M Night Shyamalan Reveals That The Sixth Sense Had A Very Different Script

The Sixth Sense is one of M. Night Shyamalan’s most beloved films. It has become an undisputed classic for fans of the divisive director, mainly thanks to its incredible twist at the end, which gives a new meaning to the whole story. However, it could have been different.

While promoting his new movie, Knock at the Cabin, the director revealed to Yahoo that the original script for the 1999 film was a bit different from what was finally seen on screen:

The Sixth Sense follows renowned therapist Malcolm Crowe, played by Bruce Willis, who, after a difficult encounter with a patient he failed to help, feels his career is over, and so is his marriage. In the midst of his personal chaos, he begins working with Cole, who apparently suffers from schizophrenia. When they manage to establish a trustful relationship, the boy, played by Haley Joel Osment, confesses that he sees dead people as if he were some kind of medium between the living and the deceased.

“Originally Sixth Sense was some kind of version of a serial-killer movie. It was more kind coming out of my love of Silence to the Lambs and that genre, mixed with the supernatural. In the first iterations of the screenplay, there was a crime-scene photographer whose son saw ghosts. So that was kind of how it started to come to me. But then it evolved … like halfway through, I came up with the idea of a therapist and changed everything, and concentrated on two families.”

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Although The Sixth Sense is his third film, it’s certainly the one that put him on the map and gave him the title of director of unexpected twists, something fans expect to see in all of his films. Unfortunately, however, sometimes it is difficult to meet that enormous expectation.

That is why some of his productions have been severely criticized over the years. The Village, from 2004, is a clear example of this. Critics were very hard on it, while viewers shared a similar sentiment after its premiere, making it one of his failures.

His most recent works, Old and Knock at the Cabin, seem to fall in between. While many declare them to be two of his best films of several years, others find flaws in the scripts and suggest that the twists are predictable or not very surprising.