Psycho influenced The Sixth Sense

Shyamalan's film is built on the device Psycho made mainstream: a reveal in the last minutes that retrospectively rewrites everything the audience has watched, placed so that a second viewing is a different film. The specific inheritance is the rule that makes such a twist fair rather than cheap. Hitchcock plays the Mrs Bates scenes so that nothing shown is a lie, only framed to be misread; The Sixth Sense does the same with who speaks to Malcolm and who does not. Filed MEDIUM: an inherited technique, not a borrowing of story or character.