The Sixth Sense, written and directed by M Night Shyamalan, has in distribution been classified as a horror/thriller (rated PG13), while some reviewers also call it a drama. (1) It is the story of a nine-year-old, Cole Sears, coming to terms with visitations by ghosts needing his help with unfinished business among the living. He is aided by a child psychologist, Malcolm Crowe, who has been shot by a former patient with a pathology similar to Cole's. Crowe redeems his earlier failure by helping Cole and return receives Cole's advice on how to communicate with his wife/widow. The much-discussed and closely guarded secret "twist" of the film lies in that the story point of Malcolm's death is not completely disclosed until the final scene.

Standards of suspense
From the first flickering light of the yellow bulb in the Crowe basement, reminiscent of the early thrillers' gas lights, over many a filmmaker's favorite the open staircase (2), to the final fade of Crowe's face into bright light, traditionally symbolizing a soul's transition Beyond, The Sixth Sense is a sampler of the horror/thriller's classical suspense-creating techniques. Actual gore-and-splatter apparitions of victims of violent death are judiciously inserted into a haunting, evocative setting where whispery sound effects, plaintive violins and oboes, appearance of visible breath, unattributed point-of-view shots and expressionist weather effects combine to tell the audience that Something Weird Is Afoot. (3)

"A cultural phenomenon"
M Night Shyamalan has obviously been to film school and done his homework. In fact, the film is so much of a catalog of classical genre conventions as to invite comparison with Pulp Fiction. Even the title is generic: as Pulp Fiction openly declares its allegiance, so does The Sixth Sense, telling the audience that this is a story of the supernatural securely rooted in its genre. (4)
The Sixth Sense does not have Pulp Fiction's basic spirit of ironical distance: such traits, however appealing to the cineaste and the more adventurous or "cool" segments of the public, are not the stuff genuine blockbusters are made of. Shyamalan's self-professed ambition has been to generate a "cultural phenomenon" comparable to James Cameron's Titanic, and he proudly notes that The Sixth Sense appeals both to young boys and older women. (5)
In spite of relatively modest advance marketing, the film has broken a number of box office records, grossing in its first six months more than the double of Pulp Fiction's total gross to-date. (6) (7) (8)

Ghostly realism?
Another goal of Shyamalan's when creating The Sixth Sense was to make it feel "real". In comments and interviews he describes at considerable length the rules that apply in his ghost world, and the care that has been taken in following them, to make the film credible and coherent. (9) (10)
In the actual film, the ambition fails miserably. The script is riddled with holes, nonsensical premises and ad-hoc solutions, the most blatant of these being the concepts of dead people "not knowing that they are dead" and "seeing only what they want to see". Noticing that one no longer needs to eat, for example, is simply not a matter of choice. (11) (12)
One potential method of reducing the demands on logic and realism, namely humor, is conspicuous by its absence, as is appropriate in a true-to-type thriller. Humor tends to de-fuse suspense, while a thriller survives on its suspense-building qualities.
A better option might have been admitting the possibility that Cole was delusional. A deluded mind can imagine anything, no logic required - but a widely acceptable Hollywood thriller can not be open-ended. Thus the ending asserts unambiguously that ghosts are an objective reality, that Cole is not just "seeing things" in his mind, and all illusion of reality crumbles.
Yet a great majority of the audience, along with various experienced professional critics, gladly suspend their disbelief, gaining the compensation of emotional satisfaction. (13)

A critical landslide
The film has been received with almost unanimous enthusiasm by critics and the moviegoing public, both US and international. (14) Of the limited number of negative comments, several are due to the reviewers' personal aversion to the actor Bruce Willis (in the role of Malcolm Crowe), and only a few are concerned with actual flaws in the film's fabric. (15)
The favorable reviews frequently focus on the movie's emotional impact, qualifying it either as "suspenseful, thrilling", or "gripping, heart-rendering". Others call it "subtle, intelligent, original, new, fresh". Several point out the refreshing absence of cursing and nudity.
All of these reactions cannot be dismissed by blaming them on the prevailing youth (i.e. lack of cinematic experience) of the audience. (16) Successful even among adults (17), The Sixth Sense strikes a fortunate balance, drawing on some aspects of modernism (18) while maintaining various classical traits (19), to yield an accessible yet interesting product, distinctive among the surrounding multitude of high concept movies. (20)

