The Big Picture · Review · Top Five · Roundtable · Interview
February 3, 2023/ 92 min/ Sean Fennessey · Elric Kane · Brian Saur
Sean Fennessey talks Knock at the Cabin with Pure Cinema's Elric Kane and Brian Saur, ranks his own Shyamalan five, trades a deep-cut double feature for each, then sits down with M. Night Shyamalan.
19 films across 4 segments.
AI-generated This episode was transcribed and analyzed with AI models. The matches aren't perfect — expect the occasional misheard title or a link to the wrong film.
‘Knock at the Cabin’with Elric Kane and Brian Saur
Shyamalan's 15th feature, from Paul Tremblay's novel: two dads and their daughter are held hostage in a cabin and told to sacrifice one of their own to stop the apocalypse. The trio single out the craft (extreme close-ups on distorted vintage lenses, blocking in a confined space, violence kept off-screen) and agree Dave Bautista's gentle-giant Leonard is what holds it together. Shyamalan diverges from the book's ending.
Sean's Shyamalan Top Fivehis personal ranking, best first
No. 1. The overlooked one that foretold and subverted the superhero era, with one of his better closing beats.
No. 3. Sean's true Knock at the Cabin double: a family stuck in a house as something vast happens outside.
The Shyamalan double features one deep cut per host, per film
Pairs with The Happening. A 1978 Australian eco-horror (writer Everett De Roche) about a feuding couple whose beach trip turns on them as nature takes revenge.
Pairs with The Happening. Geoff Murphy's New Zealand film: Bruno Lawrence wakes to an apparently empty world and slowly learns why.
Pairs with The Visit. Pete Walker's British shocker about a grandmother released from a mental hospital fifteen years after a cannibalism conviction, and not, it turns out, reformed.
Pairs with The Visit. Lamont Johnson's snowbound thriller: a pregnant widow (Patty Duke) arrives to meet her late husband's very strange mother.
Pairs with The Village as its mirror inverse. A modern couple (David Niven, Deborah Kerr) is pulled into a French vineyard's pagan sacrifice. Sharon Tate's screen debut.
Pairs with The Village. Walter Hill's Louisiana-swamp survival film: Guardsmen at war with Cajuns, the outside looking in rather than the inside looking out.
Pairs with Signs. Eduardo Sánchez's post-Blair Witch creature film: abductees capture one of the aliens that once took them, then realize they've called the rest.
Pairs with Signs. Christopher Walken as author Whitley Strieber, whose remote cabin becomes the site of a subtly terrifying alien home invasion.
Pairs with Unbreakable, the non-superhero version. Peter Weir's plane-crash survivor drama, Jeff Bridges as a man who believes he can't die.
Pairs with Unbreakable. The 1999 amateur-superhero comedy that plays better in the Marvel-fatigue era than it did on release.
In conversation
The book came to him to produce; he refused the ending, the project died, then the rights returned and he made his own version. On casting Bautista off his Blade Runner 2049 scene, chopping the characters' heads out of frame for a sense of detachment, and shooting on film so he could reshoot toward the pitch he wanted.
Hamaguchi's film was an influence while he wrote; Hamaguchi later sat on his Berlin Film Festival jury.
His last great thing: he loved how far it spun the tone and felt it was, in his words, cooked enough.
Also mentioned raised along the way
More Shyamalan The HappeningLady in the WaterSplitGlassOld
In passing M3GANBlade Runner 2049Guardians of the GalaxyThe Night of the HunterThe LighthouseTake ShelterNot Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!PatrickFortressRoad GamesGoodbye Pork PieUnder Siege 2: Dark TerritoryThe Taking of Deborah LoganOne on OneLipstickThe Last American HeroCape FearKinjite: Forbidden SubjectsThe White BuffaloThe Guns of Navarone10 to MidnightHappy Birthday to MeThe Wicker ManAlienThe Blair Witch ProjectWolfenThe HungerThe Last WavePicnic at Hanging RockWitnessSchindler's ListJurassic ParkThe Big LebowskiStars at NoonBeau TravailHard to KillMarked for Death
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