M. Night Shyamalan has revealed that The Sixth Sense easily could have gone in another direction entirely. The thriller follows the story of Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis), a psychologist who discovers that one of his patients, Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment), believes he can see ghosts. After realizing that Cole’s visions are true, the two work together to help the ghosts pass on, before coming upon the revelation that that Crowe is also a ghost in need of closure.
The ending of The Sixth Sense is a brilliant twist that turns everything about the movie completely on its head. Cole’s relationship with Crowe is completely changed in one shocking instant, demanding a rewatch just to see the many hints at Crowe’s fate. Yet, in an interview with Yahoo!, Shyamalan explained that The Sixth Sense was almost very different and originally was not about therapy at all. Check out his quote below:
“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.”
Why The Sixth Sense Twist Works
The twist in The Sixth Sense works because it encourages both Cole and Crowe to consider their emotional connection to the world and to one another. Rather than being a revelation for the sake of a revelation, it makes the characters more grounded by tying them to each other in more ways than one. That alone makes The Sixth Sense Shyamalan’s best twist.
Yet, the fact that the entire movie is slowly building toward the twist also contributes to why it works so well. Instead of coming out of nowhere to shock audiences without any real reason, the twist is teased at throughout the movie with Crowe being outright shot early on. The reveal then becomes less of a questionable decision and more of an inevitable end for The Sixth Sense and Crowe himself.
Of course, the twist is also effective because it encourages a deeper look at the story’s themes. Just as Cole helps other ghosts come to terms with their deaths, the twist makes the message more palatable by addressing the fate of an established and loved character. Shyamalan’s secret to a great movie ending is to make audiences revisit what they watched and reconsider it in a new light, and The Sixth Sense still does that perfectly, even if he originally intended to direct a very different movie.
Source: Yahoo!