First Scare: The Sixth Sense

A creepy character study that holds up over time

This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Oscar-nominated cerebral horror film The Sixth Sense. I consumed a fair amount of Bruce Willis content during his heyday, but this one escaped me. At the time, I wasn’t in the mood for creepy content, so I took a pass. Over the years, the film became a classic, showing up on best of lists, particularly for best plot twists. Thanks to the internet and repeated discussions of the film, many elements of the story were unavoidable even for non-viewers. As a result, the “twist” at the end was spoiled for me long before I saw it this month. But instead of making me less interested, the fact of the twist made me more fascinated by a story that I previously imagined as creepy and subdued. Now, in honor of our First Scare project, I have finally watched M. Night Shaymalan’s award-winning The Sixth Sense.

The story follows Dr. Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis), a successful child psychologist in Philadelphia, who works with troubled children. The film opens with Malcolm celebrating a prestigious lifetime award for his work in child psychology. His loving wife Anna (Olivia Williams) is proud of him even though she notes that his success has come at the cost of putting other aspects of his life second, including her. However, she says it’s worth it for the children he has helped. This comment serves up an ironic twist of fate: their celebration is cut short when Vincent Grey (Donnie Wahlberg), a former patient, breaks into their home and accuses Malcolm of misdiagnosing him and failing him. The psychotic, distraught, mostly naked teen suddenly shoots Malcolm and kills himself while Anna rushes to stop Malcolm’s bleeding.

Later we see a recovered Malcolm starting to work with another troubled little boy, Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment). Grade-school-aged Cole has what seems to be delusions and is generally maladjusted and often bullied by other children for his odd and awkward behavior. Malcolm wants to focus on helping Cole as a way to atone for his perceived failure with Vincent Grey. In the process of visiting and interviewing Cole, we meet Cole’s stressed single mother, Lynn (Toni Collette), trying to support her emotionally troubled son. As the therapeutic meetings continue, we also see the world through Cole’s eyes and discover the first plot twist of the story and the explanation for Cole’s stress: as Cole himself explains it to Malcolm, “I see dead people.” Throughout the film, through Cole’s eyes, we see glimpses of half-burned people, hanging people, bloodied or poisoned people lurking around Cole and sometimes interacting with him. The sudden appearances are nicely creepy and provide quite a lot of jump scares. Later we find out why the child is haunted, and we find out a second important plot twist detail about the ghosts surrounding him.

In addition to his work with Cole, Malcolm also struggles with his relationship with his wife Anna. She seems to be distant from him and is generally melancholy to the point of ignoring him. Ironically, the child Cole, at the end of the film, is the one able to give psychologist Malcom advice on how to reconnect with his wife. That reconnection leads to the last big plot twist.

The most powerful thing about the film is Haley Joel Osment’s stunning child acting. His somber, melancholy, moody portrayal of a little haunted boy is quietly mesmerizing, poignant, and creepy. At times, his sweet, young face and soft voice are tragically endearing. At other times, he becomes angry and cruel, adding an extra layer of scariness and complexity to the story. Mostly, he is coldly and defeatedly accepting of his fate of suffering in a world of abusive children and disbelieving adults. The film has a lot of great (but likely unintentional) messaging about the importance of listening to and believing suffering children. The other excellent aspect of the film is Toni Collette. She delivers a great performance as Cole’s long-suffering mother, who is trying to protect her son from bullies while dealing with her own frustrations at his inexplicably odd behavior.

My least favorite aspect of the film was, ironically, Malcolm. My issue is not with Bruce Willis himself—he does a fine job playing basically the same type of character he normally plays (from Moonlighting to Die Hard). But the character of Malcolm is written in a way that is mildly annoying. His handling of the break-in is confusing. His decision to help Cole is ultimately a self-serving way to try to clear his conscience. But when things get tough with Cole, he decides to abandon the child. Ultimately it is the child, Cole, who helps Malcolm find peace, and Cole is most helped in the end by his final emotional exchange with his mother.

