M. Night Shyamalan can’t catch a break. In 1999, he exploded onto the scene with his highly lauded and universally loved horror film The Sixth Sense, which was so good, it was nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture. His follow-up, Unbreakable, has its fans, and Signs has many passionate defenders. But since then, all of his films have been largely and immediately derided. He has somehow mutated from Hollywood Wunderkind into the central whipping boy for all genre geeks. Indeed, one of Shyamalan’s movies, The Last Airbender, was so hated, it made an early appearance in the pages of Trolling.
When it came out in 2008, you would have thought that Shyamalan’s The Happening was the worst thing to happen to cinema. I didn’t meet a single peer, critic, or family member who didn’t find The Happening to be risible and lame. And people whinged for a variety of reasons. They didn’t like the premise, the acting, the premise, the writing, or the premise. The film failed miserably at the box office, and currently enjoys a 17% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the third lowest in the director’s career (after The Last Airbender and After Earth).
Here at Trolling, we will not stand for universal hatred. We are here not just to defend The Happening, but to openly declare that it may well be one of the greatest underrated classics of the decade. Well, we may not go that far, but we can at least declare that The Happening RULES! Let’s look into why:
The film doesn’t build well, the conclusions, while left deliberately vague, are still perhaps a little too oblique, and it is hard to look past the humor in some of the horror situations. And I can see why some might be let down that the film’s monster is actually something so vague, innocuous, and poorly defined. But at the end of the day, we all have to admit that The Happening is ambitious, original, and more than a little bit scary.
Until next week, let the hate mail flow.
Witney Seibold is the head film critic for Nerdist, and a contributor on the CraveOnline Film Channel, and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. You can read his weekly articles Trolling here on Crave, and follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
7 Reasons Why The Happening RULES!
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It's Based in Real Fear
One of the scariest things to ponder is the possibility of losing your mind. External threats are fine, but internal threats – that you may not be able to accurately perceive and interpret the world around you anymore – are terrifying. The film is about people suddenly, and without warning, committing suicide for unknown reasons. And you may just be next. And you don't know why. All you know is that people are killing themselves. Not because of a virus or a bout of depression, but because they seem to suddenly think that's just the right thing to do. This is nightmare fuel par excellence, and The Happening taps into to it very well.
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It's Based in Real Science (Sort Of)
The better sci-fi and horror films tend to incorporate at least a bit of real science or factual evidence into their premises. The revealed premise of The Happening is that the world's plants, in a fit of self-defense over mankind's heightening pollution, have begun excreting a gentle gaseous chemical that infects the minds of humans and forces them to self-slaughter. There are indeed plants that excrete chemicals to defend themselves from predators. As far as we know, trees and grasses can't actually secrete suicide gas, but, well, it's easy to ponder given the facts.
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It's a Salient Comment
The man vs. nature narrative has been revisited ad infinitum in feature films, and nature usually strikes back at man in the form of a vicious animal, bad weather, or something noisy and dramatic. The Happening is quieter, scarier, more intimate, and – as a result – more salient. Nature will not necessarily wipe out humanity with a dramatic storm, flood, or influx of giant carnivorous beasts. It will quietly and easily remove us. We haven't been too active in taking care of the Earth, and the Earth will be equally unmindful when it comes to removing us. We're an evolutionary cul-de-sac, and the system has chosen to delete us because we're harmful. It's not an event. To the planet, it's just a happening. That's pretty cool.
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The Lead Character is Relatable and Fun
Mark Wahlberg plays a science teacher who, unlike most steely-'n'-determined movie heroes, is kind of a doofus. This guy smiles, banters with his students, and seems humorously self-aware throughout the movie. In these kinds of movies, we're used to seeing our heroes fulfill the usual role of “man of action,” and we're used to seeing them making resolute decisions, making good choices in a time of crisis. And that's so boring. That Wahlberg's character was funny, unsure of himself, and even a little bit incompetent made him far more human, far more entertaining, and far more relatable than any other type would have.
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Good Use of Silence
One of Shyamalan's strengths as a filmmaker is his use of silence. Most horror films tend to be stuffed with loud “boo!” sound effects and constant screaming string sections, yelling at you that their film is scary. You know what's scarier than noise? Silence. The nightmarish moments of suicide are not punctuated with ear-splitting musical stings. They just happen. And that's way more like an actual nightmare. Our nightmares don't have a musical score. They hum gently and relaxingly while they rip your mind apart form the inside. Shyamalan knows this and uses it to great effect.
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It's Certainly Original
In a creatively bankrupt Hollywood, isn't it nice just to have something original? What can The Happening be compared to? Not much of anything, I'd say. I appreciate that a movie like this hadn't been done before, and that Shyamalan – a true auteur who follows his heart – sticks to his guns every time. He's not about to make a horror movie in a typical way, and always wants to express new ideas. Not all his films necessarily work well, but I appreciate the effort way more than any middling middle-brow flick that can be described as “pretty good.”
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Humor
What many viewers don't seem to realize about The Happening, and about Shyamalan's films in general, is that it's supposed to be funny at times. People look at the doofy characters, the silly setups, and the steely, serious filmmaking, and assume that Shyamalan is somehow failing when a comic moment appears, sometimes in tandem with the horror. Shyamalan has always been a subtly funny filmmaker, and the small moments of seemingly inappropriate levity are actually deliberate moments of leavening. If you can get on his wavelength, you'll see the subtle, lighthearted, serious, salient, and terrifying anti-landscape that Shyamalan was trying to make.
