.” The movie, which came out in 2004, was called The Village.

Shyamalan was in the midst of a head-spinning run of success. Five years earlier, he had directed The Sixth Sense, a thriller about a boy who sees ghosts and befriends a child psychologist—who turns out to be a ghost himself. The movie had been a sensation, financially and critically, and was nominated for six Academy Awards. It had also established an expectation, perhaps an impossible one to satisfy, that each new Shyamalan movie would build to a shocking revelation.

In two follow-ups, the superhero fable Unbreakable (2000) and the alien-invasion thriller Signs (2002), Shyamalan had managed to deliver something like that jolt. But this time, the response to the big reveal was withering. “The entire solemn, portentous edifice that is The Village collapses of its own fake weight,” declared Newsweek, a magazine that just two years earlier had described Shyamalan as “the next Spielberg.” The critical consensus was clear: In straining to surprise, Shyamalan had become painfully predictable. “It’s so witless,” Roger Ebert wrote, “that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don’t know the secret anymore.”

The Village was not a total flop—it had its defenders, and made money for Disney—but it severely damaged Shyamalan’s reputation among critics and audiences alike. Although he was only 34 at the time, his career entered a period of steep decline, one from which it wasn’t clear he would recover. Shyamalan later described feeling, at his lowest point, like “a cautionary tale,” someone who’d “revealed himself to be a sham.”

I was just starting my own career as a film critic in the years after The Village came out, and I still remember the snickers that would spread through the theater whenever a trailer for “an M. Night Shyamalan film” appeared on-screen. In a remarkably short span, a wunderkind had become a punch line. But that’s not the end of the story.

Shyamalan eventually sold the farm where he wrote The Village, but he now lives nearby, in a Georgian Revival manor in Chester County. The drive to Ravenwood, as the 125-acre estate is known, is lush and horse-studded. Shyamalan’s compound, which also houses his production company’s offices, feels more like a bucolic college campus than a laboratory for cinematic horror.

When I visited, Shyamalan was in his basement movie theater helping his 24-year-old daughter, Ishana, mix her horror debut, The Watchers, which she directed and Shyamalan produced. He was taking a break from editing his newest thriller, Trap. Shyamalan’s movie theater is the one part of his house that feels like it sprang directly from his brain: The atmosphere is cheerful faux Gothic, like Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast meets Disney’s Haunted Mansion.

Shyamalan raised his three daughters—his youngest, Shivani, 19, is in college studying fashion design, and his oldest, Saleka, 27, is a singer—to share his obsession with movies. His office is decorated with posters for what Shyamalan calls the “holy trinity”: Jaws, The Exorcist, and The Godfather. When the girls were young, he required them to watch all movies—even, say, The Little Mermaid—in rapturous silence in a dark theater. They weren’t allowed to see his own movies until they were about 10, at which point he began to show them one a year.

Shyamalan hadn’t received anything like this kind of education from his own parents. His mother and father, who emigrated from India, were doctors, an ob-gyn and a cardiologist. Being a doctor was the “family way,” Shyamalan told me, and he was expected to attend medical school. His parents sent him to a Catholic elementary school, attracted by its rigor and discipline. Shyamalan was the only Hindu student—in his mind, a perennial outsider. He recalls his teachers explaining that anyone who wasn’t baptized was going to hell.

When he was 7 years old, he went with his family to see Star Wars. It was the first time he experienced something like religious awe: sitting in the dark, watching Luke gaze up at Tatooine’s twin suns. He remembers getting into the family station wagon after the movie, still reeling: “My sister was talking away, and I was like, ‘Don’t talk. Don’t you understand? We’ve just seen something extraordinary.’ ”

As a teenager, he started shooting his own movies. He also began to develop a deeper interest in spirituality and the supernatural. He became fascinated with Native American history, compelled by the idea of finding the divine in nature. Shyamalan’s given name is Manoj, but one day, while reading about the Lakota, he happened upon a name that translated into English as “Night” and decided to claim it.

