1999 • PG-13 • 1h 47mins • Watch trailer • Rent it
🎓 Class of ‘99: Two scary movies from a mythical year
You’re reading Pizza & A Movie—eating our way through rental classics and their backstories. This time we begin a Halloween two-parter I’m calling Class of ’99, cherry-picking two frightening flicks from one of cinema’s best years ever. Tonight we begin with the one that made M. Night Shyamalan a household name and introduced the world to the catchphrase “I see dead people.” It’s the 1999 film that asks the question, “Is five senses really enough?” We’re popping in The Sixth Sense.
Here’s the plot. It’s not complicated. We’re in Philly with psychologist Malcolm (Bruce Willis) and Anna (Olivia Williams) who are having a good night until unhappy former patient Vincent (Donnie Wahlberg) breaks in. He gives Malcolm a negative review in the form of a bullet to the stomach. The following fall, a perfectly fine-looking Malcolm, who’s apparently back to having only one bellybutton, meets his new patient, nine-year-old Cole (Haley Joel Osment). After beefing it with Vincent and with his relationship with Anna going cold, Malcolm puts a lotta pressure on this one going well.
Cole’s mom, Lynn (Toni Collette), is worried about him. Cole’s case is weird. Kid seems smart but claims to see dead folks no one else can. Sometimes he gets scratches and such from ‘em. Other times the room gets chilly during their visits. Malcolm isn’t buying it. But when he goes back to tapes of his sessions with Vincent, Malcolm faintly hears ghosts in the background audio. Did his old patient suffer from the same thing Cole does? And what if Cole’s telling the truth? And what’s behind that door with the red knob anyway?
Years of Legend
Cinema’s had a few golden years. The ones where Hollywood was firing on all cylinders and the best projects hit theaters at juuuuust the right times. 1999, the year The Sixth Sense came out, is one of those years.
But it wasn’t the only great year. Arguably Hollywood’s defining year was way back in ’39. The US was only flirting with war and The Great Depression was squarely in the rearview. We got:
The Wizard of Oz: Peak movie magic until Star Wars
Gone with the Wind: Codifying the Hollywood epic
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: Makes Jimmy Stewart a movie star
Stagecoach: John Wayne’s breakthrough
Let’s hit three more big years, starting with ’59.
Some Like It Hot: Peak Marilyn Monroe
North by Northwest: Grant and Hitchcock at the top of their respective games
Ben-Hur: What if history was exciting?
Plan 9 from Outer Space: Ed Wood’s so-bad-it’s-good classic
The 400 Blows: Begat French New Wave, auteurs, Tarantino and Wes Anderson
’76 is next, which gave us:
Rocky: The American hero
Taxi Driver: The American anti-hero
All The President’s Men: The only Aaron Sorkin movie not made by Aaron Sorkin
Carrie: The age of feminism and horror
Assault on Precinct 13: Carpenter makes action not about cowboys anymore
That brings us to ’99. Here’s some highlights of the best year for movies in my lifetime.
The Matrix: Digital filmmaking + queerness + manga + Tron
Office Space: Gen X precursor to The Office that makes Stephen Root a god
Being John Malkovich: Post-modern meta mind-bender
Fight Club: Gen X satirical screed taken absolutely at face value by many, many dudes
Three Kings: Dealing with our Iraq involvement right before it started up again
Eyes Wide Shut: Kubrick’s last movie
Star Wars: Episode 1—The Phantom Menace: Star Wars as an IP empire begins
How’d They End Up Here?
Let’s zoom back in. How did our two leads end up in The Sixth Sense?
Bruce Will-he?
Why is Bruce Willis in this? Two words: “Contractual obligation”. Let me explain.
It all started in ’97. Willis had the lead role in Broadway Brawler, a Disney movie calibrated to cash in on Jerry Maguire’s success the previous year. Willis played a washed-up hockey player who gets a new lease on life when a nice lady is inexplicably into his whole deal. Preproduction took two years. When cameras rolled, Willis blew it up in just three weeks. He hated the wardrobe. The cinematography. The direction. And a bunch of other things. Got the folks responsible for all of it fired, then brought in the guy who directed Happy Gilmore to save it. Sure, Bruce, that was going to work.
