Of his other films, Unbreakable (2000) and Signs (2002) probably come the closest to constructing the sort of well-rounded narrative that isn’t entirely reliant on a reveal in the last 10 minutes, but none quite match the creative ambition of his first major success. Night Shyamalan himself has spent a large portion of his career desperately chasing the next Sixth Sense high. For the next few years after The Sixth Sense, studios were tripping over themselves trying to reproduce the magic of this film by flooding the market with new twist endings, each more absurd than the last. A cinematic phenomenon is like lightning in a bottle: You can’t just reproduce it whenever you’d like. But the thing about novelty in filmmaking that studios never seem to understand is that when you try to repeat it, it isn’t novel anymore. But it also demonstrates a concerted effort and a rare expression of goodwill on behalf of filmgoers to preserve a fairly unique cinematic viewing experience.Īnd the novelty factor of The Sixth Sense cannot be overestimated, something that led it to earn over $670 million at the box office and turn both its pint-sized lead actor Haley Joel Osment and its director into stars overnight. It’s difficult to imagine that a horde of Twitter trolls wouldn’t ruin the surprise on a global scale within a week if it came out today. That the film’s secret was maintained long enough for weeks’ and even months’ worth of new audiences to experience the twist for themselves is a testament to what a different world existed in 1999. Night Shyamalan, made an undeniable impression. Caligari shocked viewers with the revelation that the main character had actually been a patient at a psychiatric institution the entire time (or had he?)īut for some reason, The Sixth Sense, released 20 years ago this summer and directed by a brash young filmmaker by the name of M. It’s not like there had never been a twist ending before The Sixth Sense, you know? Thirty-nine years earlier, audiences lost their collective minds when the killer in Psycho turned out to be Norman Bates in a dress 40 years before that, The Cabinet of Dr. Contains spoilers for The Sixth Sense (1999), Psycho (1960), The Cabinet of Dr.
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