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Over the past six years, M. Night Shyamalan has proved himself to be one of Hollywood’s greatest storytellers.  Born to Hindu parents in Pondicherry, India, young Shyamalan listened intently to the traditional religious stories his mother and father told him as a child.  When his family returned to the United States and made Pennsylvania their home, Night attended a Catholic elementary school and went on to Episcopal Academy high school in the 1980s (Giles 49).  Out of this varied religious milieu, his infatuation with spirituality grew strong.  As a filmmaker with Catholic, Protestant, and Hindu ideologies under his belt, Shyamalan employs a pattern of profound religious thought that echoes throughout each of his popular supernatural thrillers.

Before Shyamalan took Hollywood by storm with his 1999 blockbuster The Sixth Sense, he wrote and directed two smaller features; the title of the first, Praying With Anger, expresses a religious connotation all on its own (Giles 52).  The second, called Wide Awake, chronicles a Catholic schoolboy’s search for God after the death of his grandfather (Giles 53).  Neither movie fared well at the box office, but they helped to establish the spiritual style for which Shyamalan’s more popular films are so well known.  In addition, both films explore the concept of family.  Praying With Anger follows a young American questioning his roots, while Wide Awake deals with death and mourning within an extended family.  All of these themes resound clearly within each of Shyamalan’s later films.

In his first big hit, The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan explores the power of prayer and communication.  The audience first sees main character Cole Sear walking into a Catholic church, where he proceeds to recite the beginning of Psalm 130: “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.”  According to Biblical scholar Adele Reinhartz,
“the psalm as a whole may be interpreted in two ways: as the lament of
the dead soul who seeks forgiveness and the ability either to rise up
from the depths or to rest there peacefully; or, metaphorically, as the
lament of an individual who seeks God’s help and forgiveness in his or
her time of despair” (83).
In essence, this psalm sets the mood for the entire film.  Not only is it young Cole’s cry for God to deliver him from his curse of “seeing dead people,” but it also seconds as the plea of those very ghosts which haunt him daily.  In order to rest eternally, each ghost needs Cole to help them seal some unfinished part of their past.  When Cole realizes his purpose, he finds that he is a much happier boy.  This simple misunderstanding is what drove him to fear the ghosts in the first place.

Shyamalan asserts that “everyone learning to communicate is…the point of the movie.  The mother is trying to talk to the son, the husband is trying to talk to his wife, and all of these ghosts are trying to talk to Cole” (“Reflections from the Set”).  At the very start of the film, the audience watches the emotionally distraught Vincent shoot Bruce Willis’ character, Malcolm, in the stomach.  Later, Shyamalan reveals that Vincent suffered the same curse as Cole when he was a child.  Vincent saw dead people as well.  His parents sent him to Malcolm for psychological help, but Malcolm brushed him off and simply diagnosed him with “mood swings.”  This grave miscommunication results in Malcolm’s death, an event that sets up the movie’s surprise ending and explains why Cole and Malcolm share such a close connection.

Throughout The Sixth Sense, Cole’s mother, Lynn, resents her failure to affectively communicate with her son.  She knows that something is troubling him, but she cannot convince him to discuss the problem.  Lynn first begins to worry about Cole after bullies lock him in a haunted cupboard at a birthday party, where he is physically tortured by a ghost.  The bruises on Cole’s body puzzle Lynn, but he offers her no real explanation.  Then, during a conversation at the dinner table, Lynn asks Cole if he took the bumblebee pendant inherited from her mother.  Cole denies the accusation over and over again.  He implies that the pendant has been “misplaced” by someone else – meaning one of his ghosts.  Frustrated by this cryptic reply, Lynn grows angry and sends Cole to his room.  Later on that night, Cole is awakened by his mother talking in her sleep.  She shouts his name repeatedly, begging him to tell her “what’s wrong.”  Cole finally breaks down near the end of the movie, after he has helped several of the once-feared ghosts find peace.  Since he has conquered his fears, Cole explains his “sixth sense” to his mother while they are stuck in traffic amidst a horrible car accident.  She bursts into tears, overjoyed at this earnest connection with her once distant son.  Shyamalan describes this climactic scene as “a resolution so complete and so fulfilling that you think the movie’s over” (“Reflections from the Set”).

But there remains one final coda.  Malcolm cannot seem to relax, despite the fact that he has successfully helped Cole overcome his fears.  In a shocking postscript, Malcolm realizes that he himself is a ghost, something brought to his attention only after his relationship with Cole has subsided.  He died that night when Vincent’s bullet pierced his side, and he never had the chance to tell his wife how much he loved her.  In one last attempt to set things straight, Malcolm pours his heart out as his wife sleeps.  At last, each character attains a kind of divine peace.

