The Shyamalan Secret to Scariness
Ishana Night Shyamalan’s debut film, The Watchers, finds a careful balance between the freaky and the mundane.
In 2006, the director M. Night Shyamalan attempted to swerve away from the tense thrillers he’d become known for. His new movie was an ambitious, expansive fairy tale called —an original conceit based on bedtime stories he’d concocted for his young children. That film, a dizzy mix of whimsy and horror about a mermaid-like creature who appears in an apartment building’s swimming pool, was largely jeered at the time. But I couldn’t, the filmmaking debut of Ishana Night Shyamalan, one of M. Night’s daughters and a very commendable protégé.
