The connection between Shyamalan’s ‘Knock on the door’ and ‘The Exorcist’ that you did not expect

The arrival on the billboard of the new film by the director of ‘The Sixth Sense’ is the perfect excuse to interview its always very interesting director in a talk in which, among other things, he highlighted The connection between Shyamalan’s ‘There is a knock on the door’ and ‘The Exorcist’in addition to other of the best horror movies in history.

“If you think of ‘The Exorcist’, it starts in a very wide space, but it ends up closing in on a girl’s room for most of the movie,” he explains when we ask him about other titles that, like ‘Knock on the door’ , occur in a limited space. “That’s very significant to me because the movie doesn’t get smaller, it gets bigger as it plunges into the girl’s room as they talk about a Biblical war. That’s when the devil tells the old priest that he’s delighted to see him again, let’s make another assault. You think, my goodness, there is a battle, here, in a bedroom, for a girl… How deep.”

Shyamalan seems to have reduced his cinema to the essential minimum by giving us an “high concept”, a reduced cast and a single stage. As in ‘Time’ (2021), he gambles everything on a good idea, but this time the story is owed to Paul Tremblay, author of ‘The Cabin at the End of the World’, the 2018 novel that tells us how four Strangers force a family to make an impossible decision: if they don’t sacrifice one of their number, the apocalypse will unleash on Earth.

“‘The Birds’ moves toward a house and keeps moving forward,” he notes of one of Alfred Hitchcock’s best films. “Obviously ‘Psycho’, it’s a hotel, but it’s still going. These three movies start big and end in one place, it’s amazing.”

Turning a story like that into something really interesting in a feature film is difficult, but the director knows what he’s doing and manages to keep us tense for 100 minutes, more than enough time to leave the audience satisfied, tell a good story and leave you late to do whatever you want.

What we did not expect was the following statement, but coming from a director who was soon branded as “the next Spielberg”, it does not surprise us either: “You think of movies like ‘ET the extraterrestrial’, which is not a horror movie, but it’s a limited situation of something very big. Or ‘Night of the Living Dead’, there are many examples.

Waiting to discover if it is among the best ‘plot twists’ of M. Night Shyamalan’s films, ‘There is a knock on the door’ is now available in theaters.