Cole’s lamentable prayer at the beginning of The Sixth Sense sets the tone for the entire film.  The remainder of the movie takes place only after Cole opens a channel of communication with God.  After Cole communicates with God, he gradually discovers ways to communicate with the other characters in the film and eventually teaches them to do the same.  He cries out not only for himself, but also for all of those characters, living or dead, with whom he so deeply empathizes; and God answers that cry.

In 2000, just one year after the colossal success of The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan released Unbreakable, a dark film about a man who escapes a fatal train wreck miraculously unharmed.  It is perhaps the only movie in which Shyamalan employs a symbolic Christ figure, sole train wreck survivor David Dunne [Bruce Willis]. Unbreakable especially explores the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, which is the mystery that God, the divine, came down from heaven and became man in the person of Jesus Christ (Drum np).  Within the comic bookish world of Unbreakable, “the divine” indicates the idea of superheroes.  Elijah Price [Samuel L. Jackson], David’s eccentric comic-loving friend, truly believes that “superheroes walk the earth.”  In Elijah’s mind, David is the human incarnation of a godly superhero.

Throughout the film, Elijah strives to convince David that he is, in fact, a superhero walking the earth.  Eventually David realizes that he has never really been sick, and that he possesses a rather “superhuman” strength and durability.  He can bench press nearly 350 pounds, and he escaped the carnage of the Eastrail #177 crash completely unscathed.  At first, David believes that Elijah’s superhero theory is absolutely ridiculous.  While on the other hand, some pieces of Elijah’s hypothesis fill the empty spaces within David’s despondent life.  Is he really a hero?  Or is he just a man?  David continually struggles with his own identity, much like the Jesus character struggles with his identity in Martin Scorcese’s The Last Temptation of Christ.

Finally, David decides to trust Elijah’s instincts and take on the role of a “superhero.”  Elijah tells him to “go to where people are.”  David heads to the train station, the very place where this heroic revelation began.  He descends the staircase and walks amidst the crowd of hurried travelers.  Once he reaches the center of the station, he stretches both of his arms out into a cruciform position, which allows passersby to repeatedly bump into him.  At the touch of each new individual, David catches a glimpse of their last immoral deed.  Some of the encounters cause him to wince in pain.  In the true likeness of Christ, David takes on the sins of his fellow man and sets out to right them.

One particular vision strikes at David’s core: a man invades a private home, murders the father, tortures the mother, and holds the two daughters hostage.  Determined to right this horrible wrong, David finds the house and enters to search for the killer.  He finds the two girls tied up in a bathroom, and quickly releases them.  They head for safety as David hunts for the assailant.   While David searches over a balcony outside of the house, the attacker sneaks up behind him and pushes him into the family pool.  David immediately panics; his only weakness is water.  In a fit of coughing, David is consumed by the black tarp surrounding the pool.  It pushes him deeper into the water, and he struggles violently for an escape.  At last, David sees a long rod appear in the water.  He grabs hold of it and is pulled to safety by the two young girls he rescued previously.  David clutches the side of the pool and pushes himself up onto dry land as triumphant music swells in the background.  At one point, he thought his life was over.  Though when he surfaces unharmed, he realizes that his life has just begun.

This pivotal point in the film reflects the Christian ideal of baptism.  In baptism, the individual dies with Christ and then rises to new life.  St. Paul writes,
“Or are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?  We were indeed buried with him through baptism into
death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the
Father, we too might live in newness of life” (The New American Bible, Romans
6:3-4).
When the attacker pushes David into that pool, he arrives at least very close to death.  Darkness surrounds him, and he sinks deeper and deeper into the abyss.  At last, a light appears, a light which leads him to safety and a new life, much like the light of Christ leads Christians to new life.  After David emerges from the pool, he engages in a brutal battle with the killer he initially set out to find and thus begins his new life as a true superhero.  Indeed, death and resurrection are familiar comic book themes.  Expert Trina Robbins testifies that “this is something that happens to the hero in myth and also symbolically happens to the hero in comic books, when he’s the true hero, and that is that he dies and is reborn” (“Comic Books and Superheroes”).

