The recent premiere of ‘Knock at the door’ in theaters has been successful at the box office -it was the film that snatched number 1 in the United States from ‘Avatar: The Sense of Water’-, but the public has not been completely convinced with the result. One of the topics that has generated the most debate is its ending, also agreeing that it is totally different from that of the ‘The cabin at the end of the world’the novel of Paul Trembley that adapts
Steve Desmond and Michael Shermanthe film’s scriptwriters, were clear from the outset that the ending of the novel had to be changed, but it was Shyamalan’s arrival on the project that made everything change: “There are some decisions that were made in the book that were quite dark and perhaps too much for a wider audience. It was a decision Shyamalan recognized immediately. Now it’s a grand finale“.
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And it is that Tremblay’s novel made a decision mediated the story that changed everything: when Andrew agrees to the gun, a struggle with Leonard leads to it accidentally shooting and killing little Wen. Not being a meditated death, that doesn’t count to avoid the apocalypse and finally Andrew and Eric They decide not to sacrifice either of them and face this possible apocalypse, leaving the doubt as to whether or not it really happens. Obviously, there are more changes -for example, Leonard is not the last of the kidnappers to die, and also he does not take his own life-, but the heart of the matter is that.
Shyamalan’s explanation and Tremblay’s opinion
That ending didn’t work for what Shyamalan wanted to do in ‘There’s a Knock on the Door’, since he considers himself a more optimistic person. That shift in focus led to what we can see on film and the filmmaker explains how it ended there:
The most important thing in the end is that everyone puts themselves in the shoes of the characters. What would they have done? I feel that the genre helps me tell emotional stories. I’m generally an optimistic guy, so I can do some really dark stuff, and the audience feels supported by someone who’s not a nihilist. I can push a lot because you can feel that the vocabulary is not coming from someone trying to hurt you.
Curiously, Tremblay believes that the ending of his novel is more hopeful than that of the film. According to him, the confirmation of the existence of a higher power complicates things much more:
I find it horrible that there is a higher power that is going to sacrifice human beings at will for everyone else. It doesn’t seem like a very moral thing to do, so it doesn’t seem hopeful to me. It seems to me that the idea of what happened in my book is that the two characters reject it, as if to say: ‘No, we are not going to sacrifice anyone. That is wrong. Let’s move on’. That’s a little more hopeful.
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