10 TERRIFYING Horror Movie Openings (That Led To Disappointing Movies)

M. Night Shyamalan is one of Hollywood’s most fascinatingly inconsistent creators, and it was the dual embarrassments of 2006’s Lady in the Water and 2008’s The Happening that truly cemented his downfall.

That said, the latter movie’s promotional materials suggested a characteristically mysterious and surprisingly vicious tale of mass suicides and natural disasters worthy of The Happening being Shyamalan’s first R-rated venture.

It gets going with blood-curdling promise, too, as a woman sitting on a New York City park bench sees another woman stab herself in the neck with a knitting needle as other parkgoers freeze in place. Then, construction workers gaze in horror as their coworkers jump to their deaths from the building they’re working on.

Audiences can’t help but feel just as astonished and afraid as the characters on screen, yet Shyamalan almost immediately turns The Happening into pure – if debatably intentional – comedy.

How? By having Mark Wahlberg deliver a career-worst performance as he and his castmates spew awful dialogue and act like aliens approximating human behavior. The hotdog scene and Wahlberg’s cringeworthy exchanges with Betty Buckley are the most notorious examples of that.

Worst of all, it turns out that the trees were causing the mayhem, and while an environmentalist message could’ve worked in the right hands, Shyamalan incorporates it in the corniest and clunkiest ways imaginable.