Ooooo, scary! It’s Halloween! Time to dig out the knives candy and go door-to-door murdering spreading joy in your neighborhood.
Just be sure it’s joy you’re spreading and not like, ebola. Yeah, don’t spread that. Just joy. And cream cheese if you’re having bagels.
Another great thing about Halloween besides all the murdering candy is that you can watch all kinds of scary movies. I prefer ones with catchy titles, like Poultrygeist : Night of the Chicken Dead, Thankskilling, or The Gingerdead Man. Or maybe some time I’ll want to take a peek at some of George Clooney’s finer work in Return of the Killer Tomatoes :
Be sure to also watch through to the terrifying business-talk offered by the creepy lady. Awesome stuff.
Which brings us to today’s true subject, the filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan. Shyamalan. Fun to say if you can twist your tongue enough to get it out.
The future director-writer of The Sixth Sense, Signs, Unbreakable and the Happening was born in Puducherry, India and moved to the United States at just six weeks of age, showing remarkable nous for someone so young to master the complex U.S. immigration system. He was raised in Pennsylvania by his physician parents and now lives in nearby Willistown, a place near Philadelphia founded in tribute to Sixth Sense star Bruce Willis.
Shyamalan decided early on he wanted to be a filmmaker and started making Super 8 films. By the time he was seventeen he’d already made as many as 45 “movies”. He hit the big time with the unusual double of family hit Stuart Little, which he co-wrote, and the spooky horror flick The Sixth Sense. I don’t recall a big twist ending in the mouse movie but The Sixth Sense began his streak of hit movies, many of which concluded with an unexpected twist.
His last few films have been less well received critically but have still been moneymakers, such as the…eccentric The Happening, and the poorly reviewed The Last Airbender. The Happening focuses around a creepy plot where an odd ‘disease’ spread by wind makes the people it comes into contact with kill themselves. Or something like that.
It also made Mark Wahlberg talk to plants.
That’s just great.
Okay, that’s it for today! Get out there, have fun and eat some candy brains!
The Blog of Funny Names 
Clearly she was the perfect woman. I cannot get passed Clooney’s eyebrows. They rival that St Louis arch thing. What I do not understand is why M Night Shya Mulan doesn’t cast Shia Saide LaBeouf in his movies. Double Shya/Shia. Oh, that’s too shy shy.
Woohoo! A Kajagoogoo reference!
In other news, I just found out the other day that a friend of Arto’s and mine dated Shia LaBeouf for a year or so. Wild!
A year? Then they totally kissed. I wonder if he had the rabbi beard then?
Questions of the ages. I’ll have to ask and report back to you 🙂
Those are the eyebrows that launched him to space. With Sandra Bullock. Pretty serious eyebrow power. The Arch has nothing on that.
Looking forward to a new Shia-Mulan spectacular with that duo singing the lead roles.
Had M’s parents named him “Good” instead, the cheap jokes would never stop coming.
Ha! And even though they didn’t, the jokes came anyway!
I LOVE THE GINGERDEAD MAN!!!!!!!
– Dave Carlson, M.D.
In the back cover of the 2035 30th anniversary re-issue of the Gingerdead Man.
the sixth sense is one of my all time favorites. i was stunned by the ending and did not see it coming!
Neither did Shyamalan! He had written six drafts of the script before he came up with that ending.
I clearly have movies to hunt down. Thanks for the checklist and awesome report. Hope your Halloween was haunted, Arto.
George Clooney was young once? Who knew?
There’s a great College Humor skit on M. Night.
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