M. Night Shyamalan

Manoj Nelliyattu Shyamalan (born August 6, 1970), known professionally as M. Night Shyamalan, is an American filmmaker and actor. His films often employ supernatural plots and twist endings. The cumulative gross of his films exceeds $3.3 billion globally. Shyamalan has received various accolades, including nominations for two Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards and a Golden Globe.

Shyamalan was born in Mahé, India, and raised in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania. His early films include Praying with Anger (1992) and Wide Awake (1998). His breakthrough film, The Sixth Sense (1999), earned him Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. He then released Unbreakable (2000), Signs (2002) and The Village (2004). After a string of poorly received films—Lady in the Water (2006), The Happening (2008), The Last Airbender (2010), and After Earth (2013)—he experienced a career resurgence with The Visit (2015) and Split (2016). These were followed by Glass (2019), Old (2021), Knock at the Cabin (2023), and Trap (2024).

Shyamalan was also one of the executive producers and occasional director of the 20th Television science fiction series Wayward Pines (2015–2016) and the Apple TV+ psychological horror series Servant (2019–2023), for which he also served as showrunner.

Manoj Nelliyattu Shyamalan was born on August 6, 1970, in Mahé, India, a town in the Union Territory of Puducherry. His father, Nelliyattu C. Shyamalan, is a Malayali neurologist from Mahé and a JIPMER graduate; his mother, Jayalakshmi Shyamalan, a Tamil from Chennai, is an OB-GYN.

Shyamalan's parents immigrated to the United States when he was six weeks old. Shyamalan was raised Hindu in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania. He attended the private Roman Catholic grammar school Waldron Mercy Academy. He felt like an outsider and remembers that teachers would say that whoever was not baptized would go to Hell. When he was a student there, a teacher once became upset because he "got the best grade in religion class and [he] wasn't Catholic". He later attended the Episcopal Academy, a private Episcopal high school located at the time in Merion Station, Pennsylvania.

Shyamalan earned the New York University Merit Scholarship in 1988, and was also a National Merit Scholar. Shyamalan is an alumnus of New York University Tisch School of the Arts in Manhattan, graduating in 1992. When reading about the Lakota, he discovered a person whose name translated to "night". He used Night thereafter instead of his original middle name, Nelliyattu.

Shyamalan had an early desire to be a filmmaker when he was given a Super 8 camera at a young age. Though his father wanted him to follow in the family practice of medicine, his mother encouraged him to follow his passion. By the time he was seventeen, he had made forty-five home movies.

Shyamalan made his first film, the semi-autobiographical drama Praying with Anger, while still a student at NYU, using money borrowed from family and friends. He wrote and directed his second movie, Wide Awake. His parents were the film's associate producers. The drama dealt with a ten-year-old Catholic schoolboy (Joseph Cross) who, after the death of his grandfather (Robert Loggia), searches for God. The film's supporting cast included Dana Delany and Denis Leary as the boy's parents, as well as Rosie O'Donnell, Julia Stiles, and Camryn Manheim. Wide Awake was filmed in a school Shyamalan attended as a child and earned 1999 Young Artist Award nominations for Best Drama, and, for Cross, Best Performance. Only in limited release, the film grossed $305,704 in theaters, against a $6 million budget.

That same year Shyamalan co-wrote the screenplay for Stuart Little with Greg Brooker. He was the ghostwriter for the 1999 film She's All That, a teen comedy starring Freddie Prinze Jr. and Rachael Leigh Cook, but did not reveal his role until 2013. On June 17, 2013, Jack Lechner (who served as Miramax's head of development in the late 1990s) confirmed that both Shyamalan and R. Lee Fleming Jr. contributed to the script: Fleming wrote the initial script that Miramax bought while Shyamalan did an uncredited rewrite (doing more than "a polish") that got the film green-lit. Lechner reiterated that content from both writers was included in the final cut of the film.

Shyamalan gained international recognition when he wrote and directed 1999's The Sixth Sense, starring Bruce Willis, which became the second-highest grossing horror movie of all time. He became a director whose name could, like Spielberg, market a film. The Sixth Sense was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.