He chose to go to NYU to study film. (For his high-school yearbook photo, he submitted a fake Time cover with a grinning self-portrait and the headline “NYU GRAD TAKES HOLLYWOOD BY STORM.”) His parents were confounded by his decision. But if he was rebelling against their expectations, he wasn’t yet entirely out of their shadow. His first film was a low-budget indie called Praying With Anger, in which he starred as an Indian American student returning to his ancestral country after his father’s death, in an effort to reconnect with his roots. Supernatural forces are present in the movie, if peripherally: His character encounters a ghost while wrestling with his Hindu faith. Shyamalan found that the narrative conventions of a ghost story made it easier for him to address the deepest human anxieties: mortality, grief, the search for meaning in life. “Genre has always helped me talk about more emotional stuff,” he told me.

A few years after graduation, Shyamalan sold a script called Wide Awake. It told the story of a young boy growing up at a private Catholic school and seeking a higher power as he deals with the loss of his grandfather. Shyamalan fought bitterly with the producer Harvey Weinstein about the movie’s direction. “I was, how can I say it, blessed to have to meet the challenge of working with Mr. Weinstein at 22 years old,” Shyamalan said. “You’re facing demons right away.” By all accounts, Shyamalan was overwhelmed by Weinstein’s aggressive, bullying style of doing business. When Miramax released the film in 1998, it went largely unnoticed.

For his next script, Shyamalan wrote something completely different. His interest in the supernatural took on a darker aspect—and moved from the margins to the center of his storytelling.

The script had begun as a serial-killer drama, but Shyamalan worried that everything he wrote felt like a rehash of The Silence of the Lambs. Over time, the script morphed into a story about a boy and his psychologist. The Sixth Sense’s famous twist came to Shyamalan late in the writing process, he told me. He had been frustrated—“I was like, ‘Why is this feeling straight and flat, and why aren’t we discovering something?’ ” Then one day he had a revelation: The therapist is just another ghost.

Shyamalan’s script sparked a bidding war. In the ’90s, original dramas still had major sway in Hollywood. The producer Michael De Luca, at the time New Line Cinema’s head of production and now co-CEO of Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group, remembers the excitement of first reading The Sixth Sense. “I thought, Oh my God, he’s dead. He’s a ghost. I can’t believe it. I didn’t see it coming,” he told me.

Disney beat him out, spending $3 million and guaranteeing that Shyamalan could direct. Then Bruce Willis signed on, agreeing to make a movie by an unproven director to help satisfy a three-picture deal with Disney. Alongside Willis, Shyamalan cast a child actor named Haley Joel Osment, whose chilling delivery of the line “I see dead people” impressed him during auditions.

When The Sixth Sense was released, in August 1999, it outperformed all expectations—it was a word-of-mouth sensation, topping the box office for five weekends in a row. It ultimately made more than $670 million worldwide. Suddenly, at 29, Shyamalan was an Oscar nominee who had made the year’s biggest hit that wasn’t Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace.

He told Philadelphia magazine in 2000 that he’d been enjoying the adulation, but that it also made him nervous. “I know inevitably it could be bad,” he said. “What if I make a bad movie?”

Shyamalan followed The Sixth Sense with two movies that successfully delivered on its promise, while demonstrating the young filmmaker’s range. Unbreakable is a brooding superhero movie also starring Willis and featuring Samuel L. Jackson as his ostensible mentor. The film couldn’t match the success of its predecessor, but it was artful and entertaining, and it supplied another twist ending (Jackson’s character is more malevolent than he initially seems) to bolster Shyamalan’s reputation as a master practitioner of Hitchcockian final blows. His next movie, Signs, centers on a farmhouse that comes under siege by a mass of invading aliens. The tone is bouncier, looser, fun. It, too, was a hit at the box office.

