Critical approaches to the films of M. Night Shyamalan
Subtitle: spoiler warnings
By: edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock.
Contributors: Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew.
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2010
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
ISBN-13: 9780230104082
Subjects: Shyamalan, M. Night -- Criticism and interpretation
Description: "Critical Approaches to the Films of M. Night Shyamalan: Spoiler Warnings represents the first serious academic engagement with auteur director M. Night Shyamalan and his work. The essays, including contributions from established film scholars David Sterritt, Murray Pomerance, Emmanuel Bordeau, R. Barton Palmer, Matt Hills, and Katherine Fowkes, explore Shyamalan's Hollywood blockbusters from The Sixth Sense to The Happening in terms of their themes, aesthetics, and marketing, and attend as well to the production of Shyamalan himself as a celebrity director. Taken together, the collection recognizes and explores Shyamalan's "star status" and offers the concerted analysis that Shyamalan as cultural phenomenon requires"--Provided by publisher.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction : telling stories about stories: the films of M. Night Shyamalan / Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock; title: Feature one : narrating Shyamalan, narrating culture. The homefront hero in the films of M. Might Shyamalan / Elizabeth Abele; title: Reaching out to the other side : problematic families in the films of M. Night Shyamalan / Elizabeth Rosen; title: Melodrama and male crisis in Signs and Unbreakable / R. Barton Palmer; title: Spellbound in darkness : M. Night Shyamalan and the epistemological twitch / David Sterritt; title: Four films by M. Night Shyamalan : oh, the irony? / Katherine A. Fowkes; title: The night book or The mirror and the page / Emmanuel Bordeau; title: Intermission: Shyamalan's story. Making sense of M. Night Shyamalan : signs of a popular auteur in the "field of horror" / Matt Hills; title: Reshaping the director as star : investigating M. Night Shyamalan's Image / Kim Owczarski; title: Feature two : stories by Shyamalan. Sigmund Freud, pedophile priests, and Shyamalan's filmic fairy tale (The sixth sense) / Jane F. Thrailkill; title: Unbreak my heart : the melodramatic superhero in Unbreakable / Matthew Yockey; title: The simulation of evil in M. Night Shyamalan's The village / Miriam Jordan and Julian Jason Haladyn; title: "Something ancient in modern times" : myth-making and meaninglessness in Lady in the water / Nicholas Parker and Nirmal Trivedi; title: Whatever happened to M. Night Shyamalan : meditation on an "infection" film / Murray Pomerance.