Knock At The Cabin director M. Night Shyamalan, famous for putting last-minute twists into his films, has revealed his personal favourite twist from movie history.
Shyamalan, who broke out in 1999 with Oscar-nominated thriller The Sixth Sense, has since directed 13 films – many of which feature sudden changes in the direction or expected outcome of the plot. The most recent of these, beach-set horror Old, came out in 2021, while his latest movie Knock At The Cabin hits cinemas tomorrow (February 3).
Speaking to NME in an exclusive interview, Shyamalan got to reminiscing about the movies that first inspired him to become a filmmaker. “My favourite twist in someone else’s movie? Certainly Planet Of The Apes, the original one is profound,” he said. “I remember it blossoming in my head as I was watching it and it echoing after the fact. It was profound, ironic, all of those things. Even to this day it’s the standard for me.”
Planet Of The Apes, first released in 1968, stars Charlton Heston as an astronaut called George Taylor whose spacecraft crash-lands on a planet where highly intelligent non-human ape species are dominant and humans are enslaved. The rest of the film details George and his companions’ interactions with the apes, but in the twist ending they come across a half-buried Statue Of Liberty, revealing the titular planet was Earth all along.
“It was a profound social commentary… but suddenly it became this really apocalyptic movie,” added Shyamalan. “It’s all in the angle of the story. That’s a wonderful example of an apocalyptic movie [told from an angle] that had never been done before.”
‘Knock At The Cabin’ is released in cinemas tomorrow (February 3)