Sunday Scaries: The Most Enduring Scene of ‘The Sixth Sense,’ 25 Years Later

Note: Spoilers ahead for a movie that debuted in theaters when Bill Clinton was still President of the United States, that specifically became famous for its twist. So. Yeah. Not sure if this warning is even necessary, but better safe than sorry.

Twenty-five years… wow, when you put it that way, I cannot help but marvel at how quickly those years shot by. I am the same age as Haley Joel Osment, and it’s pretty jarring to think about how I was the same age as his iconic breakout character Cole Sear in The Sixth Sense when I saw this movie in theaters for the first time. It’s sort of the perfect “starter” scary movie for kids because it has just enough shocking scenes and scary ghosts to really rattle an eleven year-old but not so gruesome and intense like House on Haunted Hill or Stigmata as to outright traumatize them. The subsequent quarter-century hasn’t always been smooth sailing for Osment, though he seems to be doing okay for himself as he now navigates his late thirties. As I… also currently am navigating. Wow, I am getting old…

Anyway, at the time, my young mind was most blown away by The Twist, undoubtedly the thing that made it the second highest-grossing film of 1999 (number one, of course, was Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, which Osment auditioned for and lost out the role of Anakin Skywalker to Jake Lloyd… in hindsight, a very lucky break in his favor) and what made the movie a cultural phenomenon that punched writer/director M. Night Shyamalan’s ticket in Hollywood for over a decade until the failure of After Earth finally put him in a Director Jail that he had to bust out of via a found footage B-movie thriller. People were so blindsided by the revelation that Malcolm Crowe was a ghost the whole time who actually died from his wounds in the prologue that I still remember my grade school classmates and the grownups in my life frantically going out of their way to not spoil the twist because you have to go see it right now just go and don’t look at anything that might spoil the plot just trust me!

So imagine my surprise when I watched it again for the first time in decades and… was more surprised at how unsurprising The Twist was, when looking at how often Malcolm’s ghostly state of being was telegraphed a little too overtly. Particularly in the frequent cutting to closeups of his face during one of the most iconic (and, by extension, oft-parodied) scenes in modern movie history:

God, Osment was so amazing in this movie. Yes, yes, his Best Supporting Actor nomination was category fraud, fine, whatever. But if he had been nominated as a lead actor where he belonged, and if he had won, his win would have aged spectacularly in the annals of Oscar history, and in his acceptance speech, Michael Caine came really close to admitting that he believed Osment should have won, instead. Hard to argue with him, honestly.

Anyway, revisiting this film, and interacting with others who have revisited it on its 25^th anniversary, something struck me that I believe holds a profound lesson for future generations of storytellers and filmmakers: The Twist wasn’t considered all that remarkable to any of my cinephile acquaintances, either. There just wasn’t that much commentary on the thing that defined such a huge portion of a legendary year for American cinema and for most of Shyamalan’s career. There was something else that was brought up a lot in looking back at the movie. Osment’s incredible performance, of course, but see if you can spot the other common thread of these Letterboxd reviews:

Once you know The Twist ahead of time – and, after a quarter-century of pop culture saturation, I can’t imagine too many people not knowing at this point just through cultural osmosis alone – what is left of The Sixth Sense? Why should anyone go back to it?

The answer is, among other things, this scene:

This is what has stood the test of time as the monument to The Sixth Sense’s longevity as a classic, and I think there’s a lesson in that for aspiring filmmakers and screenwriters. Yes, if you want your movie to be a buzzy, talked-about, FOMO box office hit, having something like the final scene of The Sixth Sense helps a lot. It’s the thing that made the movie a smash hit back in 1999.

But if you want your movie to stand the test of time, if you want future generations to rediscover and adore and recommend your work to their friends, decades after it hits home video DVD streaming, you need something like the penultimate scene of The Sixth Sense. You need a scene of earned emotional honesty that culminates a whole feature-length film’s worth of character development and getting audience buy-in to the relationship between a single mom and her troubled son, building through those genuine emotional investments that pay off beautifully here. That’s what will linger long after everyone knows one of the main characters was a ghost the whole time. That’s what will keep people wanting to revisit your movie again and again.

Oh, and because I would feel weird not mentioning her name in this piece: Toni Collette. Just have to name-drop her somewhere here in any retrospective about The Sixth Sense because oh my god, she’s also so good in this movie. The acting in general is stellar here.

That should also be a part of its legacy, come to think of it…