Two years after Unbreakable flopped at the box office, Shyamalan set out to shock the world with another emotionally charged blockbuster about family, fear, and faith.  “Like all of Shyamalan’s movies, Signs is obsessed not just with the unknown, but with family…and shot through with the unmistakable admonition that we must draw whoever is near and dear to us even nearer” (Giles 51).  Shyamalan centers the storyline on a former Episcopal priest named Graham Hess, his young son Morgan and daughter Bo, and his younger brother Merrill.  Graham’s wife is missing from the picture.  She was suddenly killed in a car accident only six months prior to the events in Signs.  Graham’s broken family has caused him to question his faith and abandon his calling as a minister.  He no longer prays or attends church services.  He has removed all religious symbols from his home.  He grows frustrated whenever a former parishioner calls him “Father.”

Despite Graham’s greatest attempts to escape his faith, the God’s very presence seems to constantly surround him.  In one of the opening shots of the film, the viewer sees that Graham has removed a crucifix from the wall.  Nevertheless, the sunlight has faded the wall so that the outline of the cross remains there.  Throughout the movie, this godly presence haunts Graham.  He tries over and over again to run away, but God always seems to follow close behind him.  Even though Graham is faithless, God remains faithful.
“This saying is trustworthy:  If we have died with him we shall also live with
him; if we persevere, we shall also reign with him.  But if we deny him, he will
deny us.  If we are unfaithful, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself”
(2 Timothy 2: 11-13).

In addition to this “shadow” of a cross on his wall, Graham soon finds himself surrounded by crop circles and other eerie “coincidences,” all signs that seem to point to something, although he is never quite sure to what.  After hostile aliens invade his home, Graham has a hard time believing that life could get any worse.  Not only is he and his family mourning the recent death of their wife and mother, but the intruding aliens have caused his son to suffer a severe asthma attack.  The more Graham meditates on what is happening to his family, the more he begins to realize that God must have something to do with it.  While Graham is locked in the basement, holding his ill son in his arms, he looks up and says, “I hate you.  Don’t do this to me again.  Not again.”  God infuriates him; he wonders how such a “loving” god could possibly bring his family any more grief.  “Though Graham is angry with God, he has had to admit the divine back into his reality…Here is [his] first step back towards faith” (Johnston 137).

In the end, Graham’s heated exchange with God proves to be in vain.  The alien attack subsides, and Merrill helps Graham carry the asthmatic Morgan upstairs for his medicine.  Yet one alien has managed to stay behind and captures Morgan as he rests on the couch.  The alien sprays poisonous gas into young Morgan’s nostrils as the rest of the family looks on in terror.  Graham flashes back to his last conversation with his wife before her death.  He remembers two of her vital last words: “Swing away.”  Graham repeats this phrase to Merrill, who immediately grabs his record-breaking baseball bat from its plaque on the wall and moves cautiously towards the creature.  He smashes the bat into the alien’s body, finally knocking it against a dresser, where one of Bo’s many glasses of “contaminated” water tips over and burns the creature’s skin.  Once again, Shyamalan uses water as a purifying substance.  Merrill continues to smash water onto the alien with his bat, and this eventually kills the creature.  The pure, crystalline water stamps out the world’s evil, much like the waters of baptism stamp out the sins of the Christian.  Fortunately, Morgan’s asthma prevents the alien’s poison from spreading into his lungs.  He awakes and asks his father “Did someone save me?”  Graham answers with tears in his eyes, “I think someone did.”

Suddenly, everything falls together.  The suffering of Graham and his family serves a distinct purpose.  If that car had never hit Graham’s wife, he would not have known how to defeat the alien invaders.  Graham realizes that suffering is a necessary part of life, and that perhaps “there are no coincidences.”  Christ suffered on the cross, so must humans suffer with their own personal crosses.  Suffering strengthens the individual, and something good will come out of it in the end.

Shyamalan’s latest film, The Village, focuses on human suffering as well.  The film opens with a graveside service for elder August Nicholson’s young son.  Each of the elders have lost a loved one to a human act of violence in “the towns,” so they banded together and moved out into the rustic village in order to preserve innocence for their descendants.  Clearly, the early death of the young Nicholson boy proves that one cannot possibly escape human suffering or heartache.  Just as the Hess family discovers in Signs, the people of The Village also discover that suffering is an inevitable part of life.

Human immorality and the suffering that results both flow from original sin, which is the “hereditary stain with which we are born on account of our origin or descent from Adam” (Harent np).  Humans are born with a natural inclination towards wrongdoing.  Each and every human being sins, and those sins cause suffering for themselves as well as for others.  “All of us once lived among them in the desires of our flesh, following the wishes of the flesh and the impulses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like the rest” (Ephesians 2:3).  According to the doctrine of original sin, no one is truly innocent.  Everyone is naturally prone to “wrath,” and thus suffering at the hands of others is an inescapable curse.

