SPOILERS are ahead for The Watchers!
Following in the footsteps of her father, M. Night Shyamalan, Ishana Shyamalan just delivered a big twist in her feature film debut, The Watchers. One of the latest 2024 movies has the writer/director adapting A.M. Shine’s creepy novel about a young woman who stumbles upon modern fairies after being trapped in a forest with three other strangers. As the movie’s twist reveals, these are not the fairies from Disney movies we remember growing up.
When CinemaBlend sat down with Ishana Night Shyamalan to talk about the terrifying reveal of the titular “watchers” in the film, she told us what went into turning fairies into the scary antagonists of her movie. She explained,
I think [the creature design] was one of the longest parts of the process and it was something I was really excited to do. I had pulled hundreds of photo references of images that I thought were quite scary to me. And it basically was about, for me, both kind of paying homage to the mythology of sort of imagining what this specific species would actually look like in today's world and thinking about how their bodies have been affected and what they would feel like and what colors they would be – particularly in this forest. So it was very much that kind of like talking as if they were real and meeting that with what I felt was sort of gutturally scary.
The Watchers draws from Irish folklore stories, which, contrary to tales of Tinkerbell and so forth, are written as myths to be feared much more than loved and revered. In The Watchers, fairies were exterminated by humans when they were banished to the burrows under the forest. Due to this, the fairies became evil beings who seek vengeance on humans, such as Dakota Fanning’s protagonist, Mina. During our interview, Shyamalan also spoke about being influenced by one of her favorite filmmakers, Hayao Miyazaki, while making the scary movie:
The Miyazaki films are just sort of the most influential things to me. So I was particularly drawing from just my feeling of Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle. Spirited Away is very much related to Mina's journey in these woods and her discovery of this world.
In a prior interview with the new director, Ishana told us that the fantasy genre is what she loves “the most,” and she shared that the Spirited Away filmmaker has “moved” her the most across her life and his movies are “very sacred things” to her. Shyamalan said she’ll be “chasing” the feeling she gets when she watches one of his animated flicks as her career blossoms.
The Watchers earned mixed to negatives reviews by critics and audiences alike and didn’t win the box office weekend against Bad Boys: Ride Or Die, but given it was made on a relatively small budget, it could end up being a decent start for the filmmaker. She can certainly look back at the career of her father, who has seen his rollercoaster share of big hits and flops over her lifetime. While speaking with CinemaBlend, Shyamalan also shared what she learned from her dad about suspense that she brought to the fantasy horror flick.
The Watchers is now playing in theaters.