In July 2000, on The Howard Stern Show, Shyamalan said he had met with Spielberg and was in early talks to write the script for the fourth Indiana Jones film. This would have given Shyamalan a chance to work with his longtime idol. After the film fell through, Shyamalan later said it was too "tricky" to arrange and "not the right thing" for him to do.

Shyamalan followed The Sixth Sense by writing and directing Unbreakable (2000), again starring Willis, a stealth superhero film within a thriller, which was both critically and financially successful.

Shyamalan is the executive producer on the Apple TV series Servant. He directed several episodes, including the pilot. Servant was renewed for a second series in advance of the season one premiere. The second season of Servant completed filming in fall 2020 under COVID protocols.

Shyamalan was also instrumental in the creation of the Fox science fiction series Wayward Pines (2015–2016), for which he executive produced and directed the pilot episode. The series became the most-watched show of that summer.

In 2016, TNT first announced that Shyamalan would be responsible for a reboot series for Tales from the Crypt. As of June 2017 the series had been cancelled due to a number of legal reasons.

He also appeared in an episode of the series Entourage.

Shyamalan's production company, Blinding Edge Pictures, is located in Berwyn, Pennsylvania. Blinding Edge has produced Servant, Wayward Pines, Devil, The Happening, Lady in the Water, The Village, Signs, Unbreakable, The Last Airbender, After Earth, The Visit, Split, Glass and Old. It is run by Shyamalan and Ashwin Rajan. In February 2023, the company signed a multi-year first-look deal with Warner Bros., among them the Shyamalan-directed Trap, which released theatrically on August 2, 2024.

While working on his film The Happening, Shyamalan developed an interest in improving the delivery of education in American schools. He hired doctoral student James Richardson to do most of the background research and as a result published I Got Schooled: The Unlikely Story of How a Moonlighting Movie Maker Learned the Five Keys to Closing America's Education Gap through Simon and Schuster in 2013. John Willol of NPR reviewed the book by stating "I Got Schooled is a breezily written, research driven call to change America's approach to education. Shyamalan is smart and sincere, and his innovative ideas are unbound by the educational establishment."

Shyamalan married Bhavna Vaswani, a fellow student whom he met at New York University. The couple has three daughters, including director Ishana and musician Saleka. His cousin is actor Ritesh Rajan.

Shyamalan and his family live near Philadelphia at Ravenwood, a 125-acre (51 ha) estate, built around a 27,000-square-foot (2,500 m2) 1937 Georgian Revival house.

In 2008, Shyamalan was honored with the Padma Shri award by the Government of India. Shyamalan was the Jury President of the 72nd Berlin International Film Festival competition section.

After the release of The Happening, The Guardian's Kim Newman questioned, "Can it be a kind of racism that the Indian-born, Philadelphia-raised auteur is hammered for his apparent character (or funny name) rather more than, say, Quentin Tarantino or Spike Lee?" The British Film Institute (BFI) also discussed the impact of racism on Shyamalan's career, pointing to frequent mispronunciations of his last name. By 2017, Vice said that "Shamalamadingdong" had become the "agreed-upon mockery of his name".

BFI asked if critical attacks are the result of egotistical statements on Shyamalan's part. They question whether his strong statements of self-assurance coupled with the remarkable success of The Sixth Sense set up a fall from grace which was soon realized when a run of very successful films (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs and The Village) seemingly collapsed with a string of critical failures (Lady in the Water, The Happening, The Last Airbender, and After Earth). In 2019, Tim Greiving of The Washington Post said that "his confidence was interpreted as arrogance by some, especially after he cast himself in Lady in the Water as a brilliant writer whose book is prophesied as a world-saver." Greiving continued, "Howard, who expressed pride in him for forging ahead despite his turn among critics, noted how rare it was for such a young filmmaker to write, direct and produce original material. He wondered whether that placed a bigger target on his back, as his reputation for doggedness was perpetuated within the industry and reinforced by critics."

In 2026, a Malayalam movie called Mollywood Times featured its main character as an ardent fan of Shyamalan, and shows how Shyamalan's life (whose origin is tied to Kerala) influenced his film-making career.