After establishing himself with freak-out movies like The Sixth Sense, Signs and The Village, M. Night Shyamalan veered into blockbuster fantasy/sci-fi with the poorly received The Last Airbender and After Earth. So now he has taken a step back toward horror with the micro-budget The Visit.

The VisitThe Visit marks another suspenseful thriller for horror legend Shyamalan

"I love scary movies," Shayamalan says. "I never really considered my previous films as scary, but The Visit? Yeah, this is the one. The weirdness of The Visit is actually my favourite part. It's mischievous. Pulling the rug out from the viewer and making them laugh and scream is what it's all about for me. I do think that if you don't like horror movies this is the one movie to try. There are plenty of scares and all that stuff, but there is a wonderful fun factor to it."

Watch the trailer for 'The Visit' here:



Shifting away from big Hollywood money to a bare-bones style of filmmaking may seem a bit counter-intuitive. "It seemed kind of crazy," Shyamalan says, "to make a small little movie about kids and old people. It's like against every commercial instinct that you could possibly have. Why is it I can put an old lady in a doorway and do nothing else and it's scary to you? Why do we have that in our psyche? Then I started to go, well, it's our fear of getting old, which is very much related to our fear of dying and the deterioration of our minds. We almost find it funny and it's frightening at the same time."

More: Watch the trailer for Shyamalan's last movie 'After Earth'

With The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan established himself as a filmmaker who loves to play tricks on the audience. "In order to do that, you as a filmmaker have to be okay with the audience not knowing where they are for a while," he says. "The more an audience commits to their assumptions, the more that you have them. The Visit has that kind of structure. It's meant to build slowly at like 10 miles per hour, then at 15 the audience goes, 'Ugh, I just want them to push it to the edge already.' Audiences today are used to action-porn or CGI-porn to the point in which they just shut down. With me, I'm trying to hook them. The speed keeps building and suddenly - wham! - we're at 60 miles per hour and it feels like 90."

More: Shyamalan is currently working on a revival of his unmade first film 'Labor of Love'