Sixth Sense
...due to the lack of too much plot information given in the film’s trailer. An official at Disney’s distributor company for the film, insists that this lack of over exposure to the film’s plot made people get the sense of discovering the film for themselves and how this made them start telling their friends about the film’s intelligent twist, and they in turn had to see it for themselves. The Sixth Sense film was released at the end of the summer season, in the aftermath of the media frenzy surrounding The Blair Witch Project (1999, USA, Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick), which relied on months of internet buzz to generate public interest that led to its commercial success. The Blair Witch Project was an independently made film with a little budget about three student filmmakers who disappeared in the woods while shooting a documentary and how their footage was found a year later. The commercial success of the film was based on its aggressive marketing, which depicted the events in the film as being real. However, media advertising surrounding the release of The Sixth Sense was minimal, even though it was a big budget movie from a major Hollywood studio – Disney. If you put Sixth Sense next to Blair Witch you observe a slew of delicious ironies. The latter, perhaps the ultimate no-budget camcorder indie, is promoted like The Phantom Menace, with techies and horror-heads hitting on judicious plot leaks and downloads via a state of the art website, and its resultant huge profitability spilling over into merchandising and even the TM-ing of its twig fetish logo (When we finally saw the film a few days later, it was an inevitable disappointment, feeling like a mere footnote to an inspired marketing campaign). The $55m Sixth Sense, however, despite the might of Disney behind it, relied heavily on word-of-mouth recommendation and an Omerta-like resolution not to give the game away.2 I agree with Stuart Husband’s view that the Blair Witch was disappointing, and I believe most audiences felt the same way after the consistent and persuasive advertising that preceded the film’s opening. The Sixth Sense offered audiences a more mature and uncanny horror story allowing the viewer to discover the film for themselves. It also profited from having a PG-13 rating, whereas the Blair Witch had a 15-rating. For some like Robert Bucksbaum of the box-office prediction service Reel Source, Disney’s artlessness seemed stage managed: “They knew exactly what they were going for,” he says “Blair Witch brought the horror enthusiasts out of the woodwork and whetted their appetite for the genre. And Sixth Sense was pushed as a sort of classier, grown up alternative, while getting a PG rating, which meant the younger teens barred from Blair Witch could also get their scare-fix.”3 There are many factors that make the Sixth Sense a great film, such as the magnificent performance from its actors particularly the young Haley Joel Osment, the magnificent architectural edifices in Philadelphia (the film’s location), script, the production design, editing etc. However, I believe the film will always be remembered for the twist at the end. This twist that is added to the film narrative allows or forces a viewer to read the film in a different light upon watching it. The twist is successful because even though clues about it are littered throughout the film, it isn’t overwhelmingly obvious to detract from the normal way audiences have grown to read Hollywood films. To convince us of the reality of these unreal characters each film works on at least two levels. The first is the surface level on which most of the narrative appears to take place. This is the primary reading of the film. Below this is another level, a secondary reading, through which the first level must be reinterpreted by new information supplied late in the narrative. Individual scenes must contain enough ambiguity to allow both levels of interpretation.4 During the course of my research, I discovered that different critics, writers and people who have seen the film all had their various opinions of what genre the Sixth Sense belonged to. Some people feel the story is more about the psychological drama that evolves between the characters played by Bruce Willis’ and Haley Joel Osment while others feel it is basically a ghost story. Christine James comments that “Audiences hoping for a bone-chilling horror-thriller will be disappointed by the fact that The Sixth Sense is more a drama with paranormal elements than a fright flick; the film seems to purposely avoid playing up the otherworldly aspects in an attempt to be a more sophisticated genre entry.5 Stuart Husband writing for The Guardian stated that he went to watch the film with some friends, vaguely aware that it was some sort of supernatural thriller. Ira Nayman describes it her article for Creative Screen Writing as a supernatural story. Phillip French’s review on the film considers it the most popular film of the autumn, M. Night Shyamalan’s enjoyable tale of the occult.6 While Steve Boone of CitySearch, describes it as “one of the greatest horror film of the ‘90s!” These various classifications are justified as the Sixth Sense contains elements of drama, ghosts, horror, suspense, thriller, supernatural and psychological. Is it safe to say that a viewer may read the Sixth Sense in a different light if he goes with the preconception of the film bound within the rules of a certain genre? Genres are based on a tacit agreement between filmmakers and audiences.7 For instance, a horror film can easily be identified or distinguished from a film from another genre by the presence of an evil force or ‘monster’ which disrupts the natural equilibrium in a place by causing a considerable amount of havoc whi...