The Sixth Sense is my favorite kind of horror film, quietly cerebral and creepy. I’m surprised at how well it has held up over time. For a film that’s twenty-five years old, it still feels mostly timeless rather than dated (other than some passing comments on divorce and a surprising lack of diversity for a story set in Philadelphia). Despite knowing the big twist in advance, I still felt engaged with the main character, Cole. And for me, it’s all about character, even in a horror film.

Highlights:

· Oscar-worthy child acting
· Cerebral plot twists
· Survives the years of spoilers

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris—Multitasking, fiction-writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Review: The Watchers

Who watches the watchers? The watched?

I’ll admit I was drawn to watch (must avoid the temptation to make a torrent of bad puns) The Watchers because of the deeply bizarre and captivating image of these few people in a room in a building in the middle of the woods, in front of what appeared to be a gigantic mirror. It felt like an SCP article, with the attendant eeriness. It was only later that I learned that this film, released in 2024, was written and directed by Ishana Night Shyamalan—the daughter of, yes, the king of twists, M. Night Shyamalan himself, who serves as one of the film’s three producers.

The Watchers is set somewhere in western Ireland, within driving distance of Galway on the country’s Atlantic coast, in a forest where odd and disturbing entities live. This forest attracts those who are, for one reason or another, disillusioned, adrift, or otherwise deeply dissatisfied with their lives. Such is the story of Mina, your protagonist, an American who moved to Ireland and works at a pet shop in Galway dealing with her own personal demons. She takes an errand to deliver a bird to a buyer in Belfast as an excuse to get away for a while, and in doing so finds herself lost in this forest. She meets a small group of people eking out survival and putting on a show of sorts for the presences that dwell in this forest, who are fascinated with humanity in a way that these representatives of our kind most certainly would wish was not actually the case.

Mina, your protagonist, is played with proper subtlety by Dakota Fanning, who holds a lot on her shoulders. She is joined by the ominous leader of this small group of exiles-cum-captives named Madeline, played with many layers by Olwen Fouéré. Together with Oliver Finnegan and Georgina Campbell, they are all trapped in a small environment (a forest intent on not letting them leave) and slowly kicking up the tension as the film goes on, and they are set against each other in a way that is typical of its genre but executed competently.

I like the use of the Irish setting here. Part of it is the exoticism of the foreign country; the woods are woods, but they are not composed of the trees that I see in films set in the United States, or see around my hometown in the suburbs of the District of Columbia. Likewise, Galway just doesn’t look like any American town I’ve been to, with an architecture we tend to stereotype as Old World. Particularly, the shots of Galway Cathedral presiding over the city —it’s not tall enough to really be ‘lumbering’ over, so unlike big cities anywhere— put you in a different state of mind. On a broader level, this film engages with Irish culture in ways that I don’t want to spoil, but that allow the horror aspect to feel natural in its context. It makes the whole story feel like something told by the modern equivalent of a traveling minstrel, and I mean that in the best way possible (and I’m reminded of Eric Flint, who made that comparison, as does P. Djèlí Clark’s nom de plume in a West African context).

Much of the film is concerned with watching (could something with a title like that not?), indeed the very act of watching something, or someone, else. These are people put in a bizarre location away from the comforts of home and hearth to amuse people who aren’t really interested in them for their own sake. These are people, essentially, conscripted to amuse others, and the audiences keep them there, tormenting them to see what happens. It reminds me of my my favorite SCP article, one that makes this metaphor even starker, but there are undertones here that I think enhance the experience. Sure, we aren’t literally kidnapping people to be actors, but to survive they need to keep very fit, often to the point of health problems, so they can be attractive to us, endure grueling filming schedules, and then deal with merciless press junkies where the world pries into their lives as if they were public concern. I don’t know if the book this film is based on deals with this subject matter, but in bringing the story to film, the parallels become hard to ignore, and perhaps could not be told as well in any other medium barring perhaps television. It is a story in the vein of the plot of the original Watchmen comic, a narration that interrogates its very medium.

