September 01, 2026
Kris Craig/USA Today Network via Reuters Connect
M. Night Shyamalan's new YouTube channel will examine significant moments and memories during his decadeslong career as a filmmaker. Above, Shyamalan is shown in August on the set of 'Remain,' his upcoming thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal.
Filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan has a new YouTube channel where he plans to pull back the curtain on his life as a director and revisit memories tied to some of his career milestones. One of the channel's first videos digs up an old diary Shyamalan kept during the making of his 2002 sci-fi thriller "Signs," one his most widely praised projects.
Shyamalan, 56, introduced the YouTube channel last week from a bench outside his Blinding Edge Pictures production office in Berwyn, Chester County. He said embracing a new medium feels daunting and unstructured, but he hopes the channel will help him build a deeper relationship with fans.
"When I'm scared, that usually feels like I'm doing something right — growing," Shyamalan said. "The messiness of it all and permission to be not great, both for you guys and for me. It's like 30 years making movies and I want to undo it a little bit — undo whatever stigmas are in my head or in anybody's head."
Shyamalan, who grew up in Penn Valley, said he's been in a reflective period of life and recently planted a tree at the Berwyn property to honor his late father, who died last year. Shyamalan got his start making films with a Super 8 camera he received as a kid. Two of his biggest influences, Alfred Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg, are evident in Shyamalan's blend of suspense, dread and themes of universality that made movies like "The Sixth Sense" such huge hits with audiences.
The production of Spielberg's 1975 classic "Jaws" was chronicled in a log book that the film's co-writer, Carl Gottlieb, kept to document the making of the movie. Shyamalan read "The Jaws Log" during his formative years as a filmmaker, and he said he decided to start tracking his production experiences in journals starting with "Signs."
In a video published Monday, Shyamalan reads from the pages of the diary he kept in 2001 while making his mysterious alien invasion tale starring Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix. Much of "Signs" was shot in Bucks County on property owned by Delaware Valley University. Filming started two days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and in the video Shyamalan pulls up an entry from two days before they occurred. He was 31.
"Sunday. Tough weekend. I had to fire a 13-year-old today. It was very hard," Shyamalan wrote. "My heart was going a million times a minute. He cried. I felt awful. Still do."
Shyamalan didn't say who was let go from "Signs", but the casting shakeup opened the role for Rory Culkin to play Morgan Hess, the son of Mel Gibson's character, Graham.
"It's so weird to think the world's about to change in two days," Shyamalan reflects in the video. "And as you're writing it, that hadn't happened yet."
On the day of the attacks, Shyamalan could barely express his grief.
"I can't stop crying," he wrote.
Shyamalan's journal includes a number of entries in which he vented about challenges during production. He realized that some of his most frustrating days involved filming action scenes. To this day, he said he struggles with the impulse to control action instead of letting it unfold on set.
"It's tough for me," Shyamalan said. "I'm uncomfortable with action, so you're probably hearing somebody who's not very versed at it or not very naturally good at it."
"Signs," a summer blockbuster in 2002, remains Shyamalan's second-highest grossing film behind "The Sixth Sense." The movie brought in $408.2 million worldwide and became an exemplar of Shyamalan's skill weaving spirituality and folksy humor into supernatural thrillers.
Monday's YouTube video appears to have been filmed in a stable at Shyamalan's 125-acre Ravenwood Estate in Williston, Chester County. He purchased another 218 acres at the nearby Kirkwood Farm for $24 million in 2023, donating about 90 acres to the Willistown Conservation Trust for public preservation of the land. In his YouTube video, Shyamalan talks about his fondness for rural Chester County.
"I just love it," he says. "The peace and the windows and this kind of Andrew Wyeth light."
Shyamalan's next project will be the supernatural romantic thriller "Remain," a Warner Bros. Pictures film developed alongside a companion novel written by Nicholas Sparks. The movie stars Jake Gyllenhaal as a New York architect visiting Cape Cod after a bout of depression to plan a summer home for a friend. The architect meets a young woman there with a haunting connection to a local mystery, throwing the architect's plans off course. The film is slated to be released in February.
Shyamalan hasn't said how frequently he plans to post updates on YouTube, but the video on "Signs" alludes to the channel examining other film diaries in future episodes.
"I don't how this is going to be. I don't know what I'm going to show you and what you're going to show me, but the joy of it is stepping into the unknown," Shyamalan said.
