NEW YORK (KRT) -The “M” is not for “modest.”

M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Village” opens nationwide on Friday, and though the 19th-century suspenser stars Oscar-winners Adrien Brody and William Hurt and “Alien” queen Sigourney Weaver, it’s the director’s name that’s being used to sell the movie.

Trailers for “The Village” begin with signature scenes from Shyamalan’s biggest pics, “The Sixth Sense,” “Unbreakable” and “Signs.” His distinctive moniker – the “M” is for Manoj, the “Night” is made up – sits boldly atop the film’s title in print ads, posters, every aspect of the media campaign. On July 18, Shyamalan was the subject of, and mastermind behind, a three-hour special on the Sci Fi Channel, an oddball mix of “making-of” hype and “Blair Witch” faux reality called “The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan.”

Last week, he sat for a 1 1/2-hour Q & A beamed live by satellite to more than 40 theaters and hosted by the fawning, fact-challenged Joel Siegel. (“The Good Morning America” critic – who works for ABC, which is owned by Disney, the parent studio behind “The Village” – mistook an Indian actor for Shyamalan in a scene from “The Sixth Sense.”)

And weekend before last, Shyamalan holed up in Manhattan to do, by his count, 250 interviews with foreign and domestic TV, radio and print reporters.

“People ask me, why are the movies so successful? Why in so short a time?” says the boyish, ebullient filmmaker, whose troika of supernatural hits have a domestic gross of $616.5 million. “Because,” he explains, “they are me.”

Whether he likes it or not – and, for the most part, he does like it – Shyamalan is becoming a brand.

“There’s one star here – it’s M. Night,” says Tom Pollock, the producer and onetime Universal Pictures studio head. “There are certain directors who are brands. Their names, in fact, have become adjectives.

“Hitchcockian,” he offers. “Hitchcockian means something … It means scary, suspenseful filmmaker.’

“Capraesque … To say a film is Capraesque, you’re expecting a movie about a small-town guy who becomes a hero.”

Shyamalanian? Shyamalanesque? M. Nightish?

It doesn’t roll off the tongue yet. But the expectations are there, and so are the comparisons to Hitchcock. In its news releases, Touchstone Pictures hails Shyamalan – like Hitchcock, a merchant of suspense who likes to take cameo roles in his films – as “the cinema’s modern master of suspense.” Music reviewers received a copy of “The Village” soundtrack with a press note likening Shyamalan’s relationship with composer James Newton Howard to Hitchcock’s legendary collaborations with Bernard Hermann. When Newsweek put Shyamalan on its cover in 2002, the headline read “The New Spielberg” – a last-minute change from what the editors had originally approved: “The New Hitchcock.”

Shyamalan, who turns 34 on Aug. 6, shrugs off the Hitchcock business (and the Spielberg business). “When a young basketball player comes up and they move in a certain way, they say Oh, he’s the next so-and-so …,”‘ he muses. “It’s the fact that we’re so influenced by these people that were so fantastic, that were really the groundbreakers in the field.”

On one level, the Hitchcock analogy is pure, old-school movie-biz hype. But it’s hype that Shyamalan, a gregarious fellow with firm control over his career, doesn’t seem reluctant to perpetuate.

“To call him Hitchcockian is a big statement, but then Hollywood isn’t known for being hesitant about hyperbole in any form,” observes Hayes Roth, vice president of global marketing for Landor Associates, the strategic-branding consultancy. But Shyamalan has “demonstrated a skill and a style and a signature approach, which is the beginning of a brand.”

When audiences see his name in the title and the marketing of the movie, it tells them “a little bit of what they can expect,” says Sam Mercer, who produced “The Village” and has worked with Shyamalan on each of his pictures since 1999’s out-of-nowhere smash “The Sixth Sense,” which remains the 21st-highest-grossing film of all time. They know “they’re going to be challenged, and have an experience together, and they’re going to be emotionally taken by what he has to say.”

More than likely, they’re also going to expect a twist ending. The denouement of “The Sixth Sense” spun people’s heads, and the resolutions of “Unbreakable” and, to a lesser extent, “Signs,” also threw audiences for a loop.

Whether or not “The Village” has a surprise ending – no comment from this quarter – audiences are anticipating one.

Which creates an odd challenge for Shyamalan: Has he boxed himself in after just a handful of titles? Does he feel burdened by the fans’ expectations? And by the expectations of the studio, eager for another huge payoff? (Touchstone, with whom Shyamalan has been aligned since “The Sixth Sense,” has a lot riding on “The Village”: The Disney film division has had a lackluster year.)

“‘Burdened’ in the sense that I don’t want (fans) to have less of an experience for having anticipated,” the filmmaker responds. But “I can’t not make movies the way I want to make movies. I don’t want to be in a world where I can’t make “The Sixth Sense’ anymore. If those ideas come to me, they should come to me.”

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Still, Shyamalan wrestles with the dilemma. Asked about his next project – it will be shot, as have the others, in the Philadelphia area – the writer-director says he has “a really cool idea,” then adds: “There’s a couple of caveats in there that I have to deal with, in regard to people’s expectations. I’m thinking about what to do about it, whether to ignore them and just do what I want to do, which is the strong way to do it, or to cave and … not do those particular aspects of it.

“Hopefully, I’ll be courageous.”

And what if he wants to try a comedy, or a literary adaptation? Last fall, Shyamalan signed a deal with 20th Century Fox to bring Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning novel “Life of Pi,” the fantastical tale of an Indian teenager adrift on the open sea with a Bengal tiger, to the screen.

“When Hitchcock tried to do a comedy, “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,’ it was totally unsuccessful,” notes producer Pollock. “He made a second comedy that was blacker, called “The Trouble With Harry,’ (and) it was still totally unsuccessful …

“That’s the downside of being a brand: that you have to be the brand. You’re stuck with being the brand all the time. You don’t get to grow, you don’t get to change. They pay you obscene amounts of money to be in your brand and they don’t want to pay you that money when you’re not.”

Roth, of Landor Associates, says that therein lies the danger of building a brand around a living person. Foul up – or simply do something unexpected – and they’ve jeopardized their base. “Just ask Martha,” he says, referring to the convicted homemaking mogul Martha Stewart.

Unlike Stewart, however, who was tangling with federal statutes, Shyamalan has only the laws of Hollywood to contend with. And they’re all about the bottom line.

“Unlike a real brand,” says Roth, “where you have to build factories and create an image and sustain it with ongoing marketing, in the fleeting world of the movies you’re only as good as your last flick. So I think the risk” of going against the grain “is less fatal …

“And if they can build an aura about him, the upside is terrific.”

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(c) 2004, The Philadelphia Inquirer.

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M. Night Shyamalan

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