Shyamalan reveals what he thinks of Spanish horror movies

The premiere of ‘Knock on the door’ has filled the rooms with lovers of dark intrigues and impossible mysteries, the perfect excuse to speak with its director in an interview in which M. Night Shyamalan reveals what he thinks of Spanish horror movies.

“Spanish horror movies have a different color. It has a sharpness and characters that are slightly more colorful“, confesses the director who made a name for himself internationally in 1999 with ‘The Sixth Sense’. “If you compare it with Japanese genre cinema, or even Korean cinema, which are wonderful, the Spanish genre has a little more representation of humans with personality and color, which is more in line with my instinct, mixing that formality when shooting Japanese cinema with the human nuances of Spanish cinema. Feel. very identified with it“.

Among the best horror movies in Spanish we have all kinds of titles and, when we asked Shyamalan to choose one, he couldn’t choose: “You put me in a bind. I have a few in my collection, I’ll write to you when I get home” .

“Generally we don’t like to feel scared and we fight against it, but here we run to scare ourselves to see what it feels like”, deepens the genius after ‘El protegido’ (2000), ‘Señales’ (2002), ‘El bosque’ (2004) and ‘The young woman from the water’ (2006). “People who like the genre may be the most optimistic, ironically, because they feel safe enough to go into what scares them.. Facing our fears is a wonderful part of growing up. I love the genre for that.”

Shyamalan, whom we thought we had lost after things like ‘The incident’ (2008), ‘Airbender, the last warrior’ (2010) and ‘After Earth’ (2013), He brightened our lives again when he returned to terror with more force than ever with ‘The Visit’ (2015) and he took out the wonderful ‘Multiple’ (2016) and ‘Glass’ (2019) out of his sleeve.. Now, settled in the “high concept” of a reduced cast and a single scenario from the uneven ‘Tiempo’ (2021), he is gambling everything on a good idea by adapting ‘The Cabin at the End of the World’, by Paul Tremblay, the novel from 2018 that tells us how four strangers force a family to make an impossible decision: if they don’t sacrifice one of them, the apocalypse will unleash on Earth.

“I also like the stigma within the genre, you know, when they tell you that’s not real horror.“, she explains about the absence of terror among the nominees for the Oscars 2023. “That if that is not classic genre horror, that it is not sophisticated or intellectual, that they will not give it awards… I love that!”