Movies - TV
How M. Night Shyamalan's Servant Helped Lay The Groundwork For Knock At The Cabin
By TYLER LLEWYN TAING
M. Night Shyamalan’s “Knock at the Cabin” is based on Paul G. Tremblay’s novel “The Cabin at the End of the World,” and the initial screenplay adaptation was written by Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman. Historically, Shyamalan has directed his own original screenplays, but he explained that developing “Servant” for Apple TV+ prepared him for collaboration.
Working with another writer on “Servant” led Shyamalan to create from source material that wasn’t his own. He told Looper, “[Servant] was a set of characters and a premise that was brought to me by Tony Basgallop, who wrote the original pilot for the show. For years and years, I had been coming up with ideas based on that premise and based on those characters.”
Given his experience collaborating on “Servant,” Shyamalan was ready to do the same on “Knock at the Cabin,” as he said of the film, “It was an interesting mix of taking an author's characters and then going into a new direction with it in this movie. So, it felt like those muscles I've been doing on 'Servant.'” Kudos to the auteur director for embracing this way of working.