M. Night Shyamalan: “‘There’s a knock on the door’ is about the fear that someone will knock on your door and your life will never be the same”

On February 3, one of Hollywood’s most interesting and surprising filmmakers returns to theaters, M. Night Shyamalan, director of ‘The Sixth Sense’, The Forest’ and the ‘The Protected’ trilogy. His new proposal, ‘They Knocked on the Door’, confines us between the walls of an isolated cabin in the middle of the forest, where four strangers take a family hostage to force them to make an impossible decision and thus avoid the apocalypse.

Shyamalan has transformed Paul Treblay’s novel “The Cabin at World’s End” to make it more personal, more his own, and says he speaks about the fears that haunt him himself. So when we sat down with the director during his visit to Madrid, we ask him directly: what scares a master of psychological terror? “It’s About Protection”assures us, “Not being able to protect my family. It’s something that worries me constantly. Everything about their protection worries me. Like any parent, this can haunt you in a negative way.”

‘Knock on the Door’ is something like a biblical story set in the present day, a nature it shares with ‘Servant’, the series it produces for Apple TV+. In this case, the challenge was to narrow down a large-scale threat that promises to end the world as we know it to a single environment, a cabin, that the future of all mankind rests on the shoulders of a single family, a family anyone with apparently nothing special, and that we feel that vertigo and that responsibility. “The film deals with the fear that someone knocks on the door every day and your life will never be the same”, says Shyamalan, always on the lookout for “ideas with premises that provoke strong emotions, with which you connect instantly and can’t wait to see how they turn out.”

Although he has already shot fantastic action scenes in “Airbender, the last warrior” or “Glass”, mass suicides in “The incident” and suffocating deaths in “Time”, ‘A Knock on the Door’ is probably the most violent film of his career, even if we don’t see the blood gushing or splashing into the camera: “I think that’s the most effective way to do it. A lot of my films are rated 18+ first and then I have to hold back a bit, but in this film the violence is part of the plot, so there was no way to soften it, for not having the adult rating. But even if I have this qualification, I want to be elegant”.

From darkness to light

If anything, it characterizes Shyamalan’s cinema (in addition to his famous twists) is how love and fear intertwine and hope always triumphs. Faith is the driving force behind these stories which seem to be about monsters, ghosts or superheroes, but are, in essence, a reflection on humanity and our society. But why use a genre like thriller or horror to awaken the illusion in the audience and leave us with a warm heart? “I think we have to face our cynicism and fears first. That’s the first thing we have to overcome. To love someone you have to get rid of all your fears about that person. You have to forget everything and follow a light irrationally”, explains the director “I believe the path goes from darkness to light and not vice versa. You have to make the path [de la vida] in this sense”. You can see “Knocking on the Door” exclusively in theaters from February 3rd.