M. Night Shyamalan wanted to connect Glass and The Visit but chickened out

For a while, M. Night Shyamalan was the king of thrillers, even touted by some as the next Steven Spielberg. But after a string of hits, Shyamalan’s next few movies were poorly received and some thought that the director’s time had passed. In response, Shyamalan went back to basics with The Visit, a found-footage horror comedy which followed two young siblings spending a week with their grandparents who they had never met. He followed that up with Split, a psychological thriller that had a surprise connection with one of his earlier movies, Unbreakable. Shyamalan then brought the worlds of Split and Unbreakable together with Glass, but he told THR that he almost included The Visit in that reunion as well.

As many of M. Night Shyamalan’s stories take place in or around Philadelphia, he was asked if he had ever played with the notion of those characters all existing in the same Philadelphia. “If I was smart enough to have thought about it 20 some years ago, I would’ve done it, but I wasn’t smart enough to think about it,” Shyamalan said. “There was one tie-in that I almost did. It was in Glass when they all got to the mental institution. I was going to tell a story about The Visit and how two people escaped from that same hospital.” He added that he “was going to do it, but I chickened out. So I didn’t do it.” While it would have been interesting to have seen the grandparents from The Visit in Glass, the film was already juggling a lot of characters.

M. Night Shyamalan’s next movie will be Knock at the Cabin, a psychological horror based on the novel The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul G. Tremblay. The film stars Dave Bautista, Johnathan Groff, Rupert Grint, Ben Aldrige, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Abby Quinn, and Kristen Cui. “While vacationing at a remote cabin, a young girl and her parents are taken hostage by four armed strangers who demand that the family make an unthinkable choice to avert the apocalypse,” reads the official synopsis. “With limited access to the outside world, the family must decide what they believe before all is lost.“

Knock at the Cabin will hit theaters on February 3rd.