The Happening 2015 Movie: M. Night Shyamalan's Eerie and Frightening Mystery

Though the conceit is a bit thin and silly, the reason The Happening stays on many cult film lovers lists is just how uncomfortable Shyamalan is with his own movie, and the lengths he goes to avoid stabbing the audience in the soul. After we see a graphic suicide by lion, Shyamalan soothes us with a couple of hot-dog-obsessed weirdos who carry around binoculars they use to spy on their neighbors. To distract us from the bodies hanging in the trees, Shyamalan has the math teacher (John Leguizamo) try to soothe us by giving us a pop math quiz about exponential equations. Shortly after a bunch of people die, Mark Wahlberg, a science teacher who hilariously tells his students that things happen for no reason, talks to a plastic tree at a model home to beg for his life.

This dichotomy of graphic violence and childlike innocence gives this R-rated movie an identity crisis. Is it trying to be the adult horror movie it wants to be, or is it pure naivete on full display? Is Shyamalan putting us on, or does he truly mean all of this? Whatever it is, this profoundly silly movie is a must watch for any lovers of the true bafflements of the 00s.

The Happening 2015 movie

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M. Night Shyamalan is best known for his huge plot twists, and in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the director was untouchable. Not even Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese's name attached to a movie could have attracted as much attention.

Even though the film is far from the director's highest-grossing movie, it was one of his biggest successes in terms of net profit. The 2015 film was made on a shoestring, especially by Shyamalan's standards, as it had a production budget of just $5 million. That's pocket change compared to a movie like The Last Airbender.

Between Mark Wahlberg being attached to the project, Shyamalan's name still having some weight to it, and the promise of being an epic mystery movie, the film took over $160 million at the box office. Still, negative word of the mouth about the film spread before it could make Unbreakable levels of money.

More than anything, After Earth was a vanity project for Will Smith and an attempt to turn his son into a movie star. Regardless of the film's blatant nepotism, it still made a decent amount worldwide.

Unfortunately, despite making almost a quarter of a billion dollars, After Earth is still considered a failure. The 2013 movie had an inflated budget of $130 million, and as the marketing budget tends to be the same cost of production, the film was operating at a significant loss.

In an attempt to make his own cinematic universe, Glass is a sequel to both Unbreakable and Split. Despite its polarized reception, enough people were intrigued that it became one of the director's biggest success stories. Glass' success stems from what worked for Shyamalan for his previous two movies, which was making the film with a much lower budget than he's used to.

It's hard to believe that Shyamalan even pulled off the movie with just $20 million, which is impressive in itself. Anybody would think the star power of James McAvoy, Bruce Willis, and Samuel L. Jackson alone would have cost way more than the movie's budget. The actors were likely offered back end points, which means they'd get a percentage of the movie's gross profit. And if that's the case, it worked out great for everyone, as the left-field superhero movie made 12 times its budget.

However, as the movie was almost like an introspective and philosophical look into what piques viewers' interest in the genre, that isn't a big-ticket seller. The movie was a huge success, but it still made half of what The Sixth Sense did and had double the budget.

The Village was Shyamalan's fourth major movie following the formula that he perfected with The Sixth Sense. Just as is the case of all his previous movies, Shyamalan creates a world that seems normal, but there's something that's just a little off about it. And it's soon revealed what's really going on behind the scenes that makes viewers look at the movie completely differently.

The 2004 movie was the first time the big twist didn't completely land with audiences, and many think that it's a great film but ruined by its ending, but it was still able to gross an impressive figure worldwide. But even though the movie's ending might have had a polarizing response, it's still just as much about the journey. The dramatic performances, the vivid colors, and the Oscar-nominated score all helped the movie become one of Shyamalan's most impressive productions.

After The Visit sparked a Shyamalan renaissance, the director quickly followed with Split, a thriller about a man (James McAvoy) with 24 different personalities. With the wrong actor, the movie could have been terrible, but McAvoy is just as responsible for the movie's astounding box office intake as Shyamalan. The actor carries the movie, and he manages to turn what sounds like a schlocky B-movie into something serious.

