Much as the aliens in Signs were allergic to water (spoiler!), audiences have proven themselves allergic to M. Night Shyamalan’s latter-day brand of nicely composed shots and worryingly tin-eared dialogue. The man Newsweek once called “The Next Spielberg” in a cover story is now cranking out cheapie found-footage horror, as seen in this trailer for his latest film, The Visit. The story involves a pair of kids sent to live with their grandparents in the woods, only to have deeply weird things start happening. (Perhaps the production of The Happening will be one of those deeply weird things?) It’ll be odd to see Shyamalan work within the restrictions of the found-footage format, though, as a director, he’s always been an old-school formalist. (And a pretty good one, too: Wayward Pines solved the screenwriting problem by only having him direct, and not letting him write a word.) But the most telling indication of what this will be like comes from its IMDB page: Despite the trailer giving no (intentional) indication of this, the movie site lists the genre as “Comedy.”
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