M. Night Shyamalan reveals his favourite classic movie twist: “It was profound”
M. Night Shyamalan is cinema’s great trickster. His breakthrough film, 1999’s The Sixth Sense, stunned audiences with its gut-wrenching twist, going on to become the second-highest-grossing horror movie of all time and picking up an array of Oscar nominations. Since then, the Indian-American filmmaker has surprised us time and time again. Here, he names his favourite classic movie twist of all time.
Creative plot twists are the very foundation of a good horror movie. One of the earliest examples comes from the 1920 silent film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, in which, Francis, a man investigating the death of a murdered clerk, turns out to be the inmate of an insane asylum. It’s pretty much the exact same twist Martin Scorsese used so artfully in his psychological thriller Shutter Island 90 years later.
A good twist should come as a complete surprise and profoundly alter our perception of the events depicted so far. M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense is the perfect example because (spoiler alert ahead) the fact that Malcolm has been dead all along means that he has been grieving his wife, Anna, while unknowingly being a spirit himself. The ghosts, therefore, are not apparitions but neighbours.
Shyamalan delivered yet another brilliant twist with 2000’s Unbreakable, in which Samuel L. Jackson’s Dr Glass turns out to be responsible for all the chaos and destruction witnessed by Bruce Willis’s David Dunn. Then came 2016’s Split with James McAvoy, which was basically a plot twist in itself. Shyamalan’s latest offering, Knock At The Cabin, looks equally serpentine if perhaps a little overcooked.
Speaking to NME, Shyamalan discussed some of the films that made an impact on him as a director: “My favourite twist in someone else’s movie? Certainly Planet Of The Apes, the original one is profound,” he said. “I remember it blossoming in my head as I was watching it and it echoing after the fact. It was profound, ironic, all of those things. Even to this day it’s the standard for me.”
It’s a solid choice. Released in 1968, the original Planet of The Apes tells the story of astronaut George Taylor, who finds himself on a distant planet inhabited by intelligent non-human apes after his spacecraft crash-lands. On this apparently far-flung planet, apes are dominant while humans are enslaved. Towards the end of the film, George is riding along the beach with a companion when they come across the Statue of Liberty half-buried in the sand. It was earth all along. “Oh my God,” the captain cries. “You finally did it. You blew it all up. Damn you – damn you all to hell!”
“It was a profound social commentary… but suddenly it became this really apocalyptic movie,” Shyamalan said of the scene. “It’s all in the angle of the story. That’s a wonderful example of an apocalyptic movie [told from an angle] that had never been done before.” Y
ou can revisit that iconic moment from The Planet of The Apes below.
