The horror movies that inspired M Night Shyamalan’s career: “Really profound for me”
M Night Shyamalan might be known as the master of the twist ending, but his films often ponder philosophical questions—despite their heavy-handed approach. While they offer a kind of carnivalesque ride reminiscent of early spectacle cinema, with intriguing premises and twisting narratives, they sometimes reveal a core that’s curious about the big questions of life, death, society, and the universe. And no genre tackles the big questions in such a spectacular, ridiculous, and probing way quite like horror.
While Shyamalan’s films often feature the supernatural, the monstrous and the alien, most people wouldn’t quite classify them as horrors. But, seemingly, that’s where this unique auteur has found much inspiration. “I think there’s some deep philosophy in most horror movies,” the filmmaker told The Talks. For him, even the most campy, unrealistic and over-the-top horror films contain a nugget of philosophical truth – and when you think about it… it’s hard to deny.
The first film that comes to his mind as an example is, of course, The Exorcist. To many, it’s just a terrifying supernatural horror flick that was pioneering at its time, but for the American director, it’s much, much more, “Take The Exorcist, for example, you’ve got the mother’s sacrifice of the child, good and evil, the sacrifice of the priest… Watching that, I remember feeling this reinforcement that good will triumph over evil. I was terrified… But it really did reinforce those things.”
Given its cultural influence, The Exorcist is clearly a horror film that speaks to most people on themes of good and evil. Given it’s about religion and exorcism. However, it’s also been considered a parable of the USA’s growing instability at the time as a reckoning with its past evils. The Omen is another that Shyamalan understandably puts in the same category.
He also cites Night of the Living Dead as being a big influence on his movies, “Night of the Living Dead, that just shook me up! When the guy gets shot at the end? Really, that was tragic! I was like, “Oh God, this is all a metaphor!” And, once again, the man’s got a point. Not only was the 1968 horror pioneering for its use of a familiar, rural American setting and its new splatter techniques – not to mention laying the groundwork for modern zombie films – but it was viewed by many critics as a subversive film that deals with America’s domestic racism and handling of the Cold War.
This melding of the outrageous, subversive and philosophical was a major inspiration to Shyamalan and a blueprint for his work: “I hope my movies aren’t just scary movies, I hope that philosophy exists in them as well. I think you can feel there’s a benevolence underneath, that someone who believes in the universe is underneath all of this dark stuff and it’s leading to some kind of epiphany.”
This kind of epiphany is certainly there in many of Shyamalan’s misunderstood thrillers, but for some the epiphany only goes as far as the epiphany in the fourth movie he posits as a philosophical horror – Jaws. For Shyamalan, that one was really profound, which probably tells you more about his approach to filmmaking than anything else.
