What has happened to the career of M Night Shyamalan?Less than a decade ago, after the shock success of The Sixth Sense, the Indian-born, Philadelphia-raised director was being spoken of in the same breath as Spielberg and Hitchcock as a budding master of suspense. Now the appearance of a Shyamalan film is more likely to provoke derision than praise.Things were very different back in 1999 when The Sixth Sense took everyone by surprise. Who then would have thought that a supernatural thriller from an almost unknown 28-year-old director would win staggering box-office success, let alone one starring Bruce Willis, the wisecracking, singlet-wearing star of the Die Hard films, as a caring, compassionate child psychologist?Well, as we now know, The Sixth Sense took the world by storm, becoming the second most successful film of 1999 after that year’s unstoppable Star Wars prequel, The Phantom Menace, and grossing almost $300million in the US alone. Who could have imagined that? Perhaps Willlis knew something the rest of us didn’t. Before shooting, he agreed to accept a cut in his usual fee in return for a percentage of the profits.Of course, a sizeable percentage of The Sixth Sense’s box-office take probably came from viewers paying again to spot how they’d been tricked by the film’s now notorious twist.With the benefit of hindsight, however, it’s clear that it wasn’t the twist that made The Sixth Sense special. What was truly impressive was that at a time when the Scream movies and their imitators were peddling over-the-top gore and knowing irony, Shyamalan had crafted a movie that didn’t rely on sudden shocks to produce its scares.Instead, the film’s menace came from a pervasive atmosphere of unease and dread that pricked the hairs on the back of your neck as the realisation dawned that Haley Joel Osment’s deeply disturbed eight-year-old boy can see ghosts.Yet the late-breaking plot twist became Shyamalan’s gimmick – with steadily diminishing returns in his subsequent films. He was sti