The Village, then, could have been a temporary setback for a director with so much goodwill among audiences and so much capital in Hollywood. For his next project, Shyamalan might have reached for something safer. Instead, he doubled down on his dark visions. The result was Lady in the Water, which was based on a bedtime tale he’d invented for his daughters. The movie starred Bryce Dallas Howard as a mythical sea-nymph-esque creature named Story who emerges into a housing complex through its swimming pool, pursued by a gruesome monster called, regrettably, a scrunt.

When Disney executives saw the script, they didn’t know what to make of it. “It was the first time that we’d ever reached a threshold issue of ‘I don’t get it,’ ” Nina Jacobson, a former Disney executive who worked with Shyamalan, told me. “I didn’t get it, and my bosses didn’t get it.” She found it too weird, too complicated, too scary. In Michael Bamberger’s book The Man Who Heard Voices, a tell-all about Lady in the Water’s production process, Shyamalan recalls having previously cited Bambi as evidence that Disney’s audience could handle bleakness: “Bambi’s mother dies … Shot dead. One of the greatest children’s movies ever.”

Jacobson and a few other executives flew to Philadelphia to meet Shyamalan for dinner and explain their misgivings. They were still willing to make the movie, but Shyamalan was hurt by their lack of faith in the idea and his ability to execute it. “It was kind of like a painful breakup,” Jacobson told me. “It was hard.” After they left, Bamberger writes in his book, Shyamalan cried.

“I think I have a thing where I want everyone to like me and I want to please everybody,” Shyamalan told me. “There’s that side of me, which maybe isn’t a great side of me. And then the other side of me, which is: I’ll burn down the house for an idea, no problem, without blinking. Those two sides are always a little bit at war within me.”

He took the script to Warner Bros., which had been eager to work with him since it had been among the studios that lost out to Disney on The Sixth Sense. It gave him such a large budget that he was able to build an entire apartment complex as a set. But when the movie came out in 2006, it was a financial and critical disaster.

Like the Disney executives, I was baffled by Lady in the Water. The idea of a contemporary fairy tale was appealing in theory, but the movie’s tone was thudding and oppressive. Late in the story, a preening film critic played by Bob Balaban gets violently shredded by a scrunt. People in my profession couldn’t help but interpret the scene as unsubtle score-settling. But Shyamalan hadn’t just lost the critics. A filmmaker who’d once had audiences wrapped around his finger seemed to have lost his grasp on what viewers wanted to see.

Hollywood tends to view anyone who refuses to move to Los Angeles with suspicion, if not disdain. Shyamalan has made nearly all of his movies in the Philadelphia area. He spends most of his time at Ravenwood, where he can be surrounded by family and close collaborators. Perhaps inevitably, he’s earned a reputation in some quarters as a recluse, walled off in his own kind of fortress.

In person, however, Shyamalan is engaged and attentive, swinging between intensity and playful lightness. He makes unrelenting eye contact and projects a boyish enthusiasm, whether discussing the coaching career of Doc Rivers (Shyamalan is an avid Sixers fan) or considering the plate of tacos in front of him (which he consumes with audible delight). The actor Cherry Jones, who worked with him on Signs and The Village, once said that Shyamalan struck her as being like a “brilliant 11-year-old.”

Shyamalan is at his most animated when discussing the craft of filmmaking—camera angles, aspect ratios, the Soviet director Mikhail Kalatozov’s knack for framing a shot. About his own movies, Shyamalan is passionate to the point of defensiveness. When I asked him how he feels now about his most critically derided films, he was emphatic. If he could make The Village over again, he told me, he’d do nearly everything the same. He still loves Lady in the Water. What many viewers saw as chaos, he sees as a kind of “jazz.” If his critics don’t appreciate the music, he told me, perhaps it’s because he is defying expectations. “I am an immigrant, at the end of the day, and I’m telling stories not about immigrants,” he said. “Sometimes it feels like it would be easier to swallow if I was making movies about Indian mathematicians or something like that. Then I would get the benefit of the doubt.”

