M. Night Shyamalan on the secret and not-so-secret Philly connections of ‘Knock at the Cabin’

M. Night Shyamalan’s latest thriller, Knock at the Cabin, examines a terrifyingly high-stakes dilemma. Four armed messengers of the apocalypse invade a cabin rental and tell the family vacationing there that the end of the world is imminent. The family can stop it by making an unimaginable choice: Save their family or save humanity.

Out in theaters Feb. 3, the movie builds suspense as the characters and the audience try to parse what’s real from what’s fake. Without access to anyone beyond the cabin, two dads Eric (Lancaster native Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge) and their daughter Wen (Kristen Cui) have no idea what to believe.

Shyamalan, who grew up in Wynnewood and now lives in Willistown Township, directed and cowrote the film, which is adapted from Paul Tremblay’s 2018 novel The Cabin at the End of the World (with some major plot changes).

“There’s a really good chance that these four that are coming in here are crazy, or that they believe something that isn’t true,” said Shyamalan. “That’s really terrifying — that somebody breaks into your house and they’ve come to believe something they’ve read on the internet; [it’s] absolutely frightening because it could easily happen.”

Tremblay’s novel is set in a New England forest, but Shyamalan rewrote the story to be set in a wooded area in Pennsylvania. He filmed Knock at the Cabin in and around Philadelphia and South Jersey.

The majority of the movie is spent at the titular cabin rental. If those woods look familiar to South Jersey locals, it’s because Shyamalan filmed in the Pine Barrens.

“I was looking for a particular kind of graphic forest, something that kind of felt from a fairy tale,” he said. “The growth has to be old enough and the light has to be flat in a certain way. And the undergrowth has to be something that kind of evokes a kind of mystery.”

The Pine Barrens occupy 1.1 million acres, boasting thousands of pine trees as well as a vast network of marshes and bogs. The tall, thin pines create a pristine setting that can feel magical. “What you’re looking for is the kind of endless feeling of the forest for the shots,” said Shyamalan. “By itself, you’re conveying a certain sense of utopia, because it’s quite beautiful, but a sense of isolation as well, that becomes very precarious because the characters are in trouble.”

Beyond the landscape’s fantastical look, the Pine Barrens have a storied reputation. Tony Soprano famously considered the forest to be a great place to hide a body. But the Pine Barrens’ resident celebrity dates back to the 1700s: the Jersey Devil, the winged dragon-like demon with a goat’s head that terrorized the woods and the small towns nearby.

Shyamalan is aware of the legend, “but it didn’t inform this particular movie.” Still, he loves “that there’s kind of a mystery around that area. I can understand why, having spent some time there, it’s a very mysterious place.”

In the span of three weeks, the production team built an entire full-size cabin in Tabernacle, in a section of the Pine Barrens near Moore’s Meadow Blueberry & Cranberry Farm.

One scene shows Eric and Andrew meeting and adopting baby Wen at a hospital in China.

“You’re looking for an unusual geography … and finding the right hallways, like the ceilings aren’t done, or that have patterns on the walls that evoke a certain time period in the world when those designs were prevalent,” said Shyamalan. “Then how can we — all of us in the art department, the production designer, myself — imagine it transformed into another country?”

The set is actually an abandoned hospital in Chester, close to the Pennsylvania-Delaware border.

Over in Southampton Township on Route 70, the small ice cream shop Evergreen Dairy Bar also makes an appearance in Knock at the Cabin. The Pine Barrens Tribune reported in June on the film crew’s arrival in the area and the shop’s new sign that read “Angie’s Roadside Diner.” Shyamalan fondly remembers the shop.

“First of all, the people that own that are the loveliest human beings on the planet, and the people that work there are the sweetest … they’re just so loving, everyone should go there, they’re the best,” said Shyamalan.

He adds that the Evergreen Dairy Bar was a stunning find: “I was just so struck by the way they preserved this kind of 1950s, 1960s diner feeling. I love being in there, and [it] has a jukebox. It really blew us away.”

In planning and selecting the locations, Shyamalan said he and his team aimed for “a very kind of timeless feeling, almost like you don’t know what era you’re in.”

For most of the movie, Andrew wears a blue T-shirt from the Philadelphia International Cycling Classic 2016. The cycling competition is a real race that ran for decades in Manayunk. “I wanted him to feel like a Philly guy … I used an example of the [Tough] Mudder run or something, you know, where you go through the mud and the marathon and all that stuff,” said Shyamalan. “That was an attempt to show that, you know, he’s a drives-himself kind of guy in Philly, and he keeps pushing himself.”

The messengers each bring makeshift weapons. Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird) carries what looks like a duct-taped pick ax, while Leonard (Dave Bautista) wields a massive pitchfork with an ax taped onto its points. Knock at the Cabin’s props manager Robbie Duncan and his team scoured antique stores throughout Pennsylvania to find farm tools to create the uniquely creepy DIY weapons.

Without giving too much away, “there’s a horrific scene where they see footage of a disaster involving some planes and people on a balcony watching,” said Shyamalan. For Philly viewers, the terror will feel scarily close to home; the view overlooks the city.

M. Night Shyamalan’s “Knock at the Cabin” is in theaters Feb. 3. It stars Dave Bautista, Jonathan Groff, Ben Aldridge, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Rupert Grint, and others.