When I was a kid, I had two great guilty pleasures. One was horror movies and the other was martial arts movies.

Shyamalan frames his early tastes as “guilty pleasures,” suggesting they were thrilling, perhaps slightly disreputable entertainments rather than culturally sanctioned art. The pairing is revealing: horror movies emphasize suspense, dread, and the management of audience fear—hallmarks of his filmmaking—while martial-arts films foreground choreography, physical stakes, and mythic clarity. Read together, the quote points to a formative blend of psychological tension and kinetic spectacle that can underlie his later work: carefully engineered set-ups and payoffs, heightened emotion, and a fascination with genre conventions. It also humanizes the director by rooting his style in ordinary childhood viewing habits rather than lofty influences.