Critical approaches to the films of M. Night Shyamalan : spoiler warnings /
edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
- New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
- xxix, 233 p. : ill. ; 23 cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Introduction : telling stories about telling stories: the films of M. Night Shyamalan / Feature one : narrating Shyamalan, narrating culture. The homefront hero in the films of M. Might Shyamalan / Reaching out to the other side : problematic families in the films of M. Night Shyamalan / Melodrama and male crisis in Signs and Unbreakable / Spellbound in darkness : Shyamalan's epistemological twitch / Four films by M. Night Shyamalan : oh, the irony? / The night book or The mirror and the page / Intermission: Shyamalan's story. Making sense of M. Night Shyamalan : signs of a popular auteur in the "field of horror" / Reshaping the director as star : investigating M. Night Shyamalan's Image / Feature two : stories by Shyamalan. Sigmund Freud, pedophile priests, and Shyamalan's filmic fairy tale (The sixth sense) / Unbreak my heart : the melodramatic superhero in Unbreakable / Simulations of evil in M. Night Shyamalan's The village / "Something ancient in modern times" : myth and meaning-making in Lady in the water / Whatever happened to M. Night Shyamalan : meditation on an "infection" film / Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock -- Elizabeth Abele -- Elizabeth Rosen -- R. Barton Palmer -- David Sterritt -- Katherine A. Fowkes -- Emmanuel Bordeau -- Matt Hills -- Kim Owczarski -- Jane F. Thrailkill -- Matthew Yockey -- Miriam Jordan and Julian Jason Haladyn -- Nicholas Parker and Nirmal Trivedi -- Murray Pomerance.
Critical Approaches to the Films of M. Night Shyamalan represents the first serious academic engagement with auteur director M. Night Shyamalan and his work. The essays, including contributions from established film scholars David Sterritt, Murray Pomerance, Emmanuel Burdeau, R. Barton Palmer, Matt Hills, and Katherine Fowkes, explore the Hollywood blockbusters from The Sixth Sense to The Happening in terms of their themes, aesthetics, and marketing. Taken together, the collection recognizes and explores Shyamalan's "star status" and offers the concerted analysis that this cultural phenomenon requires.