Adapting Ecohorror Fables: Redemptive Revisions in M. Night Shyamalan’s Old (2021) and Knock at the Cabin (2023)

Isaiah Frost Rivera

Though his interest in ecohorror is largely attributed to the notoriously maligned The Happening (2008), M. Night Shyamalan has consistently displayed throughout his career a “fervent environmental activism” (Flasz). His films, which range from folk horrors such as The Village (2004) to sci-fi thrillers like After Earth (2013), often position the natural world in stark and vengeful opposition to the ravages of human indifference, implicating his characters in the large-scale destruction of planet Earth. What distinguishes this recurrent “preoccupation with environmentalism” (Smith) from other ecohorrors is Shyamalan’s uniquely faith-based optimism about such catastrophe, wherein “even tragedies lay the foundation for hopeful endings” (Feder 44). This thematic throughline also takes root in Shyamalan’s deployment of children as “smarter, wiser and more in tune with reality” (Swift) than the adults around them, who are unable, or unwilling, to secure a future for their successors in our increasingly apocalyptic times.

This essay examines two of Shyamalan’s recent adaptations of contemporary ecohorror novels; Old (2021), based on Sandcastles, written by Pierre Oscar Lévy and illustrated by Frederik Peeters, and Knock at the Cabin (2023), based on Cabin at the End of the World by Paul G. Tremblay. While Knock at the Cabin functions as a “cautionary climate change allegory” (Verma), Shyamalan’s “do-gooder choice” (Gabardi) to change the novel’s ending flattens its nihilistic appraisal of personal agency during end times. The same goes for Old, a film that, despite being “soaked through with pre-apocalyptic dread… [and] anxiety over rising sea levels” (St. James), reorients its source text’s decidedly bleak take on species extinction. By altering these novels and their polarizing endings in pursuit of a redemptive politic, Shyamalan resists pandemic-era despair in favor of a dogmatic certitude about the ecological future of humanity.

 

Sanitizing Sandcastles

In Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters’ graphic novel Sandcastles, a group of beachgoers is forced into dire straits when they find themselves trapped by an “unknown power” (46) that is rapidly aging them. Yet over the course of 108 pages, all they manage to do about it is argue, underscoring the author’s belief that, even in the face of planetary ruin, “we don’t pay attention to what is truly important in our lives” (Lévy, preface). Sandcastles embodies this message from its opening pages, as Zoe is chided by her father Robert for mischievously thwacking a patch of foliage: “Those plants didn’t do anything to you! Look at them rather than kill them. Maybe when you’re older there won’t be any ferns left!” Minimizing Robert’s fatalism, Zoe’s mother Marianne responds, “They’ve been there since the dinosaurs, and they’ll be there long after us!” (15).

Indeed, the natural world outlives the novel’s bickering, listless characters who, much like climate-complacent politicians and world leaders, fail to preserve their rapidly growing children’s collective futures, on the beach and beyond. At one point, Marianne grimly notes how everything is “so awful for [her] grand-daughter” (82), yet she and the rest of the adults around her do nothing to change this fact except commiserate, sleep, and resign themselves to “disappear like insects” (76), abandoning the aforementioned grandchild-now-turned-adult to contend with the ruins of a world her predecessors have left behind.

Though Shyamalan omits some of the more salacious beats of Lévy and Peeters’ story, such as its casual nudity and explicit content—including one character’s cheeky suggestion to “organize an orgy while we wait for death” (84)—he remains mostly true to their original vision. Shyamalan’s characters are just as insular and ineffectual, unable to contend with the crumbling world human intervention has created. At one point, rapper Mid-Sized Sedan (Aaron Pierre) muses that he came to the beach for a “zen trip… to see the ocean and remember I’m connected to something bigger.” In Old, however, due to the cruelly accelerated passage of time, such attempts to transcend a ruinous reality and reunite with the natural world prove too little too late.

