KNOCK AT THE CABIN
CABIN FEVER
M NIGHT SHYAMALAN IS OFF ON A FAMILY HOLIDAY IN HIS NEW THRILLER KNOCK AT THE CABIN. THERE’S JUST ONE SNAG… THE WORLD MIGHT BE ABOUT TO END
WORDS: STUART MANNING
“ THE PREMISE OF THE book is so strong. I remember thinking, ‘I wish I had come up with this idea.’”
When M Night Shyamalan talks about his film Knock At The Cabin, he makes the project sound like a perfect confluence of events. He was first asked to produce an adaptation of the source novel, Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin At The End Of The World, but ended up being so taken with the concept and Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman’s draft screenplay that he found himself taking on the director’s reins and re-developing it as a passion project.
“It was like a lightning bolt – love at first sight,” he says enthusiastically. “I read the book and it was the same thing again. It speaks to all the things that ignite me: the moral dilemma with a kind of larger philosophical thing at work, heart-pounding stakes throughout, and then the family at the centre. I thought, ‘Actually, maybe I could do it myself.’ And so that’s how we got here. It was very beautiful and organic.”
Tremblay’s novel tells the story of a picture-perfect modern family – two husbands and their young adopted daughter – taking a holiday to a remote woodland cabin. Their happy stay is disturbed by the arrival of a group of threatening strangers, convinced that the apocalypse is imminent and that it can only be averted by one member of the family making the ultimate sacrifice.
Shyamalan rewrote the screenplay and is keen to underline that his film is only loosely adapted from the novel. According to him, the book’s cinematic potential leapt off the page. “I read all the time, but it’s rare that I get that kind of lightning-bolt feeling. Whatever I’m reading, my mind starts turning it into a movie immediately.
“It’s funny, as you and I are speaking, I’m reading The Shining, Stephen King’s book, just for fun, and it’s so cinematic. I can’t stand it! Stephen is so good at evoking cinematic moments, so good at character moments… I’m making the movie in my head already, even though Kubrick’s is one of my favourite movies. It’s a part of my brain that just immediately starts working.”