Screenwriting 101: M. Night Shyamalan

“The Sixth Sense started out as a serial killer movie [laughs]. Malcolm was a crime scene photographer, a burnt-out one at that, and not a great dad. It was Parents Day at the school, and the parents are in the classrooms looking at the artwork, and his kid’s in there, and Malcolm’s outside, smoking in a non-smoking hallway, and he’s staring at a wall of these kids’ drawings, and suddenly his attention becomes focused and he walks towards the wall and stops smoking. More and more we get focused on this one particular drawing, a crayon design, a star of some kind. We’ve seen it before, it’s a design that’s on the victims of a serial killer, and this child has drawn this same exact design in crayon. So Malcolm lifts the paper that’s folded over it to see who drew it, and it’s his own son. That’s the movie; it’s about Malcolm realizing that his son is seeing the victims of this killer.”

— M. Night Shyamalan

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