Shyamalan illustrates the doctrine of original sin brilliantly in the character of Noah [Adrien Brody], a mentally challenged young man who is regarded as a genuine innocent of the village.  Generally, Noah is very gentle and playful.  He adores Ivy Walker [Bryce Dallas Howard], a blind girl fond of his company.  When Noah learns that Ivy is engaged to shy Lucius Hunt [Joaquin Phoenix], he grows envious.  Brought to tears by the thought of a love lost, Noah enters Lucius’ workshop and stabs him twice with his knife.  Lucius falls to the ground in agony as Noah walks away, leaving him there to die.

Noah, the one person whom the villagers view as most innocent, instead turns out to be the cruelest.  Despite his childlike naivety and perceived “innocence,” Noah cannot escape the curse of original sin and human corruption.  In fact, Noah most likely views his criminal act as something good.  He injures Lucius out of his love for Ivy, and he recognizes that love is good.  Clearly Noah is not an inherently good person, but rather a flawed human being naturally inclined to sin.  “Just as through one person sin entered the world, and through sin, death, and thus death came to all, inasmuch as all sinned” (Romans 5:12).  In a world where such capacity for evil can be so cleverly disguised by innocence, the ideal village of the elders is doomed to failure.

Whether the focus is communication with God or the origins of human suffering, M. Night Shyamalan is a master at crafting films out of faith.  All of his films possess remarkably Christian values, despite the fact that Shyamalan is a self-proclaimed Hindu merely infatuated with the Christian Church.  Shyamalan teaches moviegoers that God answers prayers.  He teaches that the divine can and does exist on this earth.  He shows that God’s presence faithfully surrounds even the faithless, that miracles really do happen, and that suffering is a natural aspect of life capable of strengthening the human spirit.  Unfortunately, the spirituality that exists in Shyamalan’s films is often grossly overlooked by fans and critics alike.  Most people go to the movies in search of mindless entertainment.  M. Night Shyamalan creates entertaining movies that speak profoundly to the core of humanity, and oftentimes to the core of Christianity.  Therein hides his talent, his mysticism, and his genius.

Works Cited

“Comic Books and Superheroes.”  Unbreakable.  Dir. M. Night Shyamalan.  Perfs. Bruce
Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Robin Wright Penn.  Vista Series DVD Disc 2.
Touchstone Pictures, 2000.

Drum, Walter.  “The Incarnation.”  Catholic Encyclopedia.  2003.  New Advent.  13
December, 2005.  <www.newadvent.org/cathen/07706… >

Giles, Jeff.  “Out of This World.”  Newsweek.  5 August, 2002.

Harent, S.  “Original Sin.”  Catholic Encyclopedia.  2003.  New Advent.  13 December,
2005.  <www.newadvent.org/cathen/11312… >

Johnston, Robert K.  Useless Beauty: Ecclesiastes through the Lens of Contemporary
Film.  Grand Rapids, MI: BakerAcademic, 2004.

The New American Bible.  Saint Joseph Edition.  New York: Catholic Book Publishing
Co., 1992.

“Reflections from the Set.”  The Sixth Sense.  Dir. M. Night Shyamalan.  Perfs. Bruce
Willis, Haley Joel Osment, Toni Collette.  Vista Series DVD Disc 2.  Hollywood
Pictures, 1999.

Reinhartz, Adele.  Scripture on the Silver Screen.  Louisville, KY: Westminster John
Knox Press, 2003.

Signs.  Dir. M. Night Shyamalan.  Perfs. Mel Gibson, Joaquin Phoenix, Cherry Jones.
Vista Series DVD.  Touchstone Pictures, 2002.

The Sixth Sense.  Dir. M. Night Shyamalan.  Perfs. Bruce Willis, Haley Joel Osment,
Toni Collette.  Vista Series DVD.  Hollywood Pictures, 1999.

Unbreakable.  Dir. M. Night Shyamalan.  Perfs. Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Robin
Wright Penn.  Vista Series DVD.  Touchstone Pictures, 2000.

The Village.  Dir. M. Night Shyamalan.  Perfs. Joaquin Phoenix, Bryce Dallas Howard,
Sigourney Weaver.  Vista Series DVD.  Touchstone Pictures, 2004.

