The Sixth Sense + The Haunting

• Friday, August 22 at 1:00pm (The Sixth Sense) + 3:15pm (The Haunting)
• Monday, August 25 at 6:30pm (The Sixth Sense) + 8:45pm (The Haunting)
• Friday, August 29 at 6:45pm (The Sixth Sense) + 9:00pm (The Haunting)

The Sixth Sense
M. Night Shyamalan, 1999, U.S., 35mm, 107m
A withdrawn boy (Haley Joel Osment) confides in a child psychologist (Bruce Willis) that he sees the dead… but what begins as a supernatural mystery slowly unravels into a devastating domestic drama no one was prepared for in 1999. The Sixth Sense landed in theaters like an intervention amid Hollywood’s wave of rapid-fire editing and high-concept fatigue. Formally elegant, emotionally restrained, and uncommonly vivid, M. Night Shyamalan’s patient, classically composed ghost story drew its power from the historic locales of his native Philadelphia and performances of rare sensitivity. Osment’s Cole remains one of the greatest child roles in film, and his chemistry with Willis and Toni Collette forms a deeply believable emotional core in a genre that often sidelined nuance. Built on hushed conversations and punctuated by a few sharply timed shocks, the film remains, more than 25 years later, not just terrifically scary, but genuinely moving.

Followed by:

The Haunting
Robert Wise, 1963, U.S./U.K., 35mm, 112m
Robert Wise’s suggestive adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House follows Dr. John Markway (Richard Johnson), a paranormal anthropologist who invites two women—lonely, high-strung Eleanor (Julie Harris) and the coolly perceptive Theodora (Claire Bloom)—along with a skeptical heir (Russ Tamblyn) to investigate a sinister New England manor. Overstuffed interiors of ornate carvings, patterned wallpaper, mirrors, and Victorian bric-a-brac are warped into something deliriously menacing (and breathing…) through DP Davis Boulton’s chiaroscuro palette and the distortive reach of an ultra-wide anamorphic lens, which captured spatial fields previously unseen in cinema. A master class in atmosphere, and an experiment in pulling the horror out of architecture.