The announcements, as per usual with an M. Night Shyamalan film, were vague. The director was working on a new film, Knock at the Cabin, that he would write, direct, and produce. Plot details? Top secret.
It wasn’t long before people developed some theories about the source material. The IMDb listing for Knock at the Cabin currently lists two writers: Shyamalan, and Paul Tremblay, credited only for “novel.” And finally, Tremblay can talk about it: Knock at the Cabin is Shyamalan’s adaptation of his novel The Cabin at the End of the World.
Speaking to CNBC, Tremblay said, “I honestly spent a chunk of my 2022 spring quelling internet rumors and putting out Twitter fires connecting the book and movie. It reached a point in early June where that became impossible, however, with all the information out there, including the IMDb page.”
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The Cabin at the End of the World
Tremblay told CNBC that the book was optioned in 2017. Another of his novels, A Head Full of Ghosts, has been optioned but not yet filmed, so the author was familiar with the waiting game—and the fact that things don’t always work out. “When it became clear that not only was Night interested and attached, that the movie was in fact going into preproduction and then production, I then moved from cautious optimism to real-time excited,” he said.
Tremblay had “no contractual say over the screenplay or filming,” but said, “FilmNation was great about keeping me in the loop with the early draft of a screenplay and asking my input.” He discussed the book with Shyamalan, and visited the set for two days.
The Cabin at the End of the World, Tremblay said, is “a reaction to the home invasion film subgenre.” The summary explains:
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.
Shyamalan’s adaptation, which stars Ben Aldridge, Jonathan Groff, Dave Bautista, Rupert Grint and Nikki Amuka-Bird, premieres February 3, 2023.
Author photo by Akuchling (licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikipedia
