The Sixth Sense

by Peter Lerangis

  Malcolm's character changed a lot. He was originally a crime-scene photographer. Eventually that changed into a therapist. And that change came because I had to give the character a job that would naturally place him around the kid, without him having to call Cole up and say, "Hi, can you meet me at the ice cream parlor so we can talk?" Malcolm's profession had to be some­thing where it would be natural for him and Cole to have set meetings all the time, a way for them to get intimate, without me - the writer - wor­rying about the practicalities of how this guy keeps coming to this boy.

  Malcolm as child psychologist solved that practical problem. It also gave me a clear path to research. My wife is a child psychologist, and I sent questionnaires to all her teachers, and her colleagues. I asked lots of questions, includ­ing: "What would you do if a child said he saw ghosts?" "What would you do if a child didn't want to speak to you and he was being absolutely stone cold?" Also, "Would you ever cry in a session if a child told you something emotional?"

  I got a lot of varied and interesting respon­ses. I added them up and Malcolm's reactions were the collective result.

  One thing about Malcolm that didn't change was his name. To me, a crow is sort of a bird of death. Crows give me an ominous feeling of hanging around, so that's what I named him. Besides, it would have been too weird to call him Malcolm Buzzard!

  I see dead people...

  I think it's in the realm of possibility that we can contact, or be contacted by, someone who has passed on. Certainly, I've met plenty of peo­ple who believe they are channels, but I don't have concrete evidence.

  For people who do believe, it's generally agreed upon that there are spirits who have a difficult time passing from this current world - the state of the body - to some other entirely spiri­tual world. They have trouble leaving, so they kind of stay in an interim stage - in the image of what they were, and who they were. They have a hard time letting go of that. They're most­ly in denial, they can't accept it. Those spirits don't even know they're dead. Often, they're the ones who have been wronged, and they can't leave until that wrong has been fixed. Or, like the little girl at the end of the movie [Kyra], they can't leave because they know someone else [Kyra's little sister] will be wronged. So they need to prevent [that] from happening before they can be at peace and move on. They need to have some kind of closure before they can leave.

  While I have no concrete evidence of this, it makes sense. That's the way we move, right? If we're thinking of a million things in the morning, and we have a thousand things to do, we think we have a thousand days to do it, and then, all of a sudden, boom! That car accident happens in a split second. All that energy would have to go somewhere, it can't just vanish, I'd imagine.

  My cousins and I always did the Ouija board - all the time. Only a couple of times did weird, weird things happen. One was pretty recent. We were in the basement of my uncle's house. The person asking the question did not put his hand on the board - the question was one that the rest of us could not have known the answer to. But the "ouija" answer came back so specifically, it freaked everybody out. 'Cause only the person doing the asking knew all the details. And he did not have his hand on the board.

  If I could contact someone who has passed on, I might want to talk to [the legendary direc­tor] Alfred Hitchcock. I have a couple of ques­tions for him!

  But there is someone else. A friend of mine from college who died ... not in a great way . .. I'd just want to make sure he was okay. I didn't try to bring my own feelings about this friend into The Sixth Sense, but a couple of times during the filmmaking, it did come into my head.

  The questions that remain

  The success of The Sixth Sense is very rewarding, especially that people are talking about it, dissecting it, going back to see it again, because that's how I make all my movies, to with­stand that kind of scrutiny. It would be sad if you put that kind of minutia into it and nobody cared -it would be doubly painful!

  Here are a few of the questions people still ask me.

  *Did Cole know from the start that Malcolm was dead?

  The answer is yes.

  *Is that why, the moment Cole sees Malcolm, he runs to the church?

  No, it's normal for Cole to sprint from his house to the church. He's not running because he's scared of the ghost.

  *Why isn't Cole scared of Malcolm?

  The thing I found in the research, and that I generally find in kids, is they're very matter-of-fact about things. They're not like us. They're not so jaded that they go, "Oh, you're black, you're white . . ." Cole doesn't get scared of the person in the hall because he's a ghost, he's scared of the person in the hall because he's a stranger, and he's bloody. So to Cole, even though his sixth sense tells him this is a ghost, Malcolm is just a man, just this entity. So he accepts Mal­colm easily - theirs becomes a normal relation­ship between man and child.

  *Are there other ghosts Cole hasn't been scared of?

  Yes. It's insinuated that the priest who taught him Latin, and Cole's grandmother, among oth­ers, are ghosts he's interacted with, even had educational, beneficial, not scary relationships with. And the teacher who was burned in the fire at the school -the one who told Cole about "stuttering Stanley." Of course, Malcolm is the one that transforms him.

  *What's the deal with the red door­knob to the basement?

  It's not just the doorknob. Anything that was tainted by the other world - the Sixth Sense world - anything that meant more than it actu­ally was, was red. if you concentrated, you saw that the thing that was red - the coffee mug, Cole's sweater, Anna's dress at the restaurant, and of course, the doorknob - had some con­nection, some significance, some clue to the other world.

  *Is there some belief, some theory about that color?

  No, I just made it up. It's a visual thing in film­making, the use of color to signify things.

  *If Cole knows that ghosts can't see each other, why does he expect Malcolm to see the hanging people at the school?

  Cole understands that, but he doesn't under­stand every rule of everything. He doesn't neces­sarily expect Malcolm to see them, but he yearns for Malcolm to see what he sees. He goes, "You know, maybe you can see them, if you just are quiet."

  None of his family and none of his friends can see them either, but in Cole's head, maybe he wouldn't be so isolated - a freak - if they could. If they were all really quiet and they did listen to what he was saying, they could get just the top layer, and they'd sense something, and Cole can go, "That's them." All Cole wants is for

  them to see just the peak of what he sees - which is the whole mountain. He knows that everybody can see just a little bit.

  It's like teaching someone who can't see ghosts. You say, "Be really still. Do you feel some­thing on the back of your neck? That's them. And that's as far as you're gonna see, but trust me, that's them."

  *How does Malcolm get down the basement when it's locked?

  He's a ghost! He sees the door, tries to open it, thinks, "Why is this locked? Well, I'll go get my keys." He searches for the keys . . . and then blacks out. And the next thing he knows, he's in the basement. How'd he get there? He went through the door, as ghosts can. He can't acknowledge that, because then he'd have to accept who he is and what state he's in, which he's not ready to -until the end of the movie.

  *Cole says it gets cold when the ghosts are mad, but in the end, Anna's breath is cold, and there are no angry ghosts there.

  Malcolm is there, and when he realizes he's dead, he gets very, very upset, and the room gets cold instantly. This spirit that hasn't been angry this whole time - the spirit of the man who lived in this house - suddenly realizes his life is over, and has been for two years! And all the emotions and anger, everything swirling, and he's just trying to hold onto it, but the whole temperature in the house starts to drop because he's very upset and angry.

  I'm ready to communicate with you now.

  When I was a kid I fell in love with [the movie] Poltergeist and others l
ike that, so it made sense that when I grew up and made movies, there would be a whole generation of kids that would respond to it. That has been very gratifying. But what I most want people to take away from the experience of The Sixth Sense is hope - that maybe in the end there's some meaning to everything. That it's not so bad and that you can make sense of things. And to com­municate. Because communication is a very important thing.