M. Night Shyamalan’s third feature turned a quiet Philadelphia ghost story into the second biggest hit of 1999, six Oscar nominations and a reputation its director has been carrying ever since.

The Sixth Sense opens on the worst night in the life of Malcolm Crowe, a child psychologist in Philadelphia who has just been honoured by the city for his work. A former patient, Vincent Gray, breaks into the house Crowe shares with his wife, accuses him of having failed him as a boy and shoots him. The story picks up months later, with Crowe back at work and fixed on a new case that looks uncomfortably like the old one: Cole Sear, a small, withdrawn boy who is isolated at school, frightened at home and plainly carrying something he will not say out loud.

What Cole eventually confesses is the line the film became known for: “I see dead people.” The dead, he explains, walk among the living without knowing they are dead, and they want something from him. Crowe has to decide whether the boy is ill, traumatised or telling the truth, and whether helping him might settle the debt he still feels he owes Vincent Gray. Around them, two households are under strain. Cole’s mother, Lynn, is raising him alone and cannot understand what is happening to her son, and Crowe’s marriage to Anna has gone quiet in a way neither of them seems able to name.

A spec script and a third feature

The Sixth Sense was written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, born in India and raised in Penn Valley, just outside Philadelphia, the city where he has set almost all of his films. It was his third feature. The first, Praying with Anger (1992), was a small autobiographical drama shot in India; the second, Wide Awake (1998), a gentle comedy-drama about a Catholic schoolboy looking for proof of God after his grandfather’s death, had a troubled release and found almost no audience.

The script that changed his career was sold to Disney, reportedly for around $3 million, with the condition that Shyamalan would direct it himself. The film was released by Disney’s Hollywood Pictures label and co-financed by Spyglass Entertainment, the company’s first production, and it was produced by Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall and Barry Mendel. On paper it was a mid-budget supernatural thriller with a film star in the lead and a director with two little-seen titles behind him. In the late-summer release slot of August 1999, expectations were modest.

Bruce Willis against type, and a ten-year-old lead

Bruce Willis arrived as one of the biggest action stars in Hollywood, a decade on from Die Hard and a year after Armageddon, with Pulp Fiction and 12 Monkeys showing he could take stranger material. Casting him as a soft-spoken therapist who spends most of the story listening rather than acting was the film’s first quiet gamble, and Willis would return to Shyamalan’s world twice: in Unbreakable (2000) and, nearly two decades later, in Glass (2019).

The weight of the story, though, sits on Haley Joel Osment, who was around ten when the film was shot and was already known as the son of Tom Hanks‘s character in Forrest Gump (1994). The role of Cole earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor at the age of eleven, along with a Golden Globe nomination. Toni Collette, the Australian actor who had broken through with Muriel’s Wedding (1994), plays Lynn Sear and was nominated for Best Supporting Actress; her scene with Osment in a car stuck in traffic is the one most often singled out when the film is discussed. Olivia Williams, fresh from Rushmore (1998), plays Anna Crowe, and Donnie Wahlberg plays Vincent Gray in the prologue.

Clues left in the open

The film’s design is built around a single revelation, and the reason it still works for people who already know it is that nothing is hidden. Shyamalan writes the clues into the dialogue and the staging from the first act, and he has explained in interviews that red was reserved for moments where the world of the dead touches the world of the living. That use of colour has become one of the most discussed details of the film, precisely because it only becomes legible once the ending is known.

Shyamalan surrounded himself with experienced hands. The cinematographer was Tak Fujimoto, who had shot The Silence of the Lambs for Jonathan Demme; the score was by James Newton Howard, the start of a partnership that would run through Unbreakable, Signs, The Village and Lady in the Water; and the editor was Andrew Mondshein, whose cut was nominated for an Academy Award. It is a genre film made with the crew of a prestige drama, and its reputation rests as much on that pairing as on the final turn.

Six nominations, no Oscar, and a brand

The box office went far beyond the projections. The Sixth Sense opened at number one in the United States and stayed there for five consecutive weekends, carried largely by word of mouth and by audiences who wanted to see it again once they knew the ending. It finished with close to $300 million in North America and roughly $670 million worldwide, second only to Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace among the releases of 1999, and it became one of the highest-grossing thrillers on record.

At the Academy Awards it received six nominations: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor for Osment, Best Supporting Actress for Collette and Best Film Editing. It won none of them, in the year of American Beauty. The more lasting prize was a public identity for its director. From the next film onwards, M. Night Shyamalan was marketed as the filmmaker with the twist, and every release from Unbreakable and Signs to The Village was received partly as a guessing game. That label helped sell tickets for years and became a burden in the 2000s, before The Visit (2015), Split (2016) and Glass reconnected him with a wider audience, the last two by returning to the world of Unbreakable.

Why it keeps being rediscovered

“I see dead people” entered the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest movie quotes, and the ending became so widely known that the film is one of the most frequently spoiled in popular culture, parodied in sketches and referenced in other films for more than two decades. That ubiquity is an odd fate for a story whose structure depends on surprise, and it explains why so many later discussions of The Sixth Sense focus less on the reveal itself than on how carefully it was prepared.

It has also acquired a different weight in Bruce Willis’s filmography. In 2022 his family announced that he was stepping away from acting after an aphasia diagnosis, later updated to frontotemporal dementia, and The Sixth Sense is regularly cited as the clearest example of the range he showed outside action cinema. For Osment and Collette it remains the role most often attached to their names, even after long careers that followed, Collette’s including a return to family horror with Hereditary (2018).

Read today, The Sixth Sense sits in an unusual place: a horror film whose most remembered elements are a mother, a child and a marriage, and a twist film that people return to after the twist is gone. Whether it plays as a ghost story or as a family drama with ghosts in it may depend on which half the viewer remembers. Either way, it is the film that defined how M. Night Shyamalan would be watched, and judged, for the rest of his career.