Not scary once you have seen the twist

I tried to re-watch The Sixth Sense and couldn't believe I ever liked it. The kid's whispering was repugnant, and Bruce Willis was also repugnant. There was no depth to any of the characters. It was a barebones "He was dead all along" story that aged really poorly.

Example: The only thing you know about Bruce Willis is he's a shrink. That's it. There's nothing else to know. The only thing you know about the kid is that he sees dead things and whispers a lot. It also has horrible acting. I tried to re-watch it because I actually loved it when it came out, and I couldn't get anything more out of the story other than "gory death effects" and "kid whispers and blows snot all the time."

There's a lot of depth to all the characters in The Others. And additional clues to pick up along the way (The introduction explains that "this story happened in 7 days"). You'll see that the children when upset start to breathe heavily (Stop breathing!). The use of light in the film is a metaphor for her trying to repress the truth.

And even when you know the twist, it becomes a tragedy of a woman who snapped after her husband died. You can view it all kinds of ways, including just a story about a woman who killed her children. And now they're trapped together in that house together. It's creepy. And it has all kinds of religious undertones and other themes they deal with. Both of the families in the house are afraid of "The Others"- that can be applied to any number of things, including the concept that we're all afraid of one another and view each other as unknown and scary. The servants in the house add the master/servant angle of life. There's just a lot to it, and it's a much more visually timeless movie because it's a period piece. Just the cinematography is beautiful. The ending scene is also powerful, because you can clearly get a sense of the dead being trapped in a single location, unable to move out into the world and experience it anymore. When the living drive away, you still have them there trapped in time. It's almost as creepy to think about what that might be like as it is to just know they're dead.

The Sixth Sense was a great movie, I won't deny that, I see why people love it, but there's very little else to it but jump scares from dead people and empty characters. The Others unfortunately got lumped in with the Sixth Sense twist ending because it came out just two years after The Sixth Sense, but they're two completely different movies. And I think people later on watched The Others thinking it was about the twist, and it's not. It's just a really beautiful story, and if you pay close attention to it, it's a really scary one. Because its concepts are a part of your life... and one day, maybe your own end. What's after isn't really covered in The Sixth Sense. Even when he "gets it" he never "gets it." The afterlife isn't really covered. In The Others, you see it.