Nonetheless, Shyamalan fundamentally alters the novel’s provocative conclusion. Though Lévy originally wrote an ending detailing the beach’s purpose, he and Peeters ultimately deemed it “useless,” opting instead to leave readers with “a strong impression of loneliness and despair” (CBR Staff). Old, however, reveals the vacation resort to be a clandestine medical facility that isolates unwitting victims on the naturally aging beach to fast-track clinical drug trials. In an expositional monologue, the manager relishes in his company’s manifest beach destiny: “Nature made that beach exist for a reason… Let’s do what nature wanted us to do.” Like the rest of Shyamalan’s canonically wise children, the resort manager’s nephew, Idlib (Kailen Jude), proves instrumental in helping the two surviving beachgoers escape, following his cryptic message: “My uncle doesn’t like the coral.” As Trent and Maddox, now aged into their 50s, swim through a coral reef immune to the beach’s aging effects, Maddox’s shirt suddenly snags on a tentacle, threatening to drown her. But just as all hope seems lost, a mystical crack breaks through the seafloor allowing her brother to free her, as if the landscape itself were aiding them in their mission to expose the resort’s exploitation of children and nature. Ending with the siblings safe in a police helicopter, Old rejects the hopelessness of Sandcastles’ conclusion and assures the divine promise of its children-turned-adult characters’ precarious futures.

 

Closing The Cabin Door

In Paul Tremblay’s Cabin at the End of the World, four doomsdayers hold a married couple, Andrew and Eric, and their adopted daughter, Wen, hostage, claiming the family must choose to sacrifice one of their own in order to prevent the apocalypse. Every time they refuse, one of the intruders is killed in ritualistic fashion, unleashing a series of ecological plagues broadcasted on the cabin’s television, paralleling the “creeping horror of climate change” that “infiltrates the home” (Gibson 112) via news coverage. Similarly, the invaders’ motivations mirror the “sensational conspiracies” and “collective, warped worldview[s]” (Liptak) that have infiltrated climate change discourse itself, creating a culture of denial that inevitably leads to “improperly processing the losses of global environmental catastrophe” (Gibson 111).

Tremblay’s novel depicts abject violence to confront these calamitous stakes head-on. Redmond’s death particularly achieves this effect, over the course of five agonizing pages, as “rusted metal… [r]aking claw tips are caught, stuck in [his]… face,” during which he expels a “high-pitched, animal whimper” (101) that grows into “a wail, a liquid scream” (102) snuffed by a “tree-snapping-and-falling crack and crunch” as his sternum and rib cage are crushed “clear through to the spine” (103). Adriane’s death by gunshot is equally gruesome, as her “throat explodes into a geyser of blood” (184), reducing her to “a mess of ruined anatomy, still leaking blood and fizzing air bubbles and a coppery odor tinged with the acidity of bile” (191). When Leonard is bludgeoned to death, his “high pitched and algorithmic” (234) screams fade into “a dying prey animal’s desperate and betrayed squealing” (235). And Sabrina’s suicide culminates in a single bullet that “plows through her head and exits with a ribbon of blood” (265).

In Knock at the Cabin, however, characters die quietly and with minimal bloodshed, the camera employing stylistic flourishes and jarring cutaways that flatten the violence and vindicate its antagonists of any wrongdoing. Take Sabrina, who by the novel’s end, despite her last-ditch self-sacrifice, realizes a “horrific, sacred truth… [that] in this darkest hour of the darkest day, they remain alone, fundamentally alone” (216). This compels her to help Andrew and Eric leave the cabin, as she confronts her complicity in the brutal violence she and her fellow invaders have wrought: “Maybe the world should end if any small part of it was made to be like this” (222). Despite this psychological nuance, Knock at the Cabin quickly discards Sabrina (portrayed by the excellent Nikki Amuka-Bird) via a nasty abdominal gunshot, later establishing her as the personification of healing, which not only precludes her spiritual wake-up call but reduces her character to the age-old Hollywood trope of the Magical Negro Mammy.

Shyamalan’s most notable revision alters the novel’s heated climax, during which Wen is killed by a stray bullet (186). Despite this tragic loss, Leonard explains that due to its accidental nature, her death will not stop the apocalypse, leaving the couple to weigh their options. Though Eric becomes convinced of the intruders’ narrative, Andrew rebukes a god who cannot honor their daughter’s death (267). Confronted with an uncertain future, the couple decide to carry Wen’s body out of the cabin and walk the earth together, whatever may come: “We will go on” (270). Knock at the Cabin reaches an equally tragic yet fundamentally antithetical conclusion, as Eric realizes the four intruders represent the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, convincing his distraught husband to shoot him with the promise of a better future for Wen. Apocalypse averted, the film ends on a “cynically cheerful note” (Bach) as Wen and Andrew drive through the smoke trail-littered wreckage, soundtracked by KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Boogie Shoes.”

