![]() Though VFX dutifully plays its part to make the aliens feel threatening in Signs and put poison in the air in The Happening, most of the director’s high-impact moments - even in a superhero flick like 2000's Unbreakable - lean on relatably sympathetic characters and don’t-look-away plot motion to truly keep audiences dialed in. When it comes to Shyamalan movies, he’s definitely got a point there. Those movies blast our emotions and imaginations, instead of caressing them with a knife edge.” “…Studio execs, who not only live behind the curve but seem to have built mansions there, don’t seem to understand that most moviegoers recognize all the bluescreens and computer graphics of big-budget films and flick them aside. “Horror is an intimate experience, something that occurs mostly within oneself, and when it works, the screams of a sold-out house are almost intrusive,” King wrote. That gets back to King’s preoccupation with the kind of horror that gets inside our heads - not because of a movie’s budget, but because of its narrative effect on viewers. Praising the movie at the time of its release, King said The Happening might not work as a pure fright flick, but it still showed that Shyamalan could tug hard at human nature’s scariest archetypal strings. RELATED: Stephen King posts his review of Peacock's 'Poker Face'īut even among the many viewers and critics who balked at the movie’s preachy premise, The Happening earned itself plenty of fans, including at least one horror master, Stephen King - and not because of the message, but because of its intimately-delivered (and unmistakably Shyamalan-esque) tension. Plagued by all the man-made horrors people have wrought, the plants begin dispensing an airborne neurotoxin that takes control of its human victims’ minds, leading them like zombies to seek the nearest means at hand - remember that horrifying lawnmower scene? - of doing themselves in. Pitched as an apocalyptic tale of plant-perpetrated mass suicide, The Happening serves as a sort of cautionary parable about nature striking back at humans, whom the film fingers for pushing Planet Earth past its polluted tipping point. Sitting among the measured dregs of Shyamalan’s rare movie misses, its Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores are anything but happening, despite a great cast led by Mark Wahlberg, John Leguizamo, and Zooey Deschanel. ![]() Night Shyamalan’s supernaturally creepy film canon, 2008's The Happening (now streaming on Peacock!) doesn’t exactly rate at the top of viewers’ consensus hit list.
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