What happened instead? Disney shut down production. Everybody got paid, but the movie folded. They never finished it. Broadway Brawler doesn’t exist. But what did exist was a big fat bill for $17.5M.
Willis cut a deal. Producer pal Joe Roth brokered what would become one of the most lucrative handshakes in Hollywood. “Mister Disney?” Roth said. “Usually people get sued over single-handedly tanking a major movie. But! What if Bruce made three movies for you and slashed his fee to Costco levels of savings?” Disney would make their money back and have a star attached to projects for three years straight. They took the deal. Out of that mess came Armageddon (’98), The Sixth Sense, and The Kid (’00), some of Willis’s most interesting work. And Disney made a cool $1.3B off the triad. It was a heart-warming triumph for the powerless lil’ guy—a media juggernaut that currently defines popular culture.
Holy Joel Osment
Why is Haley Joel Osment in this? Because he looked like a baby angel, that’s why.
Here’s what director Shyamalan had in mind for Cole Sear. Troubled. Edgy. Outcast. But all that changed when he put in Osment’s audition tape. “I saw this part as this brooding, darker, enigmatic child. But he nailed it with the vulnerability,” said the director. “[Osment was] this really sweet cherub, kind of beautiful, blond boy.”
Before this in ’96, Shyamalan rewrote the script for Stuart Little. It hit theaters in ’99, the same year as Sense. So did a little movie you might have heard of about a magic kid who lives in the dessert—Star Wars: Episode I. What do Episode I, Stuart Little and The Sixth Sense have in common? All three featured a highly earnest blonde boy at their centers. It was a like Shirley Temple mania, but for lil’ guys.
To me, this is the zenith of a trend that started back in the late ‘80s. You got your Home Alone, etc. Ironically, Osment gave basically the same excellent performance again in AI: Artificial Intelligence (’01), the movie that iced this archetype for good. After September 11 of ’01 American audiences didn’t vibe with overwrought innocence so much. I don’t think filmmakers wanted to use it anymore either.
Shyamalazam!
This is how M. Night Shyamalan became a household name.
He’d previously made the ultra-indie picture Praying with Anger (‘92), which he wrote, directed and starred in. Nobody saw it. Next came Wide Awake (‘98), which made a measly $282,000. Awake had some names—Rosie O’Donnell, Julia Stiles, Denis Leary—but nobody saw it either. Except me. I saw it on VHS rented from Blockbuster at a sleepover. (The parents picked it.)
Then Shyamalan made The Sixth Sense.
Hallmarks of a great M. Night movie:
✔ 1 big idea
✔ 3 main rules
✔ Very few characters
✔ Action mostly in one place
✔ Doesn’t explain why it’s happening
✔ Motivation for solving the problem is personal
The Sixth Sense was scary, not gory. Jump scares, sure, but nobody gets killed on-screen. There’s no real villain. It’s a frightening ideas movie.
But after Sense, things went off the rails. Shyamalan followed it up with Unbreakable (’00), which we have to thank for the modern superhero movie. It was interesting but much more niche from the jump. Next came Signs (’02), which does a better job of making aliens scary than most but ends up preachy and toothless. And if you didn’t like Signs then you really weren’t going to like The Village (’04). The Shyamalan brand name ripped right down the middle as some audiences loved the Pilgrim LARPing and others hated the twist ending. For me it’s a masterpiece, but mileage varies.
But if you thought The Village indulged goofy ideas, that’s nothing compared to Lady in the Water (’06). Viewers metabolized it more as a prank pulled on them than a film. The Happening (’08), an R-rated attempted return to form, cast Mark Wahlberg as a science genius, which was the cinematic equivalent of tying your own shoelaces together before the big race.
