With the breakthrough The Sixth Sense and culminating with The Village, Shyamalan has created a very obvious directorial niche: mystery based on the interface of the otherworldly with this world. Through the exploitation of unexplained phenomena, Shyamalan’s filmic territory is primarily concerned with the curious alchemy of the seen and tangible with the ghostly, ethereal, and strange. Shyamalan relies upon the timeless and universal belief that something intangible and ultimately ineffable—a presence, a vague “other”—is always with us. We are haunted. But it is the individual born under a Saturn-Neptune configuration that must contend with this mysterious sense of “otherness” in ways that other individuals can more easily ignore.

Beyond simply dealing with the vague sense of otherness, this strange quality of the otherworldly and unexplained has a particular vector for those born under Saturn-Neptune alignments. Saturn invariably has its problematic effects and injects other planetary symbolism with difficult, dark, and challenging phenomena. Thus, the subjective, fantastical, and undefined quality of Neptune is rendered shadowy, sinister, and negative by Saturn. With Saturn inflecting Neptune, dreams and fantasies become nightmares and haunting visions. With Saturn permeating Neptune, the unknown is that to be feared and that which invokes fright. With Saturn’s darkness working on Neptune, the backlands of one’s psyche, or soul, become a disturbed, neurotic playground where the demons of anguish, torment, and anxiety have full reign. This is Shyamalan’s eternal mis en scene, his archetypal palette that he has utilized to often great effect and achievement.

However, in a less obvious fashion, Shyamalan’s Saturn-Neptune expressions are witnessed beyond just ghosts, ghouls, and paranormal ability. If one views Shyamalan’s tetrology, from The Sixth Sense to The Village, as simply one continuous meditation on the unseen darkness that affects our lives, then the protagonist in this rumination, although played by different actors and given different names, is always the same. The hero of Shyamalan’s work is the man that must overcome that which haunts to arrive in daylight. Shyamalan’s more covert yet more mature thematic concentration presents the man that must develop faith in darkness, the individual that must face the nightmare of the unknown. This spiritual forging, this test of vision, is the potential magnum opus for those born under Saturn-Neptune alignments; they must endure and ultimately see through the illusions of the darkness of their experience in order to become more full and capable human beings. Thus, the Saturn-Neptune hero, if there is such a one, does a different sort of battle than most heroes. Unlike a mighty conqueror of an easily seen dragon, the Saturn-Neptune protagonist does battle with the subjective and interior demons of his experience: fear, doubt, hesitancy, insecurity. These inner devils can be infinitely more crippling to the Saturn-Neptune individual than any overt and concrete enemy in the “real world.”