The Summer of Shyamalan is happening this year, with M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap headed to theaters in August and Ishana Night Shyamalan’s The Watchers in June. Today, Warner Bros. has released the trailer for The Watchers, the upcoming horror film starring Dakota Fanning.

The Watchers is Ishana’s feature film debut, which she adapts from the novel by A.M. Shine. Fanning leads the horror film as Mina, who gets stranded in a forest where she is being watched by mysterious creatures at night.

“It’s such a wonderful novel that A.M. Shine wrote,” Shyamalan said during the special Summer of Shyamalan presentation in Los Angeles last week. “I think the main thing – you got a little taste of that in the clip that you watched – that I was drawn to was the sort of classical structure of it. It’s like a character who kind of gets taken into this very mysterious world that then just keeps expanding and expanding. So you have this fusion of very classical structural beats in a very modern world. So there was that. When I read the book, it was such a visually rich book, and your imagination just runs wild when you read it. And I was so excited by the opportunity of imagining those different spaces you created and playing with that.”

The director talks about how her experiences in Apple TV+’s Servant helped her with The Watchers.

“I worked on Servant for three years, and it was great,” Shyamalan said. “I think that particular TV format is so wonderful because you get to just play with the form in a really safe space. There’s already a look created and a vibe created. And it’s sort of getting to practice different skill sets within that framework that’s already been built for you. So it was really, really wonderful just trying to see how within a 30-minute episode format you could make structure better and make character work better. And yeah, I felt like I really got an opportunity to kind of train in that way.”

The Watchers follows four different characters and how they have to work together to survive the horrors that await them in the forest. Joining Fanning (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Ocean’s Eight) are Georgina Campbell (Barbarian), Oliver Finnegan (Creeped Out, Outlander) and Olwen Fouere (The Northman, The Tourist).

“Well, it was very much me imagining what the four vibes of these people were like and what they would be like together,” she explained. “The continual lesson that I learned during the filmmaking process is that there’s just a certain alchemy that happens. And if you’re lucky enough to catch it, you do. And I felt that way with this cast that it was sort of like all of the movements and stuff just led to this group being together. And they have such an electric energy when they’re all together. It’s really, really cool. It was so wonderful.”

About The Watchers

From producer M. Night Shyamalan comes “The Watchers,” written for the screen and directed by Ishana Night Shyamalan and based on the novel by A.M. Shine. The film follows Mina, a 28-year-old artist, who gets stranded in an expansive, untouched forest in western Ireland. When Mina finds shelter, she unknowingly becomes trapped alongside three strangers who are watched and stalked by mysterious creatures each night.

You can’t see them, but they see everything.

The film is produced by M. Night Shyamalan, Ashwin Rajan and Nimitt Mankad. The executive producers are Jo Homewood and Stephen Dembitzer.

The Watchers will be released in North American theaters on June 14, 2024, and internationally on 12 June 2024.