EXCLUSIVE
THE WATCHED A stranded young artist is observed by a sinister presence in Ishana Night Shyamalan’s feature directorial debut...
Ishana Night Shyamalan readily admits that making a horror film for her debut feature was in some ways inevitable. Having spent her childhood watching her director father, M. Night Shyamalan, hard at work, and getting her first directing experience on the second unit of Old and Knock at the Cabin, it was natural that she would turn to the genre for her first film, The Watched.
‘I feel, kind of oddly, a sense of peace after watching horror,’ the writer-director says. But that was far from the feeling she got from reading A.M. Shine’s novel The Watchers, the book she’s adapted for the screen with this movie, instead describing a sense of being ‘really, really uneasy’.
That unease comes from the fraught situation of protagonist Mina (Dakota Fanning) who’s left stranded in a creepy Irish woodland with no working phone. If that wasn’t bad enough, she finds herself being watched by mysterious and sinister creatures.
They’re as much an enigma to us as they are to Mina. ‘I think the joy of the experience is what you’re not allowed to see,’ Shyamalan explains of hiding the movie’s antagonists. ‘I was kind of taught that by Jaws, that the premise of keeping a threat off-camera is one of the most frustrating and scary things you can do. The idea that you’re being observed by something that you can’t see, that you don’t know what it is, is a very, very scary thing.’
Her reference to Jaws shows that the director has been drawing ideas and encouragement from a variety of films. ‘I’ve been inspired by the more visual filmmakers, like Wong Kar-wai;
