M. Night Shyamalan Knew This Iconic ‘Signs’ Scare Was Terrifying Before It Ever Hit the Screen

More than 20 years later, M. Night Shyamalan is going back through his personal journals from the making of Signs, and he’s unearthed a pretty great little piece of horror history.

Shyamalan recently shared the second video in a series on YouTube in which he’s reading through the journal he kept while filming the 2002 alien invasion classic.

“I hope you like it,” Shyamalan wrote while sharing a clip from the video on X. “It was great for me to go back and read and remember what I was going through back in 2001.”

One entry comes from Day 38 of production, with only eight days of filming remaining. And buried inside Shyamalan’s exhausted production notes is his immediate reaction to what would become one of the movie’s most memorable scares.

“The shots were fine today,” Shyamalan reads from the journal. “We fell behind a couple shots, but not fatal. The creature’s hand under the pantry is actually quite real and scary.”

You know exactly the scene he’s talking about.

It’s the moment when Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) visits Ray Reddy’s (M. Night Shyamalan) house and discovers that Ray has trapped one of the creatures inside his pantry. Graham attempts to get a look at the alien underneath the door, only for its hand to suddenly reach out at him.

Apparently it was just as creepy on set.

Shyamalan’s reaction is particularly interesting because Signs relies so heavily on withholding its aliens from the audience. If that hand looked “real and scary” while Shyamalan was standing there watching the effect being filmed, he had to know how well it was going to play once the shot was actually cut into the movie.

His enthusiasm about the rest of the footage?

Not quite as strong.

“Dailies were fine,” Shyamalan reads before stopping and laughing at his younger self.

“So I’m even commenting on seeing the dailies from the previous day,” he explains. “Dailies are the footage from, in theory, the previous day’s work, but sometimes because you’re developing film, it’s more than a day, like a day and a half.”