M. Night Shyamalan is the mastermind behind some of the most mind-bending supernatural films ever. So it's not surprising that he has some mind-bending techniques for promoting his films too.
He's given us films about aliens (Signs), ghosts (The Sixth Sense), killer plants (The Happening), a killer village (The Village), and a psychological superhero trilogy (The Unbreakable trilogy). Oh, and a series (Servant) about a creepy angelic-like cult that brings people back from the dead (we think), and now he's giving us one more with Old.
So it's pretty safe to say that Shyamalan has all sorts of stories to tell us, all of them equally weird. But while all of his films have that shock factor, the famous director wanted to stun fans before they even got to the theaters to see one of his most famous films. He succeeded in getting a reaction, but he may have gone too far, almost sinking his own work...with one documentary.
It All Started With A Documentary
As we've said, Shyamalan is a huge fan of the supernatural and horror genres, even though he doesn't really label his films as being in such categories.
"I make mysteries. So by the nature, you’re going to learn something at the end of a mystery," Shyamalan told New York Daily News. "And so it comes inherently with the genre that I’m in. I don’t consider myself a horror filmmaker, so that’s not the genre I’m in."
Regardless of his own views of his work, he does get pigeonholed into those creepy genres, and it's not really surprising that he idolized other supernatural/horror stories, including H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. Specifically, Orson Welles's infamous 1938 broadcast of the book, considered one of the biggest hoaxes ever. Welles read the book about an alien invasion so realistically that listeners actually thought Earth was being invaded.
Knowing about this hoax, Shyamalan was inspired to create an intricate hoax himself in the hopes that it promoted his new film, The Village.
In 2004, Shyamalan teamed up with Sci-Fi (now known as Syfy) to create a fake documentary called The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan, which "follows documentarian Nathaniel Kahn as he begins to profile Shyamalan for what’s ostensibly an authorized puff piece … at least until Kahn begins poking around into the director’s shrouded personal history, at which point Shyamalan appears to pull out of the proceedings in anger," Vulture explained.
"Before Buried Secret aired, Shyamalan had been planting stories in the press that he was unhappy with the movie, which promised to reveal a secret that the filmmaker preferred to keep hidden."
They shot the "unauthorized" documentary on the set of The Village. It tells the story of some event that happened in Shyamalan's childhood that allowed him to be connected to spirits, thus sparking his obsession with the supernatural.
The official IMDb synopsis reads, "A filmmaker and his crew making a documentary about award-winning director M. Night Shyamalan begin to suspect that their subject is hiding a dark and sinister secret."
They wanted the documentary to be believed by fans, so they created a bubble of secrecy rivaling that of the MCU or Star Wars. Shyamalan made staffers sign non-disclosure agreements with a $5 million fine attached. They also added in a nonexistent Sci-Fi publicist called "David Westover," who was named on fake press releases that were actually sent out to the press. They also fed the press false stories as well.
They Had To Apologize, And It Nearly Destroyed Shyamalan's Career
The documentary and the hoax were revealed after an AP reporter confronted Syfy's president Bonnie Hammer at a press conference. Hammer admitted the hoax and said it was part of a "guerrilla marketing campaign" to attract publicity before the release of The Village.
When the news broke, NBC Universal, Syfy's parent company, apologized and said that the hoax was "not consistent with our policy at NBC. We would never intend to offend the public or the press and we value our relationship with both."
"Perhaps we might have taken the guerilla campaign one step too far," Hammer said. "We thought it would create controversy and it probably went one step too far."
While some fans might have been angry at Syfy and Shyamalan, it did generate enough talk that many people went to see The Village. Even if you only saw broadcasts talking about the controversy and knew that Shyamalan had a film coming out on top of all that, people's curiosity had boiled over.
Vulture writes that if cinematic historians are trying to "pinpoint the place where Shyamalan’s hubris outgrew his oeuvre," should "hit up YouTube," where they could find the documentary. They call it the "burnishing of the Shyamalan brand" and find it interesting that Shyamalan "seems eager to portray himself as a prickly pear" and somewhat of a recluse.
Interestingly enough, we can't seem to find any words from Shyamalan himself regarding the documentary or the hoax in general. Maybe he wanted to keep up that mystique all these years later.