Vincent Gray: Do you know why you're afraid when you're alone? I do. I do.
Cole Sear: You ever feel the prickly things on the back of your neck?
Malcolm Crowe: Yes.
Cole Sear: And the tiny hairs on your arm, you know when they stand up? That's them. When they get mad...it gets cold.
I liked The Sixth Sense for Best Picture of 1999 (the award actually went to American Beauty).
It was terrifying when I first saw it. Original, unexpected, well-acted. It was brilliantly written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, whose work has continued to disintegrate ever since, culminating in The Happening, the lowest of the low, but AMAZING RiffTrax material.
The ending was spoiled for me in advance, so I didn't get to experience the movie without that tainting the experience, and I'll never know if I would have figured out the surprises. It was excellent anyway. Aside from being scary, it contains a poignant love story and a touching mother-son story, both of which made me cry.Haley Joel Osment set the bar for child actors with his Oscar-nominated performance as Cole, a young boy haunted (literally) by his unusual ability to -as he tells his psychologist, Dr. Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) -"see dead people." Malcolm, believing Cole to be mentally ill, is determined to help after losing a patient with similar problems who snapped and attacked Malcolm before killing himself (the scene where the patient is discovered hiding in his house is made even scarier by its plausibility -ghosts can be shrugged off by skeptics, but an intruder in the house is a frighteningly realistic possibility). Toni Collette is wonderful as Cole's mother, struggling to understand what is going on with her son, as he conceals the truth from her.
Definitely a movie to see more than once. I still cover my eyes at parts.
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