Yet even Shyamalan does not defend the period of his career that followed the box-office failure of Lady in the Water. In the late 2000s, the studios had a growing appetite for franchise-building and recognizable intellectual property. Trying to make himself useful, Shyamalan directed an adaptation of a Nickelodeon animated series and a sci-fi action thriller based on a story concept from Will Smith, the movie’s star. After Earth was a CGI bonanza of asteroid showers and crash-landing spaceships; the plot was flat and, unusually for Shyamalan, devoid of surprise. He had moved into what he calls his “hired gun” phase, working on other people’s ideas instead of his own. “I’m so bad at that,” he told me. “I’m so bad at it, and I felt so empty.”

After the Will Smith vehicle, Shyamalan decided that he wanted out of the studio system. He took out a loan against his house to fund a documentary-style horror movie called The Visit (2015), about two teenagers who go to stay with their estranged grandparents and discover them acting oddly at night. Lady in the Water had cost $70 million to make. He shot The Visit for $5 million. Narratively, the movie is classic Shyamalan—an early atmosphere of unease (why are the grandparents behaving like this?) leads to a typically flashy twist (the grandparents are not actually the grandparents).

But The Visit is also different from much of his previous work in a key way: It’s more aware of its own absurdity. The movie is genuinely frightening, full of breathless chase sequences and jump scares, but it leans into its outrageousness, at times even verging on slapstick. In a scene toward the end, the “grandfather” essentially pies one of the teenagers in the face with a soiled diaper. This tonal mash-up was intentional: Shyamalan told me that he was pleased to see early audiences laughing even at the movie’s scary parts.

The Visit was rejected by studio after studio as Shyamalan searched for a potential distributor, until Universal—in partnership with the horror studio Blumhouse—finally came on board. The movie ended up making nearly $100 million worldwide, 20 times its budget.

The success of The Visit set in motion a new budgeting approach for Shyamalan. He would fund every project himself, using his estate as collateral, and try to make his movies as efficiently as he could. His follow-up to The Visit was Split (2016), in which James McAvoy plays a kidnapper with multiple personalities. It grossed $278 million worldwide, against a budget of $9 million. “The theory is, make it as small as humanly possible,” Shyamalan said. The process, he told me, has been “both freeing and scary.”

In this shoestring mode, Shyamalan developed a new economy in his storytelling. Compared with the sprawling, elaborately staged movies of his studio days, his thrillers began to incorporate fewer characters and simpler sets, and many of them benefited from these limitations. The Visit and Split were both basically set in one place—a farmhouse and a basement, respectively—which helped give them a powerful atmosphere of escalating claustrophobia. Both movies earned some of the most glowing reviews Shyamalan had received in years.

Throughout the mid-2010s, as big studios focused on superhero sagas with the broadest possible appeal, Shyamalan moved into a space that Hollywood had largely abandoned: mid-budget thrillers aimed at adults. The decision proved prescient. After years of box-office dominance, the comic-book movie generally—and Disney’s Marvel division in particular—is now in decline, as audiences have grown fatigued by endless sequels, spin-offs, and reboots.

Shyamalan, by contrast, makes original movies, even as his name on the marquee promises something reliable: horror that is self-consciously over-the-top, even campy—plus an explosive finale. Moviegoers, once irked by his predictability, now seem to appreciate him for it.

Twenty-five years after Michael De Luca got outbid on The Sixth Sense, he signed Shyamalan to a deal at Warner Bros. to distribute his new movie, Trap. “Look,” De Luca told me, “nothing will quite equal how you felt when you read Sixth Sense … That was unbelievable.” But when Shyamalan pitched Trap, De Luca was sold. “I feel like he is closer to what the average audience member might leave the house and go see as a theatrical movie than certainly a lot of us that are based in Hollywood.”

