The Sixth Sense (1999)
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
Following an unexpected tragedy, child psychologist Malcolm Crowe meets a nine year old boy named Cole Sear, who is hiding a dark secret.
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What critics compared The Sixth Sense to
It’s hard to overstate what a big deal Shyamalan was in the years that followed the success of The Sixth Sense (1999), or how hard his reputation tanked after The Lady in the Water (2006) and the misunderstood drive-in homage The Happening (2008).
Willis’s Malcolm Crowe in The Sixth Sense missed a doozy.)
In the fictionalized version of this story, his new film, “Glass,” would complete the return to pop-culture grace from which the director fell in the years after “The Sixth Sense” in 1999, years in which movies like “The Village,” “The Happening,” “The Last Airbender,” and “After Earth” were rightly or wrongly mocked into oblivion.
In 1999's The Sixth Sense, still the director's most accomplished film, it was his care in exploring the psyche of little Cole Sear, not the dramatic twist ending, that established him as a major talent to watch (even if the twist got all the credit).
Long ago, the director displayed a knack for teasing out tension, and it worked just enough times (The Sixth Sense, Signs, The Village if we’re being generous) that producers kept hoping for more.
Followers of his work were misguided to ever anoint him the next Spielberg, which many did after The Sixth Sense, but he’s also more talented than the punch line he became in the mid-aughts.
Likewise, the young actor playing her son (David Dorfman) is extremely effective and though his preternatural ability to see things he really shouldn't be able to is perhaps too reminiscent of Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense, he is nonetheless a suitably creepy addition to the story.
This Westernized, subtitle-free version comprises a pastiche of horror hooks, from pretty, petrified teens (lifted from any slasher epic or Don't Say a Word) to the standard creepy moppet (via The Shining and The Sixth Sense) to boob-tube bogeys (à la Videodrome and Poltergeist) to some good ol' family fun akin to that of V.C. Andrews (Flowers in the Attic).
Verbinski didn't need to steal imagery from any other movie than the one he was remaking, but nonetheless references to films such as "The Sixth Sense" and "Psycho" serve only to distance the audience.
One is reminded of "The Sixth Sense" and "The Others," particularly in the sense that, like those films, "The Ring" always seems to have more on its mind than its surface-level ghost story.
It’s a slippery, murky, gray-green film, full of borrowings from “Twin Peaks,” “The Sixth Sense,” “Nightmare on Elm Street,” “Poltergeist” and who knows what-all else.
In her race against time to solve the mystery behind "The Ring" (and please don't expect me to specify what 'The Ring' actually is), Rachel enlists the help of not only her longtime friend and colleague Noah (Martin Henderson), but also her young son Aidan (David Dorfman), who, like the Hayley Joel Osment role in "The Sixth Sense" and the little girl in "Stir of Echoes," seems to have a gift for communicating with those in a different plane of existence, although he really doesn't want anyone to think so.
There are many other echoes of screen horror here: clips of Maria Bava’s Black Sabbath; portents of domestic madness in the mode of Polanski’s Repulsion; a general sense of claustrophobia that’s more than a little reminiscent of The Exorcist; a use of grey paint and an overall color-leeched palette to rival The Sixth Sense; and as female-centric psychological horror, it also recalls the evocation of shadow-steeped nocturnal anxiety so chillingly staged in Robert Wise’s The Haunting (63).
Look past the horror trope of the Satanic or disturbed little boy seen in The Omen, The Ring, and The Sixth Sense, and you'll find a child struggling to deal with the loss of a father he never knew, and Amelia's subsequent, deeply buried resentment toward him—in a completely normal way .
Wiseman didn't get the memo because he is Davis' equal in every scene here and is living the part rather than saying his lines - Harvey Stephens in The Omen and Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense have some serious competition.
Maybe M. Night Shyamalan is due some cash, because "Ghost Town" is essentially "The Sixth Sense" with the hilarious British misanthrope from the original version of "The Office" and "Extras," whose catchphrase would be "I see dead people, and I wish I could serve them all with restraining orders."
Gagging on elements of Ghost and The Sixth Sense, the film finds Pincus dogged at every step by spirits with unfinished business on Earth.
His directorial efforts, The Trigger Effect and Secret Window had their share of attributes but neither stood a candle to his underrated Stir of Echoes, which was the ghost story everyone should have seen in 1999 instead of The Sixth Sense.
It also owes a bit to a much more recent—and more serious-minded—work, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999).
Pincus maintains a tightly controlled world of solitude, until he goes in for a routine colonoscopy only to emerge with a parodied version of "The Sixth Sense."
During the opening minutes of the film—an occasionally effective mash-up of Ghost, The Sixth Sense, and The Frighteners—Gervais is nearly mute as Bertram Pincus, D.D.S. , a dentist who enjoys his work because it allows him the peace and quiet that comes with sticking cotton balls into his patients' mouths.
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It’s here that Perkins rises above merely paying homage to the aforementioned ’90s horror films and channels another one to which he’s more indirectly indebted: M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense. The twist in Longlegs, though, exists more at a thematic level than as a plot point. Perkins slowly and slyly adjusts the stakes of the film until they become unmistakably different from where they began.
