One For Them, One For Me: M. Night Shyamalan's "The Sixth Sense" and "Stuart Little"
Thursday, January 13, 2022 at 6:48PM A New Series by Christopher James
Take bets: Who did M. Night Shyamalan find it was easier to write for - a human child or a mouse child voiced by a 38-year-old man?
Do one for them; do one for you. If you can still do projects for yourself, you can keep your soul.
— Martin Scorsese: A Journey
Even from the get go, M. Night Shyamalan’s career was idiosyncratic. He went from Oscar nominated wunderkind to punchline all within the span of less than ten years. With his most recent movie, Old, Shyamalan seems to have figured out a way to own his poor reviews. At a time where the definition of “camp” is constantly argued, Old feels like pure, grade A camp. He’s also regained a lot of his box office cred with Split and Glass, which connected to one of his earliest films, Unbreakable.
In 1999, Shyamalan earned tons of accolades, including Best Director and Original Screenplay Oscar nominations, for his smash hit, The Sixth Sense. At that point, Shyamalan had only directed two movies, a personal indie called Praying with Anger that he starred in and a movie called Wide Awake that stars Rosie O’Donnell as a baseball fanatic nun. Few things could’ve prepared people for The Sixth Sense’s level of success. However, it wasn’t the only financial hit of the year for Shyamalan. He had done uncredited rewrites on movies like She’s All That, so he wasn’t above doing “one for them” to earn some money. However, he was credited as the writer of the Visual Effects nominated children’s film Stuart Little.
Is there anything that connects The Sixth Sense and Stuart Little together, other than coming from the mind of the same writer? Let’s take a look (age old spoilers ahead)...