In Trap, a young father named Cooper (Josh Hartnett) takes his daughter to see a pop star named Lady Raven, played by Shyamalan’s daughter Saleka. In an arena full of screaming teens, father and daughter snap selfies and dance in their seats. Cooper makes charmingly awkward attempts to bond with his kid, Riley (Ariel Donoghue); Riley razzes him for trying to use Gen Z slang. When Cooper notices a heavy police presence at the show, he asks a staffer what’s going on. The concert, he learns, is a sting operation: The authorities are there to catch “The Butcher,” a notorious serial killer who is supposedly in the audience. The pitch for the movie, Shyamalan has said, was essentially: “What if The Silence of the Lambs happened at a Taylor Swift concert?”

What follows is a spoiler only if you’re the kind of person who likes to know nothing about a movie before you see it: The Butcher is Cooper himself, a twist that’s revealed in the movie’s official trailer. It’s another classic Shyamalan setup: deceptively wholesome scene-setting followed by a development that casts everything that came before it—Cooper’s visible nerves, the meticulous way he mops up ketchup with a napkin—in a sinister new light. Now, stuck in the arena, the Butcher has to find a way out.

Yet Trap also delivers more complicated thrills. It tricks us into empathizing with Cooper, a doting if hapless dad who also happens to systematically murder people in his basement. While making Trap, Shyamalan found a kindred spirit in Hartnett, who was plunged into superstardom in the early 2000s by roles in blockbusters such as The Virgin Suicides and Pearl Harbor, then made a conscious decision to step away from Hollywood soon afterward. “He chose to leave and live a life,” Shyamalan said of Hartnett, who lives in England with his wife and four children. “He found meaning in his family and meaning as a human being. And now he’s like, ‘Now I can come to the industry and be able to give.’ ”

Shyamalan and Hartnett created a character tormented by both his own monstrousness and the more mundane challenges of raising a kid. Shyamalan was interested in what it would look like to merge psychopathy and paternal love in one role, Hartnett told me.

Trap is not a universal parenting tale—“If you relate to this movie, you should seek help,” Hartnett said—but Shyamalan found himself identifying with Cooper in certain ways nonetheless. He sometimes thinks about what it’s been like for his daughters to grow up in his orbit, dealing with all the attention that comes with having him as a dad. “When I go to a game or a recital, it’s, like, a thing,” he told me. “It isn’t just about the kid.” Cooper wants to give his daughter the Lady Raven concert experience she’s dreamed of, but now his job—serial killer—is threatening to ruin their special day. “You just want to be at the concert sometimes, you know?” Shyamalan said.

Shyamalan has often drawn on his anxieties about fatherhood in his writing. “That something could happen to the family unit is the primary fear,” he told me at Ravenwood. “It’s the thing that’s most sacred.” Many of his films take this primary fear and use it as fodder for psychological horror. Old (2021) follows several families trapped on a beach where they all start aging rapidly; parents watch aghast as their children transform before their eyes.

The Village, too, is a parable about family—about parents going to absurd lengths to do what all parents want to do: protect their kids from the world. When I first saw the movie, in 2004, I reacted the way most critics did at the time. I was hung up on the obviousness of the twist, and the preposterousness of the idea that people could build a life around what looked like history’s worst community-theater production.

Years later, I watched the movie again, after becoming a father myself. One of Shyamalan’s skills is his ability to take a comforting notion—making a better society for your children—and find the nightmare in it. And the nightmare at the core of The Village, for better or worse, has aged well. What parent doesn’t despair at the mess we’ve made for our children to clean up? Who wouldn’t spare them that work if they could help it?

The implausibility of Shyamalan’s story no longer bothers me: So what if the monsters look like bipedal porcupines? So what if the village turns out to be a short distance from a major road (yet somehow its residents never seem to hear the cars)? The sloppiness of the world building feels almost intentional, as does the ridiculousness of the twist itself. Of course these desperate, half-mad parents didn’t manage to create a credible utopia for their kids. That is Shyamalan’s point: You can’t escape the world’s awful uncertainty. You just have to live with the fear.

This article appears in the September 2024 print edition with the headline “How M. Night Shyamalan Came Back From the Dead.”