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20th Century Fox has released over 80 new images from THE HAPPENING...funny thing, an ungodly amount of images and you STILL don't know what the hell it's all about!
{sidebar id=1}But these story details released may shed some light on the happening which is to come, plus a few words from writer/director M. Night Shyamalan himself,
From director M. Night Shyamalan comes a lightning-paced,
heart-pounding paranoid thriller about a family on the run from an inexplicable
and unstoppable event that threatens not only humankind...but the most basic
human instinct of them all: survival.
It begins with no clear warning. It seems to come out of
nowhere. In a matter of minutes, episodes of strange, chilling deaths that defy
reason and boggle the mind in their shocking destructiveness, erupt in major
American cities. What is causing this sudden, total breakdown of human
behavior? Is it some kind of new terrorist attack, an experiment gone wrong, a
diabolical toxic weapon, an out-of-control virus? Is it being transmitted by
air, by water...how?
From Philadelphia high school science teacher Elliot Moore
what matters most is finding a way to escape the mysterious and deadly
phenomenon. Though he and his wife Alma are in the midst of a marital crisis,
they hit the road, first by train, then by car, with Elliot's math teacher
friend Julian and his 8 year-old daughter Jess, heading for the Pennsylvania
farmlands where they hope they'll be out of reach of the grisly, ever-growing
attacks. Yet it soon becomes clear that no one - and nowhere - is safe. This
terrifying, invisible killer cannot be outrun. It is only when Elliot begins to
discover the true nature of what is lurking out there - and just what has
unleashed this force that threatens the future of humanity -- that he discovers
a sliver of hope that his fragile family might be able to escape what is
happening.
Writer and director M. Night Shyamalan has become one of our
pre-eminent spinners of contemporary movie fables with a succession of
multi-layered hit films featuring his distinctive blend of suspense, drama,
humor and heartfelt emotion. Since his debut with the groundbreaking ghost
story The Sixth Sense, he has gone on to forge a series of gripping modern
films that explore provocative human mysteries, attaining critical accolades
and phenomenal box-office success along the way.
Now, with THE HAPPENING, Shyamalan goes back to his roots
with a stripped-down, gut-wrenching intense thriller - a tale of disaster,
harrowing escape, and of nature in deadly conflict with humanity. At its core,
the story is perhaps his most immediate and direct, as it follows just three
people - a man, a woman and a child - on the road, running from a nameless,
faceless catastrophe. But it is also a story that boldly puts forth a haunting
vision of an epic apocalypse triggered not directly by man but by the natural
world; that asks what happens when the primal human instinct for preservation
goes awry; and that explores how love and tenderness might help keep us alive
in the darkest and most threatening of times.
The idea of THE HAPPENING came to Shyamalan as he drove across
the New Jersey countryside, watching a lush, green world whirr by through the
windshield. "I was on my way to New York," he recalls, "it was a
beautiful day and the trees were hanging over the highway, and I suddenly
though to myself, 'What if nature one day turned on us?' In that moment, the
entire structure of the story for THE HAPPENING popped into my head instantly
and the characters suddenly became perfectly clear. It was a great feeling because
movies are always so much more accessible when the predominating this is the
structure."
Even from those earliest moments of inspiration, before a
single word was on the page, Shyamalan also knew that he wanted a very specific
style for this film. "I knew that I wanted to make a movie that would be
electric, clean and dynamic," he says.
The initial draft of Shyamalan's screenplay was already
quite intense, but when Twentieth Century Fox came on board, the studio
suggested that Shyamalan might push the story even further, that he could
approach it as an R-rated movie and take it to extremes of tension and terror
where he's not yet ventured. Shyamalan was surprised, but excited by the
freedom this suggestion brought to let his imagination run even wilder.
"When I thought about it, I though this is really the way to make this
story, because it is already a story all about taboos. I mean if you had tried
to make THE EXORCIST as a PG-13 movie, it would be hard to imagine," he
muses.
