I have to make a confession: I am such a Shyamalan fan/defender/stan, whatever you want to call it.
[laughs] Love it!
So “The Watchers” was one of my most anticipated releases of 2024. The second it was announced, I re-watched “Servant” so I could watch your episodes, I read the book, and the whole time I kept thinking, “Oh my God, she’s going to crush this,” and I’m thrilled that you did!
Thank you! Thank you.
What was it about this novel that made you decide, “This is it. This is the story for my future directorial debut”?
I think there were so many elements about the book, and I’m sure if you read it, you kind of experienced that as well. It’s just a really, really scary book. I think the author did such a wonderful job at drawing out this mystery, and playing with your expectations as a reader and making you question what world you’re in, in order to kind of touch this much larger, much more wondrous kind of fantastical world. So I was just in deep admiration of what he had done with the book, and I just really loved reading it. So it felt to me like it would be just kind of an honor to put that on screen and put those visuals into reality.
This is such a unique story with that mystery in that it doesn’t fit nicely in any one horror subgenre box, which I think is also a very Shyamalan thing to do as well. What are the types of stories that you were drawing from?
I think for me, horror is really a sort of means of confronting various fears that we have about different things. And the ones that make me the most afraid are the ones that are outlining something I didn’t know I was afraid of. Something that surprises me that I’m like, “Oh my God, I do have that fear.” So I think that’s the hope with this movie as well, is that it talks about this fear of judgment and this fear of being looked at that is very, very much within us all, I suppose. So hopefully it sort of just preys on that and helps you confront that.