ABSTRACT
The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999; score by James Newton Howard) and The Others (2001, directed and scored by Alejandro Amenábar) display notable similarities of genre, structure, and theme. Both are ghost stories featuring haunted houses and clairvoyant children. Both make use of surprise endings that arrive in a blinding flash of enlightenment and demand drastic reinterpretation of the preceding narratives. Both films ultimately reveal that their protagonists-Dr. Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) in The Sixth Sense, Grace Stewart (Nicole Kidman) and her children in The Others-who have provided the main viewpoint on unfolding events and with whom the audience has identified, have been dead from the start.1 It turns out we have been experiencing the ghost story from the wrong side of the barrier between this life and the next. Seth Friedman classifies films such as these, built around a climactic perceptual twist while disguising narrative unreliability under cover of established generic conventions, as “misdirection films.”2 He believes this category constitutes a genre in itself, claiming that the films I have chosen, for instance, would be better described as misdirection films than as horror films. I remain unconvinced on this point. I prefer to see them as ghost-stories-with-a-twist, so as not to lose sight of the initial genre orientation, while understanding the twist (Friedman calls it the “changeover”) as a technique rather than a genre-defining frame.3
