Knock at the Cabin: M. Night Shyamalan was shaken up during first week of filming on his new thriller

Last week, we shared the news – straight from the director himself – that filming had begun on M. Night Shyamalan’s latest thriller, Knock at the Cabin. Now that Shyamalan is heading into the second week of production on the film, he took to social media to reveal that he was shaken up by something he filmed during the first week. Shyamalan said,

One week finished on #knockatthecabin such intricate performances this week. Very dark, emotional film. One take shook me up so much I had to walk away to collect myself. Hopefully you’ll feel it as well when you guys see it.

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Knock at the Cabin stars Dave Bautista (Guardians of the Galaxy), Rupert Grint (Servant), Nikki Amuka-Bird (Old), Ben Aldridge (Pennyworth), and Jonathan Groff (The Matrix Resurrections). Character and plot details are being kept under wraps, but our friends over at Bloody Disgusting have heard that Knock at the Cabin is “a home invasion horror film that takes place during the apocalypse.” Their source even compared the story to the Paul Tremblay novel The Cabin at the End of the World. Could this be an adaptation of the Tremblay novel, like Old was an adaptation of the graphic novel Sandcastle?

Copies of Tremblay’s novel can be purchased at THIS LINK. Here’s the description:

Seven-year-old Wen and her parents, Eric and Andrew, are vacationing at a remote cabin on a quiet New Hampshire lake. Their closest neighbors are more than two miles in either direction along a rutted dirt road.

One afternoon, as Wen catches grasshoppers in the front yard, a stranger unexpectedly appears in the driveway. Leonard is the largest man Wen has ever seen but he is young, friendly, and he wins her over almost instantly. Leonard and Wen talk and play until Leonard abruptly apologizes and tells Wen, “None of what’s going to happen is your fault”. Three more strangers then arrive at the cabin carrying unidentifiable, menacing objects. As Wen sprints inside to warn her parents, Leonard calls out: “Your dads won’t want to let us in, Wen. But they have to. We need your help to save the world.”

Thus begins an unbearably tense, gripping tale of paranoia, sacrifice, apocalypse, and survival that escalates to a shattering conclusion, one in which the fate of a loving family and quite possibly all of humanity are entwined. The Cabin at the End of the World is a masterpiece of terror and suspense from the fantastically fertile imagination of Paul Tremblay.

That description does mention a character who is “the largest man Wen has ever seen”, and Shyamalan said he needed a “giant human being” to play the character he cast Bautista as. 

Universal has scheduled a February 3, 2023 theatrical release for Knock at the Cabin, so we have less than a year before we’ll know for sure whether or not it’s a take on The Cabin at the End of the World. Just over nine months to go before the moment when we’ll find out whether that certain take will shake up viewers as much as it did the director.