Manoj Nelliyattu "M. Night" Shyamalan (/ˈʃɑːməlɑːn/ SHAH-mə-lahn; born August 6, 1970) is an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. He is best known for making original films with contemporary supernatural plots and twist endings. The cumulative gross of his films exceeds $3.4 billion globally.
Shyamalan was born in Mahé, India, and raised in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania. His early films include Praying with Anger (1992) and Wide Awake (1998) before his breakthrough film The Sixth Sense (1999), which earned him Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. He then released Unbreakable (2000), Signs (2002) and The Village (2004). Following a period of setbacks which include several poorly received films like Lady in the Water (2006), The Happening (2008), The Last Airbender (2010), and After Earth (2013), he found a career resurgence with the films The Visit (2015), Split (2016), Glass (2019), Old (2021), and Knock at the Cabin (2023).
Shyamalan is also one of the executive producers and occasional director of the 20th Television science fiction series Wayward Pines (2015–2016) and the Apple TV psychological horror series Servant (2019–2023), for which he also serves as showrunner.
Early life
Shyamalan was born in Mahé, India to ethnic Indian parents in a town in the Union Territory of Pondicherry. His father, Dr. Nelliyattu C. Shyamalan, is a Malayali neurologist from Mahé and a JIPMER graduate; his mother, Dr. Jayalakshmi, a Tamil, is an OB-GYN.
Shyamalan's parents immigrated to the United States when he was six weeks old. Shyamalan was raised in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania. Shyamalan was raised Hindu. He attended the private Roman Catholic grammar school Waldron Mercy Academy, followed by the Episcopal Academy, a private Episcopal high school located at the time in Merion Station, Pennsylvania. He felt like an outsider and remembers that teachers would say that whoever was not baptized would go to hell. When he was a student there, a teacher once became upset because he "got the best grade in religion class and wasn't Catholic". Shyamalan earned the New York University Merit Scholarship in 1988, and was also a National Merit Scholar. Shyamalan is an alumnus of New York University Tisch School of the Arts in Manhattan, graduating in 1992. It was while studying there that he adopted "Night" as his second name.
Shyamalan had an early desire to be a filmmaker when he was given a Super 8 camera at a young age. Though his father wanted him to follow in the family practice of medicine, his mother encouraged him to follow his passion. By the time he was seventeen, he had made forty-five home movies. On each DVD release of his films, beginning with The Sixth Sense and with the exception of Lady in the Water, he has included a scene from one of these childhood movies, which, he feels, represents his first attempt at the same kind of film.