Description
Over the past six years, M. Night Shyamalan has proved himself to be one of Hollywood’s greatest storytellers.  Born to Hindu parents in Pondicherry, India, young Shyamalan listened intently to the traditional religious stories his mother and father told him as a child.  When his family returned to the United States and made Pennsylvania their home, Night attended a Catholic elementary school and went on to Episcopal Academy high school in the 1980s (Giles 49).  Out of this varied religious milieu, his infatuation with spirituality grew strong.  As a filmmaker with Catholic, Protestant, and Hindu ideologies under his belt, Shyamalan employs a pattern of profound religious thought that echoes throughout each of his popular supernatural thrillers.

Before Shyamalan took Hollywood by storm with his 1999 blockbuster The Sixth Sense, he wrote and directed two smaller features; the title of the first, Praying With Anger, expresses a religious connotation all on its own (Giles 52).  The second, called Wide Awake, chronicles a Catholic schoolboy’s search for God after the death of his grandfather (Giles 53).  Neither movie fared well at the box office, but they helped to establish the spiritual style for which Shyamalan’s more popular films are so well known.  In addition, both films explore the concept of family.  Praying With Anger follows a young American questioning his roots, while Wide Awake deals with death and mourning within an extended family.  All of these themes resound clearly within each of Shyamalan’s later films.

In his first big hit, The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan explores the power of prayer and communication.  The audience first sees main character Cole Sear walking into a Catholic church, where he proceeds to recite the beginning of Psalm 130: “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.”  According to Biblical scholar Adele Reinhartz,
“the psalm as a whole may be interpreted in two ways: as the lament of
the dead soul who seeks forgiveness and the ability either to rise up
from the depths or to rest there peacefully; or, metaphorically, as the
lament of an individual who seeks God’s help and forgiveness in his or
her time of despair” (83).
In essence, this psalm sets the mood for the entire film.  Not only is it young Cole’s cry for God to deliver him from his curse of “seeing dead people,” but it also seconds as the plea of those very ghosts which haunt him daily.  In order to rest eternally, each ghost needs Cole to help them seal some unfinished part of their past.  When Cole realizes his purpose, he finds that he is a much happier boy.  This simple misunderstanding is what drove him to fear the ghosts in the first place.

Shyamalan asserts that “everyone learning to communicate is…the point of the movie.  The mother is trying to talk to the son, the husband is trying to talk to his wife, and all of these ghosts are trying to talk to Cole” (“Reflections from the Set”).  At the very start of the film, the audience watches the emotionally distraught Vincent shoot Bruce Willis’ character, Malcolm, in the stomach.  Later, Shyamalan reveals that Vincent suffered the same curse as Cole when he was a child.  Vincent saw dead people as well.  His parents sent him to Malcolm for psychological help, but Malcolm brushed him off and simply diagnosed him with “mood swings.”  This grave miscommunication results in Malcolm’s death, an event that sets up the movie’s surprise ending and explains why Cole and Malcolm share such a close connection.

Throughout The Sixth Sense, Cole’s mother, Lynn, resents her failure to affectively communicate with her son.  She knows that something is troubling him, but she cannot convince him to discuss the problem.  Lynn first begins to worry about Cole after bullies lock him in a haunted cupboard at a birthday party, where he is physically tortured by a ghost.  The bruises on Cole’s body puzzle Lynn, but he offers her no real explanation.  Then, during a conversation at the dinner table, Lynn asks Cole if he took the bumblebee pendant inherited from her mother.  Cole denies the accusation over and over again.  He implies that the pendant has been “misplaced” by someone else – meaning one of his ghosts.  Frustrated by this cryptic reply, Lynn grows angry and sends Cole to his room.  Later on that night, Cole is awakened by his mother talking in her sleep.  She shouts his name repeatedly, begging him to tell her “what’s wrong.”  Cole finally breaks down near the end of the movie, after he has helped several of the once-feared ghosts find peace.  Since he has conquered his fears, Cole explains his “sixth sense” to his mother while they are stuck in traffic amidst a horrible car accident.  She bursts into tears, overjoyed at this earnest connection with her once distant son.  Shyamalan describes this climactic scene as “a resolution so complete and so fulfilling that you think the movie’s over” (“Reflections from the Set”).

But there remains one final coda.  Malcolm cannot seem to relax, despite the fact that he has successfully helped Cole overcome his fears.  In a shocking postscript, Malcolm realizes that he himself is a ghost, something brought to his attention only after his relationship with Cole has subsided.  He died that night when Vincent’s bullet pierced his side, and he never had the chance to tell his wife how much he loved her.  In one last attempt to set things straight, Malcolm pours his heart out as his wife sleeps.  At last, each character attains a kind of divine peace.

