In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, director M. Night Shyamalan provides something of a pre-exit interview for two projects he’s currently putting the finishing touches on: his Apple TV+ series, Servant, and Universal’s Knock at the Cabin. As is usually the case with any Shyamalan interview, the chat makes for a very entertaining read, and we’d suggest reading it in full … but there is one particular thing about this interview that we wanted to shine a light on.
Namely: M. Night Shyamalan once came this close to tying his 2015 film The Visit into his 2019 Unbreakable sequel, Glass.
You remember The Visit, right? That’s the one where a pair of kids are shipped off by their mother for a vacation at their grandparents’ house, only for (spoilers) them to realize that the two old people they’ve been shacking up with are not, in fact, their grandparents … but two escaped mental patients (if you’ve not seen The Visit, get on that; it’s wild).
During the interview, THR asks Shyamalan if he ever considered tying all of his films and characters, given that so many of them are from Philly. This leads to the following back-and-forth:
THR: Since most of your stories take place in or around Philadelphia, did you ever play with the idea of your characters all existing in the same Philadelphia?
Shyamalan: If I was smart enough to have thought about it 20 some years ago, I would’ve done it, but I wasn’t smart enough to think about it. There was one tie-in that I almost did. It was in Glass when they all got to the mental institution. I was going to tell a story about The Visit and how two people escaped from that same hospital.
Oh my God. You just blew my mind.
(Laughs.) I was going to do it, but I chickened out. So I didn’t do it.
Y’know … this might’ve worked. Furthermore, audiences might have been primed for such a crossover, given the shocking ending of 2016’s Split, which (again, spoilers) ultimately revealed itself to be a sidequel of sorts to Shyamalan’s Unbreakable. One can imagine Shyamalan not wanting to further muddy the waters by connecting The Visit into that already-shared universe – I mean, we get it – but still: would’ve been a helluva thing to see him pull that off!
Once again, we recommend heading over to THR to read their entire interview with Shyamalan. Perhaps that’s something you can do while waiting for Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin (an adaptation of Paul Tremblay’s Cabin at the End of the World, don’tcha know) to hit theaters on February 3rd.