Sums up producer Barry Mendel: "The big idea of the
film was always to push the Night genre and Fox just said to us, there are no
boundaries, take the gloves off, go for it, and we did." Adds producer Sam
Mercer: "THE HAPPENING takes many of the supernatural and emotional
elements traditional to Night's movies to a new level. And this story begs a
compelling bigger question - have we gone to far as human?"
Shyamalan envisioned creating a contemporary twist on the
Cold War paranoid thrillers of the 1950s and 60s - movies that entertained and
raised the anxiety meter with a spine-tingling sense of imminent doom and yet,
beneath their roiling surfaces, subtly questions the sanity of modern society's
direction. From the vengeful crows of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds to the
atomic-created Godzilla and the aggressive, plant-like pos of Don Siegel's
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, many of these classic tales of suspense played
like horror movies, yet also left audiences reeling with the sense of a brave
new world in which the earth might go on but the human species might not make
it.
Shyamalan knew that, as with all these movies, the driving
force of THE HAPPENING would be an all-pervasive sense of uncertainty and fear.
But he went a step further to contemplate the most unthinkable kind of demise
for humankind. "I think what's really scary in THE HAPPENING is that
people start acting in the opposite way of how they are supposed to act.
Unexplainable behavior is always very disturbing and there's a lot of taboo
behavior in this story," he explains. "After all, what is the one
thing that keeps a species going - it's the instinct to stay away from harmful
things, to protect ourselves and each other. But if you take away that instinct
what happens? Things will turn upside down very, very quickly."
The writer/director turned the screws even tighter on the mystery
of the story by staying away from any pat, detailed explanation of the causes
of "the happening," merely hinting at an environmental blowback that
has affected the human mind. "The film is a conscience check but in a
sense, I think the audience will fill in the answers and we don't need the
movie to say 100% percent what is going on," he comments. "There are
characters who are talking about what actually is going on but they're
dismissed and denied a lot by other people. Still, I believe our human responsibility
for what is going on is very much in the movie, as well as the notion that this
is a day of reckoning."
Shyamalan enjoyed the liberating effect of breaking away
from something for which he has become renowned: the tricky, twist ending. He
always saw THE HAPPENING as playing out in just 36 hours, rocketing from the
first hints of disaster to a singular climax, without any detours, that would
leave the audience still breathless. "The end-of-the-world genre was a
nice feeling for me because if I write anything that feels like a chess match
going on with the audience, the audience would expect that, even if I'm not
playing the chess match," he laughs. "But sometimes a story is just a
story. In the case of THE HAPPENING, it is really about a family trying to
survive and learning to love one another and that's what most drew me to this.
My goal was always to make a fast-paces movie where you come out paranoid about
things happening in the world you never really considered before."
Although THE HAPPENING is in some ways a departure for
Shyamalan, like his other films, the story's large-scale apocalypse also
becomes a way of exploring, on a very intimate level, two characters in the
midst of a personal crisis. At the heart of the take is a couple - science teacher
Elliot and therapist Alma - who even as the world is self-destructing around
them, are struggling with themes of protecting and caring for one another in
their domestic life.
"For me, story ideas are always catalysts for
characters to have conversations about faith, about love, about human life, and
to reveal themselves spiritually and emotionally," Shyamalan comments.
"There is a lot in Elliot and Alma's relationship about the way that love
works, about who we really are in relationships, about what is means to be the
chaser in a relationship or the chased, and about what we say to each other
when we thing we're having our last conversation together. What interested me
about Elliot is that he has a lot of faith in this wife that she'll come
through."
Unexpectedly, as event play out, Elliot and Alma find
themselves part of a newly formed nuclear family, one borne out of terrifying
times yet imbued with a flickering sense of hope that provides just enough
light in the darkness around them to go on. "I hope the new family that they
create serves as a metaphor for humanity, for our ability to be positive and
hopeful and move forward - and, at the same time, I hope the movie leaves you
with the sense that we may not get that chance if we don't start changing some
things," concludes Shyamalan.
Click on a thumbnail below to enlarge!
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