Mina, an artist in her late twenties, becomes stranded in an expansive Western Ireland forest in The Watchers. While wandering the forest, she manages to find shelter with three other strangers, but they soon become trapped. Things get even worse when mysterious creatures begin to stalk them each night.

The Watchers is based on A. M. Shine’s book of the same name with Ishana Shyamalan adapting the story into a screenplay and making her directorial debut. Her father, M. Night Shyamalan, served as a producer on the project, but Ishana looks to make her own mark on the world of cinema and horror. The Watchers features a powerhouse cast led by Dakota Fanning, who delivers a compelling performance as Mina.

Screen Rant interviewed The Watchers writer and director Ishana Shyamalan about her directorial debut. She discussed the influence of Irish folklore and how she blended it with things she found inherently terrifying. Shyamalan also touched on the theme of found family that threads throughout the movie and shuts down rumors of connections to her father’s movie Trap.

Ishana Shyamalan On Filming in Ireland & The Influence Of The Irish Folklore

Shyamalan shared what inspired the look of The Watchers. This began with a blend of the folklore that was at the heart of the story from The Watchers novel and what elements she found scary. Finding that balance was key to the design of The Watchers.

Ishana Shyamalan: It was very much an exploratory process of both thinking about the actual mythology that’s embedded into the film and what I felt was very scary to me. [I thought of] images I had seen that made me really scared and blended that all into one thing.

This film is based on Irish folklore, but at its center is a universal theme of found family. Can you discuss how that theme helps ground the film?

Ishana Shyamalan: I think the family dynamic within the coop of four of them was one of the things that I was most interested in playing with. I really enjoyed that theatrical thing of playing house, and it’s very much just about human dynamics. That’s because, for me, the genre of both horror-thriller and fantasy are just a means to talk about the things that we’re dealing with in our home spaces most often. So, it was very much that for me.

This is from an Irish writer, A.M. Shine, with Irish folklore [throughout]. How important was it for you to shoot this in Ireland, and can you discuss finding the right forest? The forest is almost like a character itself.

Ishana Shyamalan: I think once we had decided that this was going to be the book that we were going to adapt, it was going to be shot in Ireland. I was very much enamored with how A.M. had written such a rich Irish environment, and it felt only right to do it there.

It was so wonderful. He was very much involved in the process with me and became a great friend of mine. I just thought it was so cheeky and wonderful that we got to shoot in the place where he had imagined the story, and even [the pub where he had] written the book. I had quite a few pints there myself and loved it. But that was just wonderful magic.

And then the forest itself was very much something I was looking for, something that felt like it had its own character within it. And I think forests now are all planted with different things and don’t really have that kind of homogenous feel. We came across this space at the very, very end of our scouting process, and it was just completely quiet, completely scary, and it felt to me like it had such a spiritual energy about it.

Ishana Shyamalan Explains The Nod To The Watchers In The Trap Trailer

Fans noted a nod to The Watchers in the trailer for M. Night Shyamalan’s next movie, Trap. However, she shut down the theory that they are set in a shared universe.

Ishana Shyamalan: I don’t know. I won’t say too much, but no. I think it is just sort of about us making fun of this odd situation that’s happened where we both have movies coming out, and it’s a little nod to that experience that we’re sort of in it together.

About The Watchers

A young artist gets stranded in an extensive, immaculate forest in western Ireland, where, after finding shelter, she becomes trapped alongside three strangers, stalked by mysterious creatures each night. This forest isn’t charted on any map.

Check out our other interviews for The Watchers:

• Dakota Fanning
• Georgina Campbell

Source: Screen Rant Plus