M. Night Syhamalan, Defying Genres and The Visit

M. Night Syhamalan, Defying Genres and The Visit

“I love my stories being multi-layered, and coming at it from different angles, so that you don't understand the film's true emotional motivation until the very end.”

M. Night Shyamalan

By: Erreh Svaia

Don't call auteur M. Night Shyamalan a horror movie director, that's an assumption that for years I have hated, given the fight that Shyamalan body of work is simply too broad to place it all up under one single umbrella.

The Sixth Sense was a powerful proof of Shyamalan enormous talent to play with a story, it was simply classified as a Horror movie or a Suspense Thriller, but in the end, it was something else, it wasn't so much the thrills or the scary facts about it, it was a mind game and a too clever one, Shyamalan demonstrated that he was not only a master at creating suspense, just like his obvious predecessor Alfred Hitchcock, Shyamalan was developing a brainy formula in which nothing was exactly what we thought it was, thing in the end turned out in an unsuspected way, always opening interesting debates and the joy of watching the movie a couple of times more in order to discover new clues that we previously didn't notice.

Unbreakable again was made under Shyamalan rules, of course it had nothing to do with the horror genre, a fact that obviously costed Shyamalan part of his audience who founded out the superhero story not "scary" enough, but for those who have followed the superhero genre, and know the base of Stan Lee, mainly humanist stories, M Night's movie is a triumph unsurpassed within the genre, just considers today's awful Marvel movies, and you end up with Unbreakable, The Watchmen and Birdman as the top superheroes movies ever.

Signs, a science fiction thriller was Shyamalan stylistic peak, as he was able to shake the horror tag and embrace another genres in a more successful way, with The Village as a another powerful example of it, while Lady In The Water or The Happening were more personal, really difficult to accept by his less hardcore fans not willing to immerse into an adult metaphysical fairytale firts and then into a 9-11 paranoia inspired story about a neurotoxic attack by plants, with a hard to believe plot.

After some major failures, Shyamalan looks like he has finally got back to shape with The Visit, a big artistic shift towards the more complex and universal style of Signs, but with a more maniac style, Shyamalan cinema looks energized and uncontainable in this tale about two kids who went on a trip to stay a week with their grandparents, a quirky little insane comedy mixed brilliantly with art house terror movie, Blair Witch inspired with an astonishing plot twist that shows that Shyamalan is again at full control of his amazing storytelling powers.

The Visit is a unique experiment that clearly portrays Shyamalan talent at creating huge cinematic tension and at the same time stealing hysterical laughs from the audience, with solid efforts The Visit, it isn't hard to think that Shyamalan is well on his way a becoming a rare phenomenon much in the shape of the great master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock.