CES 2023: M. Night Shyamalan Treats Fans To Terrifying ‘Knock At The Cabin’ Immersive Experience

One of the biggest surprises at CES has been the appearance of legendary filmmaker, M. Night Shyamalan, who’s hotly-awaited apocalyptic thriller, Knock at the Cabin, premieres in theaters on February 3. The film is based on the best-selling novel by Paul Tremblay, and has been adapted by Shyamalan with his own special brand of shock horror.

Leveraging Canon technologies, Shyamalan has created a terrifying mixed-reality experience where attendees can explore scenes from the movie in the most visceral way.

Walking through a physical cabin that has been constructed on the show floor in the Las Vegas Convention Center Central Hall (Canon Booth 16359), attendees can converse with AI-versions of the intruders and then enter a gamified escape-room challenge where they must barricade the door with virtual furniture to make a run for it. Clues abound everywhere – and yes, there’s even a twist ending.

Canon Americas President and CEO Kevin Ogawa told me that he expects AI to play an increasing role in creating these type of immersive experiences and that the company plans to do more with its Kokomo, MREAL, Free Viewpoint and AMLOS technologies in activations for Hollywood.

I had a chance to talk with Night about what it was like to create this immersive trailer, a first-of-its-kind for him. The following is an edited and condensed transcript of our conversation.

You’re here at CES, one of the world’s largest technology shows, with an immersive experience for your upcoming apocalyptic thriller, Knock at the Cabin. What has this been like for you?

It’s been a surprisingly fun experience for me and I don’t mean that casually.

I feel like a 100 year old creator at this point – I’ve been doing this since I was 21. I’m a dinosaur, a minimalist guy who believes the humanity of the art form is the most important thing.

To be provoked in your mind working in a different way with new storytelling veins, it’s very exciting. You never want to keep doing things the same way. So to keep it fresh for the film, I tried new composers, new editors, new everything, and this experience with Canon has given me this weird injection of wow. The four different versions of the trailer with these technologies creates a far deeper experience of the creative.

What parts of the Shyamalan-brand of movie-making will the audience experience?

I’m hoping the audience will see dark humor when meeting and talking with the characters that are funny as well as odd and unsettling. You know, since I was a little kid, I’ve enjoyed making people feel uncomfortable, so we’re using technology to do just that in an eerie way that will stick with them.

All I really care about is the resonance of an experience – that they take it home with them and it becomes part of them.

I don’t want transactional experiences. I want it to be deeper.

Have you planted any Easter eggs in this experience?

Yes, there are little clues to be found everywhere that will help people who are walking through the experience build a picture in their mind of what’s happening. That’s what a trailer is supposed to do, set up the audience to get excited to see the movie. We planted information that will make them think about things – and then the mystery begins.

For me, marketing and trailers are the beginning of the storytelling. My marketing brothers and sisters start telling the story first and then I finish the story in the movie theater. And then in the best movies, the story continues in your head after you leave the theater. So this is one continuum, and this immersive trailer is meant to be a deeper version of the setup.

Are you taking this immersive experience elsewhere outside of CES, like to the Los Angeles premiere of the film?

That’s the first thing I thought was hey, we got to take this everywhere, take this on the road, man. Before Canon, there were a lot of in-person immersive experience companies that came to me and said let’s do something like an M. Night Shyamalan experience, but this is the first time that I’ve been able to do something like this.

I’d love to do more things with Canon and wish we could take this to every movie theater. However for this set up, it would take an enormous amount of equipment to ship. So this one is just meant to be a special experience for people at CES.

How did this collaboration come to you?

It was very organic — Canon came to me. I told them they have always been a part of my life. My first cameras were Canon. I use them in the office, at home, on the sets. There are very few companies you can say have been with you your whole life, both on your personal side and your professional side in equal measure. So it was an easy yes and then we went to Universal to see if they’d be open to this and they were like, this is fantastic.

You have said that Hitchcock, Kubrick, Kurosawa and Ray have influenced your work. Is this something people will see in this experience?

There is a connection, the frames are not casual. They’re carefully thought out. That’s a 40 millimeter lens at that distance from that person, when the camera moves it’s for an intention. We’re not just gathering things and putting them together in a distraction kind of way, it’s all very intended.

What was it like working with Dave Bautista?

He’s such an amazing person. It’s become important to me to work only with people that have a beautiful energy, and Dave’s like that – a beautiful human being who plays a very complicated character in the movie.

What are your aspirations for this experience? What are you hoping people will get out of it?

Not sure how many people will get to walk through it here at CES but I hope they have a titillating experience and become the framers for everyone.

What’s next for you?

I have to finish Knock at the Cabin – just have a couple more days left on it – and then I start writing the next one.

For more on CES, check out the CES Guide to the Hottest Parties, Panels and Robots.