The most striking thing about Shyamalan, besides the speed of his success, is a confidence that virtually walks. This is a guy who considers his foiled attempt to direct Labor of Love, the second script he ever wrote and which he sold for $750,000, a major disappointment. And his successes so far outshine the “setbacks” he enumerates that it seems important to remind him that six years in the business is not, after all, a long time to get where he is. The Shyamalan oeuvre is a quick list of hits that started in 1993, the year he graduated from NYU, with Praying  With  Anger,  which   he   wrote,   directed    and

‘In 2003 came the chilling tale of a close-knit community that lives with the frightening knowledge that creatures reside in the woods around, and the courage of one young man who challenges the unknown creatures in the film ‘The Village’. You can even call him Scheming Shyamalan. In 1994, 20th Century Fox bought Labor of Love, leaving him out of the loop. Disappointed at losing directorial rights to his story about a man’s love for his dead wife, he went home to start over. “I sat down, and I said, I’m going to write another screenplay, but I’m going to write no male leads in the movie. If there are no white male leads in there, then it doesn’t instantly go into the we-gotta-get-Tom-Cruise-Tom-Hanks, gotta-get-a-director-who-can-get-them pile. So I wrote Wide Awake, which stars a 10-year-old kid.”The younger child of Indian immigrants, Shyamalan has a deeply ingrained sense of the supernatural.

Growing up on the upper-crust Main Line, he was a regular participant in his Hindu parents’ religious rites in the home. Like his parents, he believes in life after death, and at 18 adopted the Native American “Night” as his middle name, because he feels he may have been an American Indian in a past life.

That the earthly and spirit worlds coexist easily for Shyamalan comes through in his movies, as in the most compelling scene near the end of Praying With Anger, when the young American encounters his dead father’s spirit, in the shape of a shadow, caressing him in a darkened room. It’s also the reason why Sixth Sense is one of the most believable horror stories ever.

Shyamalan’s great technique is to scare and terrorise you by not showing too much. Leaving more to the imagination was a technique perfected by the ultimate master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, and Shyamalan has picked up the scent. He leaves out the gore and the blood and it makes for infinitely better viewing.

Shyamalan also has the unique ability to extract first-rate performances from child artistes. He did it with Haley Joel Osment in “The Sixth Sense”. And he has repeated it with Rory Culkin and Bo Abigail Breslin in “Signs”. In a phone-in chat with Indian journalists, Shyamalan was matter-of-fact about the subject: “Actually I am shocked that kids are not in every movie. They are a third of the planet and are a gigantic part of our lives and not to have them in a film seems strange.”

 Here was a film that used less blood to tell its story than a “Nightmare on Elm Street” would use in one shot and yet managed to scare people many times over. Shyamalan has said in an interview, “Freddie Krueger with the blood—that doesn’t really scare me. What scares me is something like this: if I had a photo of my wife on my desk, and it was face down, and I put it up and I walked out of the room and I came back and it was face down again. That’s scary.”

Suspense, in a Shyamalan film, is like an invisible animal in the room. There is a sense of foreboding, something hidden within the atmosphere that is about to attack—but decides to leave just before it attacks. As he has said, “I don’t like to show everything, I like to prolong the revelation. I like to show the footprint of the creature without showing the creature.” Definitely more Hitchcockian than Spielberg’s rather popcorn-crunching style.

Shyamalan is in many ways like Spielberg in reverse, in the sense that he’s darker, spookier, and also has a religious faith. Family is important in Shyamalan’s films. Shyamalan is indeed a “very scary guy,” says Bruce Willis, who acted in Shyamalan’s two hit films, The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable. To be sure, Willis was referring to Shyamalan’s steadfast passion and lengthy rehearsals. Following the success of Sixth Sense, which is now among the top dozen grossers of all time, Shyamalan insists on directing all the scripts he writes. And each of his movies is set in or close to  Philadelphia because, he says, he likes to go home for dinner to his wife and kids. Shyamalan, who was born in Pondicherry, lives in the Philly suburb of Conshohocken with his wife Bhavana Vasvani and their two daughters.In a recent story on Shyamalan, Esquire magazine wrote: “From the beginning of his career, Shyamalan has politely demanded complete control over the stories he tells.” He has never been anyone’s assistant. He has never worked in Hollywood. As a director, he has worked only on his own scripts.

Shyamalan, who is only 34, employs a single associate who serves as creative consultant and conducts business over an unlisted phone number. His small film company, appropriately for the kind of movies he makes, is called Blinding Edge Pictures. “All this he can do because his last movie, The Sixth Sense, grossed $650 million worldwide. The only other directors who achieved this kind of success at this age are named Spielberg, Lucas, and Cameron,” Esquire said.

It’s what he had to contend with when, as a 17-year-old high-school senior, he told his doctor parents he wanted to make movies-not at all what had been planned for the stellar student, whose unspoken promise of success meant a career in medicine or business or computers. “I was not very happy in the beginning,” Nelliate Shyamalan, the filmmaker’s father, admits. “He was going into a tough profession, in which only a few people come up. We’ve had a very pleasant surprise.”

The downside? Says Night, “Now the whole family has these high expectations. My grandfather in India wants to see me holding an Academy Award on the TV. And I really want to do that for him.”