Cole’s lamentable prayer at the beginning of The Sixth Sense sets the tone for the entire film.  The remainder of the movie takes place only after Cole opens a channel of communication with God.  After Cole communicates with God, he gradually discovers ways to communicate with the other characters in the film and eventually teaches them to do the same.  He cries out not only for himself, but also for all of those characters, living or dead, with whom he so deeply empathizes; and God answers that cry.

In 2000, just one year after the colossal success of The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan released Unbreakable, a dark film about a man who escapes a fatal train wreck miraculously unharmed.  It is perhaps the only movie in which Shyamalan employs a symbolic Christ figure, sole train wreck survivor David Dunne [Bruce Willis]. Unbreakable especially explores the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, which is the mystery that God, the divine, came down from heaven and became man in the person of Jesus Christ (Drum np).  Within the comic bookish world of Unbreakable, “the divine” indicates the idea of superheroes.  Elijah Price [Samuel L. Jackson], David’s eccentric comic-loving friend, truly believes that “superheroes walk the earth.”  In Elijah’s mind, David is the human incarnation of a godly superhero.

Throughout the film, Elijah strives to convince David that he is, in fact, a superhero walking the earth.  Eventually David realizes that he has never really been sick, and that he possesses a rather “superhuman” strength and durability.  He can bench press nearly 350 pounds, and he escaped the carnage of the Eastrail #177 crash completely unscathed.  At first, David believes that Elijah’s superhero theory is absolutely ridiculous.  While on the other hand, some pieces of Elijah’s hypothesis fill the empty spaces within David’s despondent life.  Is he really a hero?  Or is he just a man?  David continually struggles with his own identity, much like the Jesus character struggles with his identity in Martin Scorcese’s The Last Temptation of Christ.

Finally, David decides to trust Elijah’s instincts and take on the role of a “superhero.”  Elijah tells him to “go to where people are.”  David heads to the train station, the very place where this heroic revelation began.  He descends the staircase and walks amidst the crowd of hurried travelers.  Once he reaches the center of the station, he stretches both of his arms out into a cruciform position, which allows passersby to repeatedly bump into him.  At the touch of each new individual, David catches a glimpse of their last immoral deed.  Some of the encounters cause him to wince in pain.  In the true likeness of Christ, David takes on the sins of his fellow man and sets out to right them.

One particular vision strikes at David’s core: a man invades a private home, murders the father, tortures the mother, and holds the two daughters hostage.  Determined to right this horrible wrong, David finds the house and enters to search for the killer.  He finds the two girls tied up in a bathroom, and quickly releases them.  They head for safety as David hunts for the assailant.   While David searches over a balcony outside of the house, the attacker sneaks up behind him and pushes him into the family pool.  David immediately panics; his only weakness is water.  In a fit of coughing, David is consumed by the black tarp surrounding the pool.  It pushes him deeper into the water, and he struggles violently for an escape.  At last, David sees a long rod appear in the water.  He grabs hold of it and is pulled to safety by the two young girls he rescued previously.  David clutches the side of the pool and pushes himself up onto dry land as triumphant music swells in the background.  At one point, he thought his life was over.  Though when he surfaces unharmed, he realizes that his life has just begun.

This pivotal point in the film reflects the Christian ideal of baptism.  In baptism, the individual dies with Christ and then rises to new life.  St. Paul writes,
“Or are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?  We were indeed buried with him through baptism into
death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the
Father, we too might live in newness of life” (The New American Bible, Romans
6:3-4).
When the attacker pushes David into that pool, he arrives at least very close to death.  Darkness surrounds him, and he sinks deeper and deeper into the abyss.  At last, a light appears, a light which leads him to safety and a new life, much like the light of Christ leads Christians to new life.  After David emerges from the pool, he engages in a brutal battle with the killer he initially set out to find and thus begins his new life as a true superhero.  Indeed, death and resurrection are familiar comic book themes.  Expert Trina Robbins testifies that “this is something that happens to the hero in myth and also symbolically happens to the hero in comic books, when he’s the true hero, and that is that he dies and is reborn” (“Comic Books and Superheroes”).

