M. Night Shyamalan’s Movie About “The Silence Of The Lambs at a Taylor Swift concert” Was Inspired by a True Story from a 1985 Police Operation
- The new movie from M. Night Shyamalan is based on the idea of The Silence of the Lambs happening at a Taylor Swift concert.
- Shyamalan's Trap is inspired by a real-life police sting operation conducted decades ago in the U.S.
- The Sixth Sense director said that the creation of Josh Hartnett's Cooper was an interesting process.
American filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan has been in the limelight for making unique and unexpected movies. Many of his movies like The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Split, Stuart Little, and Signs have given the fans a wonderful cinematic experience. Shyamalan has won nominations for two Academy Awards and two BAFTA Awards.
If a Taylor Swift concert turns into a real-life thriller, just know that the Knock at the Cabin filmmaker is behind it. The claim makes sense after realizing that his 2024 horror mystery is influenced by a 1985 secret police operation. Fans were already positive about his 2024 horror movie, Trap. What’s more interesting about the movie is that Shyamalan has taken the plot’s idea from a real-life police operation.
A Real-Life Police Operation Inspired M. Night Shyamalan’s Latest Venture
Shyamalan has always been a topic of appreciation for his unique movies. His movies always find a new way to surprise the fans. His latest release, Trap, might just be his highest-concept movie ever. Apart from the mystery that the plot carries within it, the movie also takes its inspiration from something that happened in 1985.
Recently, Shyamalan himself brought out an exciting thing about Trap in an interview with Empire. He revealed that he took the movie’s idea from a 1985 sting operation organized by the United States Marshals Service and the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C.
In the 1985 sting operation, some fugitives were offered free NFL tickets and were lured into a secret police operation by offering them a chance to win an all-expenses-paid Super Bowl trip. So, Shyamalan’s pitch for the movie was basically this:
What if The Silence Of The Lambs happened at a Taylor Swift concert?
Likewise, in Trap, Cooper (Josh Hartnett) and his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) are shown attending a concert by Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan). What the characters are unaware of is that the entire concert is actually a secret police operation to catch a serial killer, The Butcher.
M. Night Shyamalan Shares How He Managed To Show The Duality Of Josh Hartnett’s Character
Recently, Shyamalan was interviewed by Steven Weintraub for Collider Interviews where he talked about his latest mystery release. Weintraub got curious about how the filmmaker managed to get Josh Hartnett to play the role of both a protagonist and an antagonist. Shyamalan responded immediately by expressing how he was genuinely interested in portraying Hartnett as the good guy who went bad.
Shyamalan explained that creating Cooper as a surprising character was an interesting task for him. He genuinely enjoyed his time writing the structure of the movie where Cooper suddenly turns into an antagonist from a protagonist.
It’s fun to kind of flip and then the structure of the movie at some point shifts to him (Hartnett) as the antagonist… That’s kind of a beautiful thing of structure which I enjoyed writing.
Shyamalan also said that it was not just him, but Josh Hartnett himself was also enjoying the structure of the movie that turned him from a positive character into a frightening figure.
