Deadline reports that Universal Pictures has acquired distribution rights to M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit, which is weird because M. Night Shyamalan never officially announced he was making The Visit. The bastard twisted us! He twisted us all!
There were some clues—like the casting rumor about Kathryn Hahn starring in a M. Night Shyamalan movie called Sundowning, a film whose plot sounds very similar to how Deadline describes The Visitor. (Both films were about children who discover a horrific secret about their grandparents while visiting them at their farm.) But then there was that other casting rumor saying he was making a movie about Bruce Willis walking. Which was true, and which was a mass hallucination caused by a stinky yellow fog or something? Only M. Night Shyamalan knew—until now.
Now we also know that Shyamalan self-financed The Visitor and shot it in and around his home in Pennsylvania, which isn’t terribly surprising considering his last two studio movies, After Earth and The Last Airbender, were generally considered terrible. But with any luck, returning to his low-budget horror roots has given Shyamalan, once again a filmmaker with something to prove, the creative boost he needs to make another The Sixth Sense. That’s a twist we could get behind.