Signs

Shyamalan wrote, directed and produced Signs for Touchstone, describing its concept as two ideas combined: a family finding a crop circle on their property, and an end-of-the-world story. The farmer, Graham Hess, was originally written as an older man; Paul Newman and Clint Eastwood were approached and declined before Mel Gibson took it. Shyamalan cast Rory Culkin and Mark Ruffalo after admiring them in You Can Count on Me, but Ruffalo needed surgery for a tumor behind his ear, and a week before filming the role of Graham's brother Merrill went to Joaquin Phoenix. The film was shot in 2001 entirely on location in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, with the house and cornfield built on the campus of an agricultural college that lent the production 40 acres.

The story stays on the Hess farm outside Doylestown. Graham, a former Episcopal priest, has quit the church since his wife Colleen died in a traffic collision six months earlier; his son Morgan has asthma, his daughter Bo leaves half-finished glasses of water all over the house, and his younger brother Merrill, a failed minor-league ballplayer, has moved in to help. A crop circle appears in the corn, then more appear worldwide, then lights hang over the cities. Morgan hears something on the old baby monitor, Merrill sees the Brazilian footage of a creature walking past a children's party, and Shyamalan himself appears as Ray Reddy, the veterinarian responsible for Colleen's death, who has one of the things locked in his pantry. The family boards up the windows and rides out the night in the basement, and in the morning Colleen's dying words, "swing away," send Merrill's bat into a creature that Bo's water glasses turn out to weaken. James Newton Howard's score, his third for Shyamalan after The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, does the rest.

Signs opened on August 2, 2002 to $60.1 million from 3,264 theaters, at the time the second-biggest August opening ever behind Rush Hour 2 and the biggest opening weekend of Gibson's career. It finished with $408 million worldwide on a $72 million budget, the seventh-highest-grossing film of 2002 and, among Shyamalan's films, second only to The Sixth Sense. Critics split: Roger Ebert gave it four stars and called Shyamalan "a born filmmaker, able to summon apprehension out of thin air," while A. O. Scott in The New York Times found its handling of grief "heavy-handed." In 2004 Bravo ranked the birthday-party scene number 77 on its 100 Scariest Movie Moments.

It was Abigail Breslin's first acting role, and Bong Joon-ho later cited the film's focus on one family rather than the aliens as an inspiration for his 2006 monster movie The Host. The VHS and DVD arrived on January 7, 2003, in time for a generation of sleepovers to rediscover the baby monitor scene.