Though publicly approving of Shyamalan’s adaptation, Tremblay laments the film’s ending as “unremittingly cruel,” in contrast to his own “defiantly hopeful” (Yamato) conclusion. Certainly both endings are tremendously upsetting, not least of all because each results in the dissolution of a queer family left to carry debilitating grief. However, in its refusal to confirm whether its characters’ anguish will pay off, Tremblay’s novel denies them a stable future, apocalypse or otherwise, thus foreclosing any ethical certitude readers may take away from its (ir)resolution. Whereas Knock at the Cabin presumes faith will free us from such existential dread, Cabin at the End of the World dares us to consider a world in which faith will not—should not—save, where our actions do not define us but rather lead us to new futures, most of which aren’t utopic, some of which do not include an ‘us’ at all.

 

Conclusion

In true ecohorror fashion, Sandcastles and Cabin at the End of the World end with many questions—we never learn what comes of the solitary woman/child survivor on that fateful beach, just as we never discover if the apocalyptic stakes of Wen’s untimely death were real. Yet Shyamalan’s adaptations insist on answers. While many of Shyamalan’s other films, such as The Village (2004), Lady in the Water (2006), and the Eastrail 177 Trilogy, evince “the ways in which ritual and myth can be self-consciously manipulated for the purposes of binding a community together” (Murphy 145), Old and Knock at the Cabin suggest that ritual and myth themselves are guiding forces that must manipulate in order to secure communities and their posterities—in other words, the Universe is indeed a real, tangible presence that demands we protect those who will inherit the mystical fruits of its labor. In this way, Shyamalan repositions the child as a redemptive figure who will not be left stranded in the wake of humanity’s neglect. While his source texts position children as helpless inheritors of planetary devastation, Shyamalan’s adaptations ensure they will emerge from the environmental wreckage they have been forced to inhabit, apocalyptic horsemen and mysterious beaches be damned. If the adults around them must die for that future to cohere, so be it.

Queer theorist Lee Edelman once infamously wrote, “Fuck… the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized” (29), a powerful theoretical claim that condemns not actual children but their symbolic function in cisheteronormative society as tools to dehumanize and delegitimize queer people. Not nearly as radical but striking nonetheless, Shyamalan’s adaptations make their own declaration: fuck greedy corporations and their continued destruction of the Earth, fuck stubborn parents and guardians who would rather ignore the problems facing their children’s generations than try fixing them, fuck a world that subjects children to widespread social violence, economic precarity, and ecological Annihilation—in short, fuck everybody else but the Child (capitalized or not).

In his best movies, Shyamalan’s characteristically sentimental depiction of children as insightful, empowered beings offers a “break from the cultural logic we are all tied to, a chance to see these structures and renegotiate our relationships with them… to see the world otherwise” (Wisniewski 27). Although Old and Knock at the Cabin never quite reach those aspirations, their droll pronatalism still offers a fascinating take on ecohorror that, despite all scientific signs pointing to the contrary, boldly professes the opening line of one of Whitney Houston’s greatest hits: “I believe the children are our future.”

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Works Cited

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CBR Staff. “Frederik Peeters Builds an Unforgettable ‘Sandcastle.’” Comic Book Resources, 7 May 2013.

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke University Press, 2004.

Feder, Don. “The Benevolent Universe of Filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan.” The American Enterprise, vol. 14, issue 3: pp. 43-45.

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Knock at the Cabin, directed by M. Night Shyamalan, Universal Pictures, 2023.

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Liptak, Andrew. “Paul Tremblay’s Apocalyptic Novel The Cabin at the End of the World Is a Parent’s Worst Nightmare.” The Verge, 30 Jun 2018.

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Swift, Kelly. “How M. Night Shyamalan Portrays Horror Through the Eyes of Children.” MovieWeb, 28 Feb 2023.

Tremblay, Paul. Cabin at the End of the World. HarperCollins, 2018.

Verma, Shikhar. “Knock at the Cabin (2023) Review – A Lean Thriller That Doubles Down as a Cautionary Climate Change Allegory.” High On Films, 7 Feb 2023.

Wisniewski, Kevin. “Betwixt and Between: The Child in M. Night Shyamalan’s Films.” Kidding Around: The Child in Film and Media, edited by Alexander N. Howe and Wynn Yarbrough, Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. 11-31.

Yamato, Jen. “At Times, ‘Knock at the Cabin’ Made the Book’s Author Want to ‘Run Out of the Theater.’” The Los Angeles Times, 8 Feb 2023.