M. Night Shyamalan Talks About His New Horror Film KNOCK AT THE CABIN and Bending Genres
Director M. Night Shyamalan recently sat down with Total Film about his upcoming horror movie Knock at the Cabin.
The movie is based on the book by Paul Tremblay, and it centers on a family vacationing in a cabin in the woods who are terrorized by four people who break in and are told the apocalypse is coming and they must "make an unthinkable choice."
The intense trailer that was released for the movie really hits hard at the end as the family is going to be forced to make a terrible decision, and if they don’t make it… the world will end. When talking about the trailer, and why it escalates so quickly, Shyamalan explains:
"We talked a lot, Universal and I, about whether to say, at the end of the trailer, what is the thing that they have to do. And we came to the decision of saying no, we just have to get everyone to understand that the thing is not going to be good!"
We have no idea what decision that is, but we do know that the movie is going to deliver a big whiplash twist that audiences won’t see coming. The movie does feature a familiar genre with the whole cabin in the woods thing, but the filmmaker is looking to bend that into something very different. When talking about bending genres Shyamalan said:
"I’m drawn to things that take genres and bend them in new ways, or change genres from what you thought you were watching. The architectural twist is part of the fun of it. And as I’m morphing genres, I have to move up into more high-octane genres. If you cadence down, even if you do it really well, it has a certain reducing-of-stakes quality that the audience feels."
Knock at the Cabin stars Dave Bautista, Jonathan Groff, Ben Aldridge, Nikki Amuka-Bird, newcomer Kristen Cui, Abby Quinn, and Rupert Grint. Here’s the synopsis:
While vacationing out at a remote cabin, a young girl and her parents are taken hostage by four armed strangers who demand that the family make an unthinkable choice to avert the apocalypse. With limited access to the outside world, the family must decide what they believe before all is lost.
Universal will release Knock at the Cabin in theaters on February 3rd, 2023.