M. Night Shyamalan’s new film Knock at the Cabin marks the filmmaker’s first R-rated film since 2008’s The Happening, but despite that rating allowing him the freedom to showcase explicit violence, he recently recalled that he ultimately showed restraint on what he graphicly filmed as to allow audiences to conjure far more frightening imagery. Shyamalan expressed the challenge of being able to satisfy a variety of audiences, as some of his fans would prefer he went more violent as others would hope he throttled back the gore. Knock at the Cabin lands in theaters on February 3rd.
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“Because I smash many genres together, how to balance them together so the flavors don’t cancel each other out, because they could easily cancel each other out,” Shyamalan recalled to Digital Spy. “Like, for example, I’m trying to get everyone, so you have the 14-year-old boys that are like, ‘More blood,’ then you have, like, the older women that are like, ‘Oh, I would never tell Claire to come see this movie, it’s too violent.’ I want everyone and so, for me, the actually really fun answer of it is by using their imagination, it’s more violent.”
Shyamalan detailed how he precisely chooses when to cut away from a potentially jarring sequence and how, through this technique, audiences on either end of the spectrum get what they want from the experience.
“The 14-year-old boys, when I pan away or I show you something, your mind is doing the rest of it. They realize that their mind is working and making this horrible image and so they get that satisfaction of that adrenaline that comes,” the filmmaker expressed. “And then the older women, they’re feeling the safety of the fact that if they chose to, they can reduce that image of violence. There’s a balancing act to everything, the humor, how much humor to mind from it, the drama, the violence, all of it.”
The new film is described, “While vacationing at a remote cabin, a young girl and her parents are taken hostage by four armed strangers who demand that the family make an unthinkable choice to avert the apocalypse. With limited access to the outside world, the family must decide what they believe before all is lost.”
Knock at the Cabin lands in theaters on February 3rd.
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