Peele’s homework for his sensational star, Lupita Nyong’o, included, according to Entertainment Weekly, “The Birds,” “The Shining,” “Dead Again,” the original “Funny Games,” “The Sixth Sense,” “A Tale of Two Sisters,” “Let the Right One In,” “The Babadook” and “It Follows.”
Having hit it out of the park with his debut film, “The Sixth Sense,” Shyamalan has spent the rest of his career trying to come up with a “Seventh Sense” or “Eighth Sense” or “203rd Sense” or something.
Before filming on Us began, Peele gave Nyong’o a list of 10 horror movies to watch to prepare for the role: Dead Again , The Shining , The Babadook , It Follows , A Tale of Two Sisters , The Birds , Funny Games , Martyrs , Let the Right One In , and The Sixth Sense .
Films Jordan Peele had his cast watch before making 'Us' “Dead Again” “The Shining” “The Babadook” “It Follows” “A Tale of Two Sisters” “The Birds” “Funny Games” "Martyrs” “Let the Right One In” “The Sixth Sense”…
Alex takes that energy and turns it into a creepy, physical manifestation as his other self that marks one of the best turns by a child actor since The Sixth Sense .
With supernatural dread lifted directly from the likes of Stir of Echoes and The Sixth Sense , The Black Phone features a breakthrough performance from Madeleine McGraw while Ethan Hawke’s hauntingly memorable turn as The Grabber is felt in a hair-raising sense; like someone who has unknowingly snuck up behind you and waits in your peripheral for that dramatic reveal.
While some of the spoken lines defy logic (one character seems obsessed with his memories of Finney's pitching arm), each seemingly insignificant detail comes together in an exhilarating climax, reminiscent of early M. Knight Shyamalan films like Signs and The Sixth Sense.
Relying too heavily on quick jolts and jump scares, some moments of The Black Phone feel like the more PG-13 moments of The Sixth Sense .
And the supernatural elements of “The Sixth Sense” (and numerous other horror flicks).
It also seems to help that Split is not a puzzle movie, that nebulous subgenre inspired by The Sixth Sense and Christopher Nolan's Memento, which rewards the viewer for piecing together the plot from a slow dribble of ambiguous information.
Ever since he made “The Sixth Sense,” his one good movie and far and away his biggest hit, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan has been attempting to rekindle the fire.
Stark and soaked in dead-silent tension, the short recurring sequences build a sense of dread that’s woefully absent from the rest of the movie, an eerie reminder of Shyamalan’s no-kid-gloves approach to childhood trauma in The Sixth Sense and other films.
Nevertheless, the more significant and spoiler-proof astonishment here is that Shyamalan — after nearly a decade-long creative (and sometimes commercial) drought — has reclaimed much of the formal precision and conceptual daring that made his earlier pictures, “The Sixth Sense” and “Unbreakable” chief among them, so memorably creepy.
But Split does unify Shyamalan’s films in other ways, specifically through its three biggest themes, which thread throughout most of the other movies he’s written and directed, from The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable to The Village and The Visit .
It's the sort of outlandish setup one might expect from The Sixth Sense mastermind M. Night Shyamalan, and thanks to inspired turns from Taylor-Joy and Scottish actor James McAvoy, Split is often as engrossing as it is implausible.
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Bayona's moves are deft, the atmosphere oozes with anxiety and grief, but the big payoff - like the big payoff in The Sixth Sense, another film The Orphanage has more than a bit in common with - never comes.
It may take more than one viewing to decide whether you prefer the fantastic or realistic interpretation; like "The Sixth Sense," this film demands to be seen more than once.
All due respect to "The Sixth Sense" (which I think is a nifty movie), but this isn't exactly, "I See Dead Children."
It never achieves the type of thrills to satisfy hardcore horror fans but it will appeal to audiences who enjoyed films such as The Sixth Sense, The Others and del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone.
The incredibly unsatisfying conclusion only exacerbates the film's various problems, and it's clear that comparisons to superior (yet similarly-themed) efforts such as The Others and The Sixth Sense are entirely unwarranted.
Guillermo del Toro has taught us this, first by directing the chilling "Devil's Backbone" and now by producing something simply called "The Orphanage," which is as tingly and creepy a ghost story as you could wish for, recalling classics like "Poltergeist," "The Sixth Sense," and "The Others."
Here he has fashioned a tonal and stylistic tribute to the eerie kid- fright of "The Spirit of the Beehive," "The Sixth Sense" and to Hitchcock.
The Sixth Sense casts a long shadow over movies like this, and sometimes The Others can't resist borrowing a few twists and turns from that earlier film.
Were it not for the huge and surprising success of 1999's "The Sixth Sense", this horror-thriller would not have been conceived, written nor green-lighted.
Like The Sixth Sense, The Others relies more on atmosphere than standard horror "beats."
Make the story scarier and more unnerving than The Sixth Sense — but do it without any gory or gross imagery; almost without special effects.
By taking healthy doses of "The Shining", "The Sixth Sense" and Alfred Hitchcock and mixing thoroughly, Mr. Amenábar creates a haunted house that is at once familiar and unique.