Shyamalan and his co-writers talk about why they changed Knock At The Cabin's ending

Shyamalan’s co-writers, Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman, don’t mince words about why the ending had to go, either: It was just too damn dark. Both stories center on a family (with the fathers played by Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge in the film, with Kristen Cui as their young daughter, Wen) who are accosted by strangers who claim that, unless one member of the family willingly sacrifices themselves to die, the world will end. In the novel, the inevitable confrontations that follow have a horrifying outcome: Wen is accidentally shot and killed (failing to fulfil the “willing sacrifice” bit in the process), leaving all involved horrified with grief. Her two fathers kill or drive off the remaining attackers and refuse to sacrifice themselves; Tremblay leaves it unclear if the world will end.

Here’s Desmond and Sherman, talking about why they and Shyamalan ditched Tremblay’s ending in favor of one where Wen survives, with one of her fathers eventually giving his life to apparently save the world (and with the apocalypse itself much less ambiguously rendered):

[Shyamalan] had a whole new vision for what the ending could be. The book is the book, and the movie is the movie, and we think they both were exceptional mediums. This is a big, wide release movie that is meant for a very large audience. There are some decisions that the book made that were pretty dark and may have been a little too much for a broader audience. That was a decision that [Shyamalan] immediately recognized. It’s a great ending now.

(Interestingly, Tremblay suggests that his own ending is the less depressing one, since it leaves the situation ambiguous, rather than positing a universe where God or whoever absolutely pulls this kind of manipulative shit on his creations: “I find it horrific there’s this higher power that is just going to willy-nilly sacrifice humans for everybody else.”)

As for Shyamalan himself, he argues that his film walks the line between optimistic and nihilistic: “The most important thing at the end is that everybody puts themselves in the characters’ shoes. What would they have done? I feel that genre helps me tell emotional stories. I’m generally an optimistic guy, so I get to do really dark things, and the audience feels held by somebody that isn’t nihilistic. I can push pretty hard because you can feel the vocabulary is not from someone who’s trying to hurt you.”

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