And yes, if you were wondering, there is a twist. Ishana follows in her father’s footsteps in creating a plot swerve. Fortunately, it is ultimately logical for the circumstances and makes sense given the story and the characterizations. You can certainly feel that the apple hasn’t fallen too far from the tree here, but it’s an apple that is ultimately pretty sweet. I hope she gets more work and can start forging her own style, drawing from her father but never just being more of him (and Hollywood needs more female directors).

Overall, I enjoyed The Watchers. I would say it was reasonably good, not outstanding. I can’t place a finger on why exactly. The film does everything it does well, be it the acting, the plotting, the horror, the environment, the score, the cinematography. However, it never does any of those well enough to become a truly great film. It’s worth watching if you’re in the mood for horror, and particularly folk horror, but I don’t think it’ll become a classic.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Microreview [book and TV series]: Wayward Pines, by Blake Crouch

Mediocre novels made into a dreadful TV series: what fun! I'm suffering from a terminal case of Retention of Disbelief.

There are plenty of entertaining aspects to this series, particularly the novels (more on why the TV series is awful later). It’s an intriguing idea, to wake up in a strange town and feel that, a la The Truman Show/The Matrix/etc., something’s rotten in the state of Idaho. It’s classic melodrama (if not creative) gold, to have both the wife and the Other Woman orbiting a single cleft-jawed man, occasionally colliding with each other as they vie for supremacy behind the scenes. So I can understand—sort of—why the story has achieved such popularity.

Except no, wait a minute, I really can’t understand it at all, because the entire premise of the story is absolutely, fundamentally ridiculous. (NB: I would feel worse about the spoilers to follow if a) most people interested in this had not at least seen the TV series already, and perhaps read the novel, and b) if there was anything much to spoil.)

Which problem to tackle first? Ah, yes, the vaunted “time travel” hook. Imagine you’re a living human being in the early 21^st (or late 20^th) century, and a genius comes along offering you the chance to sleep through the next 2000 or so years. Sure, it’s an untested cryogenic procedure that they estimate will have a small, say 1~3% failure rate, but hey, it’s worth it to see the future, right? Wrong. Virtually no one would agree with this, because it’s bananas. Let’s leave aside the small but—I think you’ll agree—critically important chance you could go from being alive to being dead due to equipment failure, etc. There’s still the obvious opportunity cost: virtually everyone you know, all the other people who gave your life meaning, will be left behind. On top of that, why trade a world you understand for one you can’t even begin to anticipate? That sounds like a high-risk, no-return nightmare come true.

“Maybe some of the people in the ‘Mountain’ were just loners or didn’t have anyone binding them to their original time! Besides, I’ll bet you’re just angry because you didn’t figure out what was really going on!” I can hear the true believers crowing triumphantly, and you’re right—I certainly didn’t guess where Crouch was going with his story. I also utterly failed to hypothesize that all the characters were made out of cottage cheese, and would have been just as surprised to hear that was the case—why? Because neither the cottage cheese hypothesis nor the “let’s go into cryogenic status for a couple thousand years ‘to save the human race’” make any sense at all. So, even if it were the case (and it’s not!) that plenty of people would join Pilcher and gamble on this bonkers plan, there’s still a major problem with the salvific overtones of Pilcher’s mission. He claims the human genome is degrading (do you know what that means? Funny, I don’t either) due to environmental problems, so they can just sleep through a few millennia and emerge to restart the human race, once all that environmental stuff clears up. Hey you, true believers—how’s he going to do that with less than 1000 people? Genetically speaking, I’ve heard from reputable sources (like Gaius Baltar!) that you need a lot more genetic diversity to avoid extinction. Pilcher was enough of a Brainiac to figure out the human race was doomed, but didn’t consider the long-term implications of a population that is too small? Doubtful. And besides, nobody acts “to save the human race” in the abstract, they act to save those important to them personally. The idea of joining Pilcher’s little time capsule goes against everything we know of human nature.

