Music: Mozart Et

The disappointment is a consequence of the expectations aroused by Shyamalan’s previous efforts. With The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan announced a new beginning in the horror genre. The gory, nihilistic blood fest into which horror movies had sunk in the 1990s put filmmakers in a bind: The genre and its audience had increasing, and increasingly jaded, expectations for the aesthetics of evil, spurring competition to outdo previous films in the quantity and quality of the acts of maiming, raping, decapitating, and murdering victims. The greatest novelty to emerge in the late 1990s was the genre’s degeneration into self-conscious parody in the Scream and Scary Movie films.

Then came Shyamalan. The Sixth Sense appeared in the same year as The Blair Witch Project-even more than Blair Witch, whose scares rested mostly on the gimmickry of a hand-held camera, Sense returned us to less overt forms of horror, predicated upon audience sympathy with the dilemmas of the characters. Shyamalan self-consciously locates himself in the tradition of Hitchcock, who once said, “There is no terror in the bang,

About the Author

Jay Nordlinger

Jay Nordlinger was a senior editor of National Review and a book fellow at National Review Institute.

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The disappointment is a consequence of the expectations aroused by Shyamalan’s previous efforts. With The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan announced a new beginning in the horror genre. The gory, nihilistic blood fest into which horror movies had sunk in the 1990s put filmmakers in a bind: The genre and its audience had increasing, and increasingly jaded, expectations for the aesthetics of evil, spurring competition to outdo previous films in the quantity and quality of the acts of maiming, raping, decapitating, and murdering victims. The greatest novelty to emerge in the late 1990s was the genre’s degeneration into self-conscious parody in the Scream and Scary Movie films.

Then came Shyamalan. The Sixth Sense appeared in the same year as The Blair Witch Project-even more than Blair Witch, whose scares rested mostly on the gimmickry of a hand-held camera, Sense returned us to less overt forms of horror, predicated upon audience sympathy with the dilemmas of the characters. Shyamalan self-consciously locates himself in the tradition of Hitchcock, who once said, “There is no terror in the bang,