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1. Who wrote and directed The Sixth Sense?
M. Night Shyamalan
It was Shyamalan's third feature, after Praying with Anger and Wide Awake, neither of which many people saw. Disney bought the script on condition that he direct it, and the result was the second biggest film of 1999 behind The Phantom Menace.
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2. Who plays psychologist Malcolm Crowe?
Bruce Willis
Willis plays almost the whole film in a murmur, with no gun and no quips, and it ended up outgrossing every Die Hard film. He and Shyamalan reunited the next year for Unbreakable, also shot in Philadelphia.
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3. Who plays Cole Sear?
Haley Joel Osment
Osment was ten when he shot it and had already played young Forrest in Forrest Gump. The role earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, which went instead to Michael Caine for The Cider House Rules.
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4. Who plays Cole's mother Lynn?
Toni Collette
Collette, an Australian known then mainly for Muriel's Wedding, has said she did not realize the script was a horror film when she first read it. The part earned her an Oscar nomination, one of six the film picked up without a single win.
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5. Which city is the film set in?
Philadelphia
Shyamalan grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs and has set most of his films in and around the city. The award Malcolm and Anna are toasting in the opening scene is a citation from the city for his work with children.
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6. What is Cole's famous secret?
He sees dead people
Cole says it from a hospital bed, after his classmates lock him in a cupboard at a birthday party and something in there leaves him bruised. Malcolm's first reaction is to diagnose hallucinations and privately conclude that he is not helping the boy.
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7. What happens to the temperature when spirits are near?
It drops
The cold shows up as visible breath inside Cole's bedroom tent, the sheet fort he fills with religious figurines. It is the film's main way of announcing a ghost before anyone on screen sees one, and it gives the sharpest scares their timing.
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8. What color repeatedly marks objects connected to the supernatural?
Red
Shyamalan kept the color out of the film except where the dead have touched the living world: the balloon drifting up the stairs at the party, the doorknob on Malcolm's basement door, the tent Cole hides in. Everything else in the frame is deliberately muted.
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9. What role does Cole take in the school play?
King Arthur
He pulls the sword from the stone to applause, while Tommy Tammisimo, the classmate who torments him, is stuck playing the village idiot. The play comes near the end, once Cole has started helping the dead instead of hiding from them.
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10. What does Malcolm suggest Cole do about the spirits?
Listen to what they need
The advice comes once Malcolm believes him, after an old session tape of Vincent convinces him that Cole is not imagining things. Cole returns the favor with advice of his own: talk to Anna while she sleeps, when she will listen without knowing it.
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11. What is the name of the dead girl who leads Cole to a videotape?
Kyra
Kyra Collins turns up in Cole's tent, sick and shaking, then at her own wake hands him a box from under her bed with something for her father inside. Mischa Barton, who plays her, went on to star in The O.C.
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12. Cole gives Kyra's father the videotape at her wake. What does it show?
Her mother poisoning her soup
The tape starts as Kyra's puppet show and ends with her mother bringing in a lunch tray and pouring something from a bottle of cleaner into the bowl. Her father watches it in the middle of the wake, and the whole room turns to look at the mother.
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13. What is Malcolm's wife's name?
Anna
Anna runs an antiques shop where a younger colleague has started paying her attention, which Malcolm watches from across the room. Olivia Williams, who plays her, was fresh from Rushmore, where she was the teacher Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman fought over.
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14. Malcolm turns up the volume on an old session tape of Vincent, the patient who shot him. What does he hear underneath?
A voice pleading in Spanish
Vincent had been left alone in the office for a moment, and under the hiss a man's voice begs in Spanish not to die. It convinces Malcolm that Vincent heard the dead too and that Cole is telling the truth. Latin is what Cole mutters in the church.
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15. The director gives himself a cameo. As which character?
A doctor who examines Cole at the hospital
Shyamalan is Dr. Hill, the doctor who looks over Cole's bruises after the birthday party and quietly asks Lynn whether anyone at home has been hurting him. The cameos became a habit, and he gives himself larger parts in Signs and Lady in the Water.