Several increasingly expensive and correlatively misguided projects later, Split landed in ’16. It was an acting showcase for James McAvoy and broke Anya Taylor-Joy to a world woefully underserved in the alien-like eyes department. It was small again. About creepy ideas again. Wrong-footed you over and over again. But best of all, it had a high-concept premise anybody could understand. This guy? His personality? You’re not gonna believe this, but it’s split. During the pandemic, Old (’21) bottled that lightning again by asking, “What if a beach made you… [consults title] old?”
Why did Shyamalan make so many goofs in the middle of his filmography? Kids, that’s why. Shyamalan stopped wanting to make scary movies while his kids were growing up. He’s a sensitive guy, okay? Interestingly, his next project puts him in the producer’s chair while his daughter Ishana directs. Filming wrapped on The Watchers last month. Should hit theaters next summer.
At the Box Office
What did folks in 1999 think of The Sixth Sense? I mean, c’mon. Everybody loved this. Critics loved the old Hollywood feel in general and Osment’s performance in particular. He doesn’t even seem to be acting. Few commented on it, but Willis himself turns understatedly good work as the intelligent but skeptical audience surrogate. These are good things because this is a ghost story, not a horror movie. While horror flicks don’t care about their humans, ghost stories depend on them.
The Sixth Sense opened on August 6 (nice) of ’99. It made its budget back in the first week, then spent the following four weeks at #1. All told, it gobbled up $293M in the States alone. Lemme run the math real quick… okay, carry the 1… yes, that is indeed a gross of roughly a thousand times more than his previous film. Folding in worldwide ticket sales we arrive at the total $672M, a right-place-right-time level of success almost impossible to replicate. It earned six Oscar nominations. Won zero.
What does The Sixth Sense leave behind? Culturally, I’d say its line “I see dead people” is about as enduring as the dun-dun dun-dun theme of Jaws. Scary Movie scooped up the catchphrase along with everyone else’s work in horror in the late ‘90s, nearly killing the genre in the process. But do you remember Scary Movie? Or do you remember The Sixth Sense?
Exactly.
Pizza of the Week
Homemade Meatball with Caramelized Onions
Oh baby, the sweetness of the onions with the savory of the meatballs. And the game of finding the perfect bite that has it all. Whoa. There are a couple tricks to putting meatballs on a pizza. First, don’t cook the meatballs all the way when you make them. You want ‘em a little pink in the middle so they don’t turn into rocks when you fire them again later. Second? Split ‘em up. I break meatballs into three to four parts before placing them on the pizza. Just think bite-sized. Also? Meatballs keep great in the freezer, so make big batches.
That’s the story of The Sixth Sense, a movie that doesn’t feel to me like it’s almost a quarter century old but is from The Class of ’99. Next week we pack spare batteries and a camcorder to follow The Blair Witch Project. It’s a total witch hunt.
Thanks for reading! You could be doing anything else but here you are. That’s right, this means you’re a good person. Hope you enjoyed this one! If you did, share it with a pal who would too. Let ‘em into your tent before the ghosts get here.
NOTES:
High-concept premise: What if I see dead people?
Michael Cera tried out for Cole but didn’t get it. I gotta think that would have changed his career. Arrested Development started airing in ‘03, and he was off to the races.
Shyamalan told his agent he wouldn’t take less than $1M for this script. It kicked off a bidding war faster than a Zillow listing with an open floor plan. Disney paid somewhere between $2.2M and $3M for it.
This was shot in Philly, where Shyamalan lives and makes many of his projects. I assume he had a cheesesteak and then said to himself, “Why would I leave?”
I saw this on cable the first time. My dad recorded it on VHS and we watched it together the next night. It’s one of my great movie-watching memories.
Sure, you could say ‘07 was one of the golden years too. And you might be right.
I remember getting so annoyed at myself for working out the twist in The Sixth Sense while I watched it for the first time. Then I used to go and watch his movies to see what the twist would be, like some sort of horror murder mystery.