Another key component in Split's Earth-shattering box office success is the reveal of Bruce Willis in the mid-credits scene, showing that the film is tied to a bigger universe. That got audiences talking almost more than the movie itself. The film had a budget of just $9 million, meaning that it made 30 times its budget, which is almost unheard of, and in that respect, it's the director's biggest success.

However, though it's easily M. Night Shyamalan's worst movie, the movie's failure didn't still didn't slow him down. For any other director, it could have been critical for their career, so it's something of a feat that Shyamalan is still so successful today.

Though the final twist is that aliens are allergic to water, which is derivative of The War of the Worlds' ending, Signs is still enormously entertaining and full of terrifying scenes. And though it isn't the most loved movies in his filmography, the aliens are used so sparingly, which makes it easily Shyamalan's most suspenseful work.

If anybody has ever wondered why studios kept green-lighting Shyamalan's movies after so many disasters in the 2000s and 2010s, The Sixth Sense is why. When a fresh-faced writer-director comes along with a completely original screenplay that grosses over $670 million with a budget of just $40 million, he's somebody worth taking a risk on.

The movie established Shyamalan's style, and the movie's final plot twist had audiences talking for months, becoming a phenomenon and breaking so many box office records. The Sixth Sense was the second-highest-grossing movie of 1999, being beaten only by Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, and it was one of just a few movies in the top 10 of the year not based on an existing property.

Currently splitting his time between Madrid and Chicago, Stephen Barker has been a staff writer at Screen Rant since 2020. Since graduating from Manchester Metropolitan University with a bachelor's degree in Film, Television, and Cultural Studies in 2014, he has written for numerous movie and music websites. Visit Stephen's personal blog, Quaranste, where he writes about guilty pleasure movies, his latest musical discoveries, and how he stays creative during global pandemics.

And then he made The Happening. Lady in the Water was a collage of self-important grand movie statements about the state of the world doctored up by a man who had not one clue what the world was, let alone how to convey that on the screen. What could be a better counter to the big-boy statements of a preachy message film than an elementally chilly exercise in pure nihilism and horror? With the idea for The Happening, Shyamalan seemed to be at least listening and returning back to the muck and earthen horror of what he does best (indeed, atmospheric horror is the only thing he ever did well). Ideally, The Happening could have been an exercise in humorless style and pure cinematic horror, entirely visual and lacking in any of the pretentious import of Shyamalan at his worst.

The sixth installment in the series is evidently a direct sequel to Paranormal Activity 4, although no plot details -- or even hints -- have been released yet. All we know for certain is that the movie will be released in 3D.

Already touted as one of 2015's scariest horror movies, It Follows has been described as a "brilliantly atmospheric pulse-pounding thriller [that] introduces a new kind of ghoulishly obsessive spirit: one that's sexually transmitted. Oh, you heard that right. It Follows tracks the story of one girl whose perfect first date ends with her being infected with a curse that finds her being endlessly followed by an angry spirit only she can see. A spirit, mind you, that will keep following her until it kills her... unless she passes it on to someone else."

A group of teenagers all receive a mysterious message from a classmate. All well and good, except she killed herself the year before. The movie was conceived and developed by Timur Bekmambetov (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter); Levan Gabriadze directed.

M. Night Shyamalan directs his first horror movie since 2008's The Happening. It's a low-budget affair about two children who visit their grandparents, who live on a remote farm in Pennsylvania. Then they learn terrible secrets that suggest their week-long visit may have fatal consequences.

A coming-of-age zombie movie, this horror-comedy stars Tye Sheridan, Logan Miller and Joey Morgan as scouts who must save their town after an outbreak of zombies. Christopher Landon (Paramormal Activity: The Marked Ones) directs.

Six years after the last reboot comes a new reboot of the venerable franchise. Rumors have been swirling about which characters will be featured; at one point, Jason Voorhees was said to be out, while more recent rumors suggest that his mother will have an active role. It's also been reported that the movie will be set in the 1980s; whatever (and whoever) is involved, it's sure to be a must-see for horror fans.

Director: M. Night Shyamalan Writer: M. Night Shyamalan Starring: Olivia De Jonge, Ed Oxenbould, Kathryn Hahn, Deanna Dunagan, Peter McRobbie Release date: Sept. 11, 2015 2ff7e9595c