Two years after Unbreakable flopped at the box office, Shyamalan set out to shock the world with another emotionally charged blockbuster about family, fear, and faith.  “Like all of Shyamalan’s movies, Signs is obsessed not just with the unknown, but with family…and shot through with the unmistakable admonition that we must draw whoever is near and dear to us even nearer” (Giles 51).  Shyamalan centers the storyline on a former Episcopal priest named Graham Hess, his young son Morgan and daughter Bo, and his younger brother Merrill.  Graham’s wife is missing from the picture.  She was suddenly killed in a car accident only six months prior to the events in Signs.  Graham’s broken family has caused him to question his faith and abandon his calling as a minister.  He no longer prays or attends church services.  He has removed all religious symbols from his home.  He grows frustrated whenever a former parishioner calls him “Father.”

Despite Graham’s greatest attempts to escape his faith, the God’s very presence seems to constantly surround him.  In one of the opening shots of the film, the viewer sees that Graham has removed a crucifix from the wall.  Nevertheless, the sunlight has faded the wall so that the outline of the cross remains there.  Throughout the movie, this godly presence haunts Graham.  He tries over and over again to run away, but God always seems to follow close behind him.  Even though Graham is faithless, God remains faithful.
“This saying is trustworthy:  If we have died with him we shall also live with
him; if we persevere, we shall also reign with him.  But if we deny him, he will
deny us.  If we are unfaithful, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself”
(2 Timothy 2: 11-13).

In addition to this “shadow” of a cross on his wall, Graham soon finds himself surrounded by crop circles and other eerie “coincidences,” all signs that seem to point to something, although he is never quite sure to what.  After hostile aliens invade his home, Graham has a hard time believing that life could get any worse.  Not only is he and his family mourning the recent death of their wife and mother, but the intruding aliens have caused his son to suffer a severe asthma attack.  The more Graham meditates on what is happening to his family, the more he begins to realize that God must have something to do with it.  While Graham is locked in the basement, holding his ill son in his arms, he looks up and says, “I hate you.  Don’t do this to me again.  Not again.”  God infuriates him; he wonders how such a “loving” god could possibly bring his family any more grief.  “Though Graham is angry with God, he has had to admit the divine back into his reality…Here is [his] first step back towards faith” (Johnston 137).

In the end, Graham’s heated exchange with God proves to be in vain.  The alien attack subsides, and Merrill helps Graham carry the asthmatic Morgan upstairs for his medicine.  Yet one alien has managed to stay behind and captures Morgan as he rests on the couch.  The alien sprays poisonous gas into young Morgan’s nostrils as the rest of the family looks on in terror.  Graham flashes back to his last conversation with his wife before her death.  He remembers two of her vital last words: “Swing away.”  Graham repeats this phrase to Merrill, who immediately grabs his record-breaking baseball bat from its plaque on the wall and moves cautiously towards the creature.  He smashes the bat into the alien’s body, finally knocking it against a dresser, where one of Bo’s many glasses of “contaminated” water tips over and burns the creature’s skin.  Once again, Shyamalan uses water as a purifying substance.  Merrill continues to smash water onto the alien with his bat, and this eventually kills the creature.  The pure, crystalline water stamps out the world’s evil, much like the waters of baptism stamp out the sins of the Christian.  Fortunately, Morgan’s asthma prevents the alien’s poison from spreading into his lungs.  He awakes and asks his father “Did someone save me?”  Graham answers with tears in his eyes, “I think someone did.”

Suddenly, everything falls together.  The suffering of Graham and his family serves a distinct purpose.  If that car had never hit Graham’s wife, he would not have known how to defeat the alien invaders.  Graham realizes that suffering is a necessary part of life, and that perhaps “there are no coincidences.”  Christ suffered on the cross, so must humans suffer with their own personal crosses.  Suffering strengthens the individual, and something good will come out of it in the end.

Shyamalan’s latest film, The Village, focuses on human suffering as well.  The film opens with a graveside service for elder August Nicholson’s young son.  Each of the elders have lost a loved one to a human act of violence in “the towns,” so they banded together and moved out into the rustic village in order to preserve innocence for their descendants.  Clearly, the early death of the young Nicholson boy proves that one cannot possibly escape human suffering or heartache.  Just as the Hess family discovers in Signs, the people of The Village also discover that suffering is an inevitable part of life.

Human immorality and the suffering that results both flow from original sin, which is the “hereditary stain with which we are born on account of our origin or descent from Adam” (Harent np).  Humans are born with a natural inclination towards wrongdoing.  Each and every human being sins, and those sins cause suffering for themselves as well as for others.  “All of us once lived among them in the desires of our flesh, following the wishes of the flesh and the impulses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like the rest” (Ephesians 2:3).  According to the doctrine of original sin, no one is truly innocent.  Everyone is naturally prone to “wrath,” and thus suffering at the hands of others is an inescapable curse.

