Ishana Shyamalan Reveals Her Unusual Inspiration for The Watchers

Ishana Shyamalan’s debut film The Watchers hits theaters on June 7, 2024, and as the first-time feature writer/director gets ready to make a splash with her supernatural horror film starring Dakota Fanning, she’s revealed that she took inspiration from the most unlikely of places: the TV show Love Island. Shyamalan is, of course, the daughter of famed director M. Night Shyamalan, and while this might be her first film all on her own, it’s not without experience. She previously collaborated with her father on the Apple TV+ series, Servant (writing and directing several episodes), and she also had second unit directorial duties on his films Old, and Knock at the Cabin.

Speaking with Variety ahead of the premiere of The Watchers, Shyamalan revealed that while writing the script for her upcoming horror film she was also watching Love Island at the same time. She began to draw parallels between her characters and the contestants on the reality show, and says it was a unique experience to juxtapose the TV show with the film during the writing process. Check out her comments below.

“I was
watching Love Island as I was writing the script
. I am just so enjoying these people flirting with each other and getting emotional, and just obsessively watching these characters and connecting to them. And it felt very much like the experience of what was happening in the coop: they’re sort of being observed in their humanity.”

The Watchers

Release Date

June 7, 2024

Director

Ishana Shyamalan

The Watchers stars Dakota Fanning as a young woman who finds herself trapped in a vast forest in Ireland only to seek shelter among three other strangers. Like her father’s films before her, all is not as it seems in Ishana Shyamalan’s debut movie, which is so far receiving mixed reviews. Check out the full synopsis for The Watchers below.

“28-year-old artist Mina gets stranded in an expansive, untouched forest in western Ireland. Upon finding shelter, she unknowingly becomes trapped alongside three strangers who are watched and stalked by mysterious creatures each night.”

Dakota Fanning Says She Felt ‘Drawn’ to the Character of Mina

No stranger to the weird and unusual, Dakota Fanning got her start on the big stage at age six with a role in the television series ER. Since then, the 30-year-old actress has appeared in a number of significant projects including the Twilight franchise, the off-beat comedy-drama Please Stand By, and the voice of Coraline in Henry Selick’s Oscar-nominated seminal stop-motion horror film of the same name. Fanning herself is the recipient of numerous awards, including a highly-coveted Fangoria Chainsaw Award for her work in the horror film Hide and Seek in 2005.

For Fanning, she says she felt “drawn” to the character of Mina in The Watchers thanks to the similarities between the two. While Mina is a bit younger than Dakota Fanning, the actress says she was relatable in the sense that neither of them really have things figured out yet, but to be honest…does anybody?

“I felt like Mina was a searcher. She obviously had some things buried from her past
and was still trying to find herself
. I was in my late 20s reading the script and making the movie, and I kind of felt like that: you’re not young and you’re not old. You’re somewhere in between, and you’re supposed to have it all together.

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As to whether Fanning has ever seen Love Island? She admits that while she does watch shows like that, she hasn’t “gone full Love Island” yet.