Why you eyein’ my lemon drink?
After kicking off April at the local Deer Cheer festival in James Gunn’s horror comedy Slither (listen) and checking in with Boris Karloff in The Mummy (listen), we’re headed to the weird and wacky world of M. Night Shyamalan to discuss his much-maligned B-movie The Happening.
In The Happening, a science teacher (Mark Wahlberg), his wife (Zooey Deschanel), and a young girl (Ashlyn Sanchez) struggle to survive a plague that causes those infected to die by suicide.
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Episode 383: The Happening (2008) feat. Lindsay Traves
Prepare for a colossal culling and try to stay ahead of the wind because we’re discussing M. Night Shyamalan’s much-maligned film The Happening (2008) in celebration of Earth Day! Tagging in for the conversation is Pajiba senior critic Lindsay Traves.
Join us as we offer up not a defense of the film, but rather a desire to see a paradigm shift in the way people view it (meaning: we want you to dislike it for the “right” reasons). This is Shyamalan’s self-proclaimed “best B-movie you’ve ever seen” and, as uneven as it is, the comedy is all intentional! Or most of it is, anyway…
Plus: math vs. statistics, declaring Shyamalan the king of the nonsense newscast, so many comparisons to Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds and debating whether or not Zooey Deschanel’s character is stealthily trying to kill that little girl for the whole movie.
Cross out The Happening!
Coming Up Next: We’re headed to the local SavMart to check in on Sy the Photo Guy (Robin Williams) in Mark Romanek’s 2002 chiller One Hour Photo.
P.S. Subscribe to our Patreon for over 483 hours of Patreon content including this month’s new episodes on Hanibal S03 E03-04, Faces of Death (2026), They Will Kill You, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, an audio commentary on the 2017 Tom Cruise-starring The Mummy and the conclusion of our episodic coverage of Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House on the Requel Tier.