Don’t call it a comeback, but M Night Shyamalan’s career turnaround in the last 10 years has been something to behold. At the outset, a 2002 issue of Newsweek touted him as “The Next Spielberg”. Since then, the director has attained similar household-name status while serving up low-budget bangers like Old, Knock At The Cabin, and this week’s Trap, rather than “elevated” genre fare like The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable.
Indeed, the lowest point in his career was probably when he was making movies for more than $100 million. Neither 2010’s The Last Airbender nor 2013’s After Earth rank highly on any lists of the director’s best films. But in between, he wanted to showcase other filmmakers in a trilogy of low-budget studio horror movies in the vein of The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
Set up at Universal, The Night Chronicles was pitched as a supernatural horror trilogy based in different modern urban settings. Alongside the late Sam Mercer, Shyamalan would produce the films, all based on story ideas he hadn’t got to make. His only criterion when choosing stories – they had to be good enough that he wanted to direct them himself.
The first of these films, Devil, came out in 2010, but the two sequels bumped in the development process. One of them remains unproduced, and the other grew from an old idea and then circled back around again.
Here’s what became of The Night Chronicles…
Night 1: Devil (2010)
Most of what we know about The Night Chronicles came out of the promotional circuit for Devil, a $10m claustrophobic supernatural horror film set in and around a broken-down elevator in a Philadelphia skyscraper.
The premise is simple – five strangers (Logan Marshall-Green, Geoffrey Arend, Bojana Novakovic, Bokeem Woodbine, and Jenny O’Hara) get into a lift. One of them is the Devil in disguise. Outside of the lift, teetotal police detective Bowden (Chris Messina) monitors the group on CCTV as events turn supernatural.
In an interview with TIME Magazine in 2006, Shyamalan mulled over two ideas for his follow-up to Lady In The Water: “One is a big, broad idea, a Jurassic Parkian kind of idea. And one is kind of an Agatha Christie type idea.” The Happening was the former, and Devil, with its And Then There Were None conceit, was the Christie-esque story.
Directed by John Erick Dowdle (The Poughkeepsie Tapes) and written by Brian Nelson (30 Days Of Night), Devil still evokes Shyamalan’s shenanigans. Notably, there’s a heavily memed scene where security guard Ramirez (Jacob Vargas) explains the Devil’s Meeting by dropping a slice of toast. Apparently, if it lands jelly side down, the Devil is around.
Superficial stylings aside, it’s a story about atonement, which is also in keeping with Shyamalan’s directorial efforts. All five characters are hiding something. And at just 80 minutes long, it’s a taut thriller with some entertainingly nasty twists.
However, Shyamalan’s reputation had taken a battering with Lady In The Water and The Happening. And in the summer of The Last Airbender, Devil’s trailer premiered at the 2010 San Diego Comic Con. Bloody Disgusting reported that the audience groaned at Shyamalan’s producer credit and booed at the end of the trailer.
The negative buzz carried over until the film’s release. Universal didn’t screen Devil for critics, even though the reviews on its release were fairly positive about its B-movie competencies. Its $63 million worldwide box-office total didn’t herald a new franchise either…
Night 2: 12 Strangers/Reincarnate (unproduced)
A month after The Last Airbender's release, Will Smith called Shyamalan to ask him to direct One Thousand A.E., a sci-fi action vehicle for himself and his son Jaden. The director shelved an untitled project, which had Bruce Willis, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Bradley Cooper attached to star, to work on what would become After Earth at Sony.
Devil performed solidly enough for development on the second Night Chronicle to continue in the background of this. The Last Exorcism also came out around this time, and its director, Daniel Stamm, was attached to the next instalment.
12 Strangers was a supernatural legal thriller about a jury who are haunted by a supernatural force while deliberating over a murder trial. Comparisons to 12 Angry Men abound, and we expect this would have continued in the claustrophobic, single-location style of Devil.
Chris Sparling, the writer of the much more claustrophobic thriller Buried, wrote the screenplay. In an interview with The Film Stage, Sparling said he was given a three-page story synopsis and carte blanche to turn it into a script.
The close release dates of Devil, The Last Exorcism, and Buried in 2010 gave The Night Chronicles a lot of press attention, but news of 12 Strangers dried up in the following years. While working on After Earth, Shyamalan seemed optimistic, tweeting in December 2012 about the planned production. He later announced the film was now called Reincarnate and that he’d also been working on the script.
Shyamalan told the fan site M Night Fans: ‘I’m almost done with the script for the second one, I’ve just been sidetracked by directing my own movies, but hopefully within this year we’ll get this one up and running and jump to the third one.’
Like The Last Airbender, the $130m-budgeted After Earth flopped but didn’t bomb. Neither film met expectations, in part due to their excoriating reviews. It’s not for nothing that Shyamalan went back to lower-budget movies after this one, and perhaps the impact on his filmmaking brand is what stalled The Night Chronicles after one film too.
In a 2015 interview with Cinephilia & Beyond, Sparling said: ‘I don’t know what’s going on with that. […] Projects have momentum, a script will be written, even a director attached, and then for some reason it falls off.’
Nevertheless, Shyamalan continued working on the planned third instalment. In fact, he wound up directing it himself.
Night 3: Split (2017)
Back in 2010, the other big Night Chronicles news was that the third film would take its lead from Shyamalan’s unproduced sequel to 2000’s Unbreakable.
He told MTV.com: ‘I cannibalised the idea for the sequel to Unbreakable for one of the Night Chronicles […] It was such a cool idea for a villain, and it was actually originally in the script for Unbreakable, and it was too much. There were too many villains, so I pulled this villain out and was like, “I’ll make this the second flick.”’
Picking up where we left off, Shyamalan’s next film was 2015’s The Visit, a self-financed found-footage horror film that won the filmmaker his best reviews in years. It also connected Shyamalan with Jason Blum, whose Blumhouse Productions was building an indie empire on the Night Chronicles ethos of packaging low-budget genre movies for up-and-coming filmmakers.
Having borrowed $5 million against his home to make The Visit, Shyamalan also financed his next film, 2017’s Split. The aforementioned villain is Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), a.k.a. “the Horde”, a serial killer with dissociative identity disorder.
Produced by Blumhouse and distributed by Universal, the film sees Crumb abduct three girls and keep them in his underground lair. It became the most profitable of Shyamalan’s career, grossing $278m worldwide on a budget of just $9m. Split wasn’t part of The Night Chronicles, but it topped up another trilogy instead.
Read more: M Night Shyamalan | Exploring the filmmaker’s early twists and rug-pull endings
Meanwhile, he also secretly made a deal with Unbreakable distributor Disney. This allowed a mid-credits cameo for Bruce Willis, reprising his role as David Dunn and setting up another sequel. What a twist! 2019’s Glass, the follow-up to both Unbreakable and Split, was a studio-funded affair, sitting right on Blumhouse’s $20m budget ceiling, while Universal and Disney co-distributed the film worldwide.
In a 2021 interview with Coming Soon, Shyamalan reflected on the idea of The Night Chronicles and how it changed his filmmaking:
‘When I was thinking of making more contained, lower-budget movies at that time, that felt like a side thing […] Then I just started doing them myself. So, what was supposed to be The Night Chronicles became the way I [now] make movies. I’ve just enjoyed these last six years so much doing this.’
As lost trilogies go, two out of three Night Chronicles movies ain’t bad. And who knows, given Shyamalan’s use of older ideas, maybe the toast will eventually land jelly-side up for Reincarnate too…