User-friendly form
Where form is concerned, Shyamalan takes good care of his audience, as the many tributes to the film's intelligence and subtlety indicate. Not simply a classical linear narrative-driven film, The Sixth Sense has just enough convolution to make Jane and Joe Moviegoer feel clever. (21) The color red symbolizes supernatural occurrences, giving the audience a chance to feel "just like an art movie, and I get it, ain't I smart". The film introduces a series of clues that lead up to the final "twist" with just the right degree of obviousness, the audience plays along, cheerfully competing as to how soon everyone figured it out, and the occasional critic admits coyly to "being blind-sided by the ending". (22) And finally a series of flashbacks gives everyone a chance to catch up in tying up the loose ends. In this way the public makes a certain intellectual investment in the film and is immediately rewarded by receiving confirmation of their cleverness, an almost sure-fire way of making a human feel good.

The feelgood ghost story
In its content, The Sixth Sense also appears to possess some important trait that satisfies a deeply felt psychological need among a wide audience. (23) The secret lies in the resolution of the film's basic conflict.
The typical conflict in a horror/thriller is constituted by some threatening entity invading what is perceived as a world of secure normalcy, "normality as threatened by the Monster". (24) The threat may take the shape of a mentally divergent individual, a corrupted, "neurotic" aspect of nature, or some representation of the supernatural. The classical solution lies in the annihilation of the Monster by more-or-less violent means: exorcising the ghost, killing the rogue shark or the murdering psychopath.
Not so in The Sixth Sense. Shyamalan chooses a solution that is a fixture in European folk tales, but rather uncommon in current Hollywood film: that of making peace with the ghosts by helping them achieve their goals. On a thriller market saturated with splatter and gore to the point of boredom (as described by various critics and members of the audience), he introduces an innovative hybrid: the feelgood ghost story. In ideological terms, it is a case of repressive tolerance (25): the Monster is neutralized, not by violent exorcism, but through warm fuzzies and togetherness.

A religious experience
Several reviewers, commentators from the audience, but also members of the cast and crew, describe the film as something of a religious experience, one that makes death seem less horrifying. (26) Thus it certainly addresses a deep, general human need, that of coming to terms with mortality - other people's and one's own. And a Hollywood movie with its popular, familiar form is, in fact, an extremely suitable, efficient means of addressing this need. In our civilization the pictorial narrative (television, film) has effectively replaced the printed and spoken text as the central medium of public discourse, so a mass-market movie, speaking directly to the audience's instincts and emotions, succeeds where philosophical essays have very limited impact. (27) Receiving reassurance on the subject of death is equally satisfying for the intellectual and the shopping-mall audience, regardless of age, gender and ethnicity. The absence of sexuality in the movie reinforces its innocuous feelgood effect while opening the film to larger potential audiences.

Disneyfying death
A phenomenon sometimes referred to as Disneyfication has been associated with the total victory of the entertaining moving picture story over reasoning and analysis. (28) Disney's animated versions of classical legends and literary works turn out shallow, innocuous, pretty, with a rubber-stamped happy ending - as in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame or The Little Mermaid. By a similar process, any issue, no matter how potentially profound and serious, can be reduced to a nice, reassuring, simple answer, like a warm, fluffy blanket to cuddle up with.
This is precisely what happens towards the end of The Sixth Sense. Cole hugs his mother and tells her that "Granny says Hi!" from the Other Side. The feelgood ghost story leads up to the assertion that the dead are all around us, and they are okay people. Being dead is no big deal, really.
The Sixth Sense treats a major universal human issue in an attractive manner, familiar yet complex enough to keep a broad audience interested, and presents a pleasing, reassuring
conclusion. Thanks to Mr Shyamalan, even death itself has been Disneyfied.