Resurrector: Signs

We didn’t often go to the movies as a whole family, but in 2002 we all saw Signs. This was back when we could be convinced to hit the theater en masse simply because a guy named Manoj—better known as “M. Night”—was making it big in Hollywood. This was a post-9/11, pre-representation time, before streaming services could serve us bespoke categories like “supernatural tearjerker Indian American mock­umentaries.” I imagine that Indian American families like ours no longer feel that numinous sense of duty to turn out for films made by brown people. Now we can sit back and let a mediocre movie be, flapping in the wind, without pledging tribal fealty. It’s a kind of progress.

But as I will go to my grave babbling about, Signs is not one such mediocrity. I’ve rewatched this horror movie, about a family dealing with lost faith and unwanted aliens, several times since I first saw it as an eleven-year-old through barely parted fingers, and each time I have been ensnared in its suspense. It arrived at a critical juncture in the career of M. Night Shyamalan, who was then just four days shy of his thirty-second birthday. He was still bobbing in the waves of acclaim from The Sixth Sense (1999), and critics were only beginning to sour on a narrative device common to his confections. By now his name is synonymous with this device: a cheap last-minute plot twist that forces the viewer to watch all his other movies with bleary anticipation, waiting for the swerve. (For seven years in the middle of his career, he studiously avoided this device, before relapsing with 2015’s The Visit.)