In a video released by Apple, M. Night Shyamalan reflects on his career and influences. He discusses the role of his father, growing up with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg movies, and then going back to the likes of Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock. He also details how this helped shape the Apple TV+ series Servant.
Check It Out: M. Night Shyamalan Discusses His Influences And ‘Servant’
Charlotte:
I’ve always been an M. Night Shyamalan fan.
Two things impress me about his art, one of which is a seldom used form.
First, he is willing to take risks and do ‘different’. This, in turn, particularly with his genres that live in that border between thriller (his stated favourite genre) and horror, gives his treatment an almost dreamlike nightmarish quality; imagery that only the subconscious mind might conjure with objects that are misplaced, but are by that very nature, frightening. This might have something to do with his background, which clearly draws from South Asian folklore.
The other is to compel your mind to create the horror, an art that only few filmmakers (but more authors) have succeeded in pulling off. One of the scariest movies I ever saw was one of his, Devil, which only comes to its crescendo at the end (granted, I saw it jet-lagged somewhere between the UK and Southern Asia, but despite the small screen, its ending was hair-raising).
While it’s not entirely clear where he’s going with it, the dark humour underlying this dysfunctional family portrayed in The Servant, with its creepiness and tease of the supernatural is a paradoxically pleasant diversion.