There are only a few days left until the spooky season begins, and horror takes the number one spot on everyone’s list. And thanks to Hulu, you may find yourself rewatching one of M. Night Shyamalan‘s best films and definitely his scariest: The Sixth Sense, which will stream on Hulu this October.
October is one of those months when priorities change, and almost everyone likes to watch scary films. We can’t think of a better movie than Shyamalan’s official debut in Hollywood, the movie that landed him the position of being “the new Spielberg” in the late 1990s, and a categorization that has unfortunately faded out in the past decade.
The Sixth Sense follows Cole Sear, a nine-year-old boy who lives alone with his single mother and who gets haunted by nightmarish visions all the time. His social skills are the opposite of good, but child psychologist Malcolm Crowe arrives just in time to help him deal with the situation. The problem is that Cole confesses to his new therapist that he can see “dead people,” but Crowe disregards Cole’s honest reveal. However, when he digs deeper, he realizes that the boy may actually be telling the truth, and this truth may be closer to Crowe than he thought.
The film was a blockbuster in 1999, falling behind Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. It was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and it worked as a perfect business card for Shyamalan, who would see his career catapulted due to his clever use of twists in a genre that hadn’t had many of those in the ’90s.
Many would say the value of The Sixth Sense lies in the power of the film’s unpredictable twist ending. But in retrospect, they will find that there’s more than just the shock of finding out that… Well, you just wait until October. The Sixth Sense is an extraordinary exercise in horror, with the classic tropes applied to a slow-burn story that gets spookier every minute. If someone says they weren’t scared by The Sixth Sense, they probably had their eyes covered when the ghost of a little girl shows up to claim justice.
Shyamalan’s Catalog of Scary Films Could Work as a Halloween Marathon
To many fans of the filmmaker, they know it wasn’t the same for M. Night Shyamalan again. The director never replicated the effect of his horror magnum opus. However, his following films were great executions of other genres, where he almost always incorporated the final twist as his greatest resource. Sometimes, it worked, and sometimes, it just didn’t. But one thing audiences can trust him with is that he can achieve thrills like few modern directors do.
For those familiar with everything he did afterward, they know Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense isn’t the only horror film he ever made. In fact, a revisit through his catalog may just be the perfect opportunity to make this October a very spooky month. These are his spookiest films (to be complemented by a pretty good TV show called Servant, streaming on Apple TV+):
|
Title |
Year of Release |
Where to Stream(Rent |
|---|---|---|
|
The Sixth Sense |
1999 |
Hulu (soon) |
|
Signs |
2002 |
Max |
|
The Village |
2004 |
Prime Video |
|
The Visit |
2015 |
Max |
|
Knock at the Cabin |
2023 |
The Roku Channel |