“You’re missing the point—the time travel thing is just the initial premise. The real story starts in the town—it’s all about the people trying to figure out what’s wrong in the world!” True enough, but that brings up all the other problems in the story that I just can’t get beyond, disbelief-wise. Exhibit A: the aberrations. Supposedly the product of evolution and the “degrading” of the human genetic profile, in less than 2000 years humankind has transformed into the ‘ultimate killing machine’? Please. It’s taken humankind like a gazillion years just to get rid of their tails, and we still have a little bone thingy! But practically overnight, the remnants of humanity have morphed into lethal predators? That’s just a ridiculous idea. That being said, in the novels we get rather vague descriptions of monsters with talons, etc., and can visualize them how we wish (that’s one of the advantages of the medium of the written word, and Crouch takes advantage of that medium to play certain tricks that would never work in a visual medium, like having the enigmatic scout turn out to be a character we already know). But in the TV show, we got this. Compare these two images next to each other, and tell me they’re not practically the same!

Somebody get "Abby" an appointment with a dentist!

Go Go Power Sheriff Burke!

It’s time to tackle Exhibit B: the town itself. Why rebuild a town? Pilcher claims it’s to ease the transition, but why, in the name of all that’s holy, did they waste time recording cricket noises and make street signs and useless crap? They’re preparing for an unknown world, but they waste all these resources on ephemera due to one idiot’s fantasy that people might be upset about the world once they wake up? For the record, Pilcher was wrong anyway, because when people did start to commit suicide in droves, it was the incredible loss of everyone they knew and loved, not the thought of no more white picket fences or the knowledge that the world was harsher now, that threw them into despair. The town makes no sense, but (I presume) Blake Crouch wanted to create a dystopian environment and perhaps didn’t care too much about the verisimilitude along the way. Still, at least in the books the town situation has some depth, as does the quest to find out the truth; in the TV series, it’s devolved into nothing more than a ridiculous high school Lord of the Flies-esque drorror (drama + horror) story (one bereft of the main protagonist, no less!). Ugh.

When Matt Dillon, as Ethan Burke, has his cathartic “I Am Legend” Neville/Will Smith moment—another gross distortion of the original literary work on which it is based, in point of fact!—I wanted to kick the entire writing and production team responsible for the crap-fest of the TV series down the elevator shaft with him (especially the ultimate scapegoat, Hollywood punching bag M. Night Shyamalan). But if the show had had mercy on its viewers and crawled off somewhere to die an ignominious death, it would’ve been palatable; instead, we discover that the teenagers are running the town now. I mean, I’ve seen Between, another show centered around the Lord of the Flies framework; if I wanted terrible non-entertainment, I could get a festering heap-full from Between, and certainly don’t need a double helping from Wayward Pines.

In conclusion, despite my utter inability to suspend disbelief with the ‘scientific’ elements of the Wayward Pines trilogy, I will freely admit to enjoying some aspects of the books, and would even go so far as to dub them “not terrible”. Not so the TV series, which tramples on the ho-hum story and turns it into something truly, unforgettably dumb. And by the way, how could they humanize Pam, of all people? If I were Crouch, I would definitely be egging the houses of everyone involved in the TV series!

Finally, a call to rhetorical arms: there are apparently thousands of genuine fans out there for both the mediocre novels and the dreadful TV series, so my challenge to you is: what’s the appeal? I’m willing to listen, and/or possibly even be convinced I’m wrong about all this, if you’re persuasive enough!

The Math(s):

Objective assessment: 5/10 for the books, 3/10 for the TV series

Bonuses:  +1 for sometimes quite cleverly using medium-specific tricks (books)

+1 for a reasonably good job casting the TV show (Terrence Howard as the ice cream-loving Sheriff Pope was a great touch, though (surprise surprise!), the show made no attempt at all to recreate the book’s description of Burke and Pope clashing, one of the highlights of the book)

Penalties: -1 for the sheer ridiculousness of all the initial and continuing premises of the story (books and TV series both), -1 for taking a silly idea and worsening it into a high school drorror (TV series)

Nerd coefficient: 5/10 (“problematic”) for books, 2/10 (“really, really bad”) for TV series

[If these scores seem low, you’re not imagining it—they are. See here for details!]

Zhaoyun, champion of the hard truths for literally dozens of readers worldwide, has been reviewing much better science fiction and fantasy literature and films for Nerds of a Feather since 2013.