After Lady in the Water, M. Night Shyamalan probably had a nightmare. He could see people walk out of the cinema halls halfway into his film and kill themselves because they couldn’t take it any more. He woke up and wrote and wrote and wrote… Different ways how people could kill themselves… They could jump off the roof, shoot themselves, lie down in front of a lawn-mower, bang their heads into glass windows, cut off their veins if car-crashing didn’t work… He didn’t have a plot as such, so he looked back at his films — he’s shown the living dead, a superhuman born on earth, aliens from outer space, a village that lived in the past, nymphs and scrunts from water — and realised that logical progression demanded paranormal activity out of thin air.
So he finished his script in a line: A mysterious air-borne toxin (which will remain mysterious till the end of the film) is making people kill themselves all along the West Coast of America. We already know Shyamalan has the knack of stretching short story scripts to a feature-length thriller and we’ve never had a problem with that because he manages to weave in a conflict (both for the protagonist of the film and the larger community) and resolve it with a little bit of logical reasoning.
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