(Spoiler alert: If you’ve somehow never seen “The Sixth Sense,” please refrain from reading this article.) About midway through “The Sixth Sense,” Bruce Willis’ Malcolm, a compassionate child psychologist, attempts to cheer up Haley Joel Osment’s Cole, a disturbed boy struggling with secrets he’s too scared to reveal. Malcolm tries telling Cole a bedtime story, but it’s meandering and uninteresting — finally, the 9-year-old takes over, offering some pointers on how to craft an arresting tale.
“You have to add some twists and stuff,” he says. Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan clearly heeded his character’s advice.
It’s been 25 years to the day since his unlikely blockbuster was released, becoming one of 1999’s biggest hits on its way to earning six Academy Award nominations, including best picture (rare for a horror movie). But arguably the film’s most lasting impact — even more so than Cole’s endlessly quoted “I see dead people” — was introducing the modern moviegoer to the complicated beauty of the perfectly executed third-act twist. There were, of course, memorable twists in cinema before “The Sixth Sense” — for instance, in the Charlton Heston chestnuts “Planet of the Apes” and “Soylent Green” — but what Shyamalan achieved haunted his future movies, his career in general and our ability to enjoy such late-reel surprises in other people’s films.
The Twist grabbed us and never let go. Many remember the first time t.