(WARNING: There are spoilers)

Beginning with its simplistic but ominous opening credