Why Is the Happening So Bad?

The Happening. Image courtesy of 20th Century Fox.

See that look on Zooey Deschanel’s face? That is everyone’s face as they watch M. Night Shyamalan’s 2008 film The Happening. Billed as a B-horror movie throwback to the 1950s, it is a truly awful piece of filmmaking. And yet, it is so much more than that.

Honestly, I can’t believe I had never seen The Happening before. It was kind of like getting hit in the face with a shovel at first, but after I sat with it for a while and the full weight of what I had seen started to sink in I started feeling different. The more times I watched clips of Mark Whalberg doing, well, literally anything in this film I started laughing. Deep, belly laughs. Pure, cosmic joy like the kind that shoots from God’s fingertips. This movie is the true, absolute definition of so bad it’s good.

It has terrible, terrible, terrible acting. The kind that starts to bleed into performance art. It’s so bad you are never sure if the actors are in on it or not. Were they actively aware that the movie they were making was terrible? That’s part of the real mystery of The Happening, and part of what makes it somehow so compelling - not the stupid environmental deadly tree wind thing, but the mystery of whether the people making it knew they were in a world historical piece of shit.

There’s some evidence to suggest they did. How else do you explain Mark Whalberg’s delivery of all his lines? And, I mean, if you are the guy playing Hot Dog Man how do you read that script and not instantly recognize what kind of movie you are in? But now some revisionist historians would have you believe that Shyamalan was in on it too, and he was actually trying to make an intentionally bad film that called back the campiness of 1950s shlock. The AV Club got everybody sold on this ridiculous idea with an article a few years back. But I think that is a clear case of a Shyamalan retcon.

It’s debatable whether the ACTORS knew the script was trash and simply leaned into to because they couldn’t get out of their contracts. But it’s clear as day that the script itself, as well as the direction, was an earnest attempt to make a good film. It’s just absolutely terrible at every aspect of good filmmaking - the dialogue is bad, the plot makes no sense, the structure is horrible.

There are, actually, some interesting visuals. But the script is and always was a hopeless mess and there’s no way anyone could have seen it differently. The moments in this film are so awkward, so stilted, so weird, so inexplicable, the dialogue at times seemingly generated by a computer but like an older model with buggy software, that it’s hard to wrap your mind around them.

Shyamalan tries to imbue the film with moments of tension, and hit these tonal shifts on the fly, but misses so badly in just about every instance that here we are a decade later and literally the only way we can make sense of this movie, is to convince ourselves it was this bad on purpose. This was supposed to be a good movie. It turned out to be a bad movie. And now we watch it because its badness is such that it makes it special. In some ways, and especially given the roller coaster of M. Night’s career, this makes The Happening far more interesting than if it had been a better film.