Shyamalan illustrates the doctrine of original sin brilliantly in the character of Noah [Adrien Brody], a mentally challenged young man who is regarded as a genuine innocent of the village.  Generally, Noah is very gentle and playful.  He adores Ivy Walker [Bryce Dallas Howard], a blind girl fond of his company.  When Noah learns that Ivy is engaged to shy Lucius Hunt [Joaquin Phoenix], he grows envious.  Brought to tears by the thought of a love lost, Noah enters Lucius’ workshop and stabs him twice with his knife.  Lucius falls to the ground in agony as Noah walks away, leaving him there to die.

Noah, the one person whom the villagers view as most innocent, instead turns out to be the cruelest.  Despite his childlike naivety and perceived “innocence,” Noah cannot escape the curse of original sin and human corruption.  In fact, Noah most likely views his criminal act as something good.  He injures Lucius out of his love for Ivy, and he recognizes that love is good.  Clearly Noah is not an inherently good person, but rather a flawed human being naturally inclined to sin.  “Just as through one person sin entered the world, and through sin, death, and thus death came to all, inasmuch as all sinned” (Romans 5:12).  In a world where such capacity for evil can be so cleverly disguised by innocence, the ideal village of the elders is doomed to failure.

Whether the focus is communication with God or the origins of human suffering, M. Night Shyamalan is a master at crafting films out of faith.  All of his films possess remarkably Christian values, despite the fact that Shyamalan is a self-proclaimed Hindu merely infatuated with the Christian Church.  Shyamalan teaches moviegoers that God answers prayers.  He teaches that the divine can and does exist on this earth.  He shows that God’s presence faithfully surrounds even the faithless, that miracles really do happen, and that suffering is a natural aspect of life capable of strengthening the human spirit.  Unfortunately, the spirituality that exists in Shyamalan’s films is often grossly overlooked by fans and critics alike.  Most people go to the movies in search of mindless entertainment.  M. Night Shyamalan creates entertaining movies that speak profoundly to the core of humanity, and oftentimes to the core of Christianity.  Therein hides his talent, his mysticism, and his genius.

Works Cited

“Comic Books and Superheroes.”  Unbreakable.  Dir. M. Night Shyamalan.  Perfs. Bruce
Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Robin Wright Penn.  Vista Series DVD Disc 2.
Touchstone Pictures, 2000.

Drum, Walter.  “The Incarnation.”  Catholic Encyclopedia.  2003.  New Advent.  13
December, 2005.  <www.newadvent.org/cathen/07706… >

Giles, Jeff.  “Out of This World.”  Newsweek.  5 August, 2002.

Harent, S.  “Original Sin.”  Catholic Encyclopedia.  2003.  New Advent.  13 December,
2005.  <www.newadvent.org/cathen/11312… >

Johnston, Robert K.  Useless Beauty: Ecclesiastes through the Lens of Contemporary
Film.  Grand Rapids, MI: BakerAcademic, 2004.

The New American Bible.  Saint Joseph Edition.  New York: Catholic Book Publishing
Co., 1992.

“Reflections from the Set.”  The Sixth Sense.  Dir. M. Night Shyamalan.  Perfs. Bruce
Willis, Haley Joel Osment, Toni Collette.  Vista Series DVD Disc 2.  Hollywood
Pictures, 1999.

Reinhartz, Adele.  Scripture on the Silver Screen.  Louisville, KY: Westminster John
Knox Press, 2003.

Signs.  Dir. M. Night Shyamalan.  Perfs. Mel Gibson, Joaquin Phoenix, Cherry Jones.
Vista Series DVD.  Touchstone Pictures, 2002.

The Sixth Sense.  Dir. M. Night Shyamalan.  Perfs. Bruce Willis, Haley Joel Osment,
Toni Collette.  Vista Series DVD.  Hollywood Pictures, 1999.

Unbreakable.  Dir. M. Night Shyamalan.  Perfs. Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Robin
Wright Penn.  Vista Series DVD.  Touchstone Pictures, 2000.

The Village.  Dir. M. Night Shyamalan.  Perfs. Joaquin Phoenix, Bryce Dallas Howard,
Sigourney Weaver.  Vista Series DVD.  Touchstone Pictures, 2004.