knock at the cabin | the m0vie blog

New Escapist Column! On M. Night Shyamalan’s Fascination with Faith…

Posted on February 14, 2023 by Darren

We’re launching a new column at The Escapist, called Out of Focus. It will publish every Wednesday, and the plan is to use it to look at some film and television that would maybe fall outside the remit of In the Frame, more marginal titles or objects of cult interest. This week, with the release of Knock at the Cabin, it seemed wothing taking a look at the films of M. Night Shyamalan.

Shyamalan is a filmmaker with a unique perspective, and many of his films circle around the same sets of themes concerned with family and horror. However, Shyamalan is also a director fascinated by faith and belief. He’s often horrified by characters who hold firmly to seemingly irrational beliefs. More than that, though, Shyamalan’s films often mine a sense of dread and horror from something even more fundamental: the fear that, against all odds, these irrational understandings of the universe might be correct.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Movies | Tagged: agnosticism, Atheism, belief, faith, fear, horror, insanity, knock at the cabin, m. nigth shyamalan, rationality, uncertainty | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On the Thrills and Disappointments of “Knock at the Cabin”…

Posted on February 5, 2023 by Darren

I published a new piece at The Escapist during the week. With the release of Knock at the Cabin this weekend, it seemed worth taking a look at the latest movie from M. Night Shyamalan.

Knock at the Cabin is by turns fascinating and frustrating. It is a movie that works really well as a claustrophic and ambiguous thriller, a home invasion movie that is essentially a battle of wills over belief. However, it suffers somewhat from the fact that Shyamalan can’t stay within the cabin. At various points, the narrative has to become bigger and more epic, and in doing so, it unravels the tension that makes the best scenes in the movie so compelling.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Movies | Tagged: belief, faith, horror, knock at the cabin, M. Night Shyamalan, review, suspense, tension, the escapist | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On How M. Night Shyamalan Proves Bigger Isn’t Always Better…

Posted on February 2, 2023 by Darren

I published a new piece at The Escapist this evening. With the looming release of Knock at the Cabin in theatres, it seemed like a good time to consider the films of director M. Night Shyamalan, and the director’s interesting redemption arc following his descent into a laughing stock during the 2000s and 2010s.

Since the turn of the millennium, the assumption has always been that directors scale upwards, that filmmakers tend to movie from low-budget projects to big-budget blockbusters, a career arc typified by directors like Christopher Nolan or Ryan Coogler. Part of what is so fascinating about Shyamalan is that his career rejects this logic. Shyamalan had that arc, launching with a series of impressive low- and mid-budget films like The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, but floundering with bigger projects like The Last Airbender or After Earth. He’s instead found redemption working at a smaller scale on movies like The Visitors or Old.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Movies | Tagged: blockbusters, budget, escapist, hollywood, knock at the cabin, scale, scope, the escapist | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On “M3GAN”, “Renfield”, “Cocaine Bear”, “Knock at the Cabin” and the Enduring Appeal of Universal Horror…

Posted on January 9, 2023 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. This week, with the release of M3GAN, Renfield, Cocaine Bear and Knock at the Cabin all in the first four months of the year, it seemed like as good a time as any to consider Universal’s embrace of the horror movie and creature feature.

For the next couple of months, Avatar: The Way of Water is just going to dominate the box office. It will be unchallenged until the release of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania in mid-February. However, what’s interesting is that other studios aren’t necessarily hiding from this. In fact, they’re releasing smaller and lower-budget movies in the space, in the hopes that they can quietly earn back relatively impresive box office on a low investment. In particular, Universal is returning to one of the studio’s most reliable models: the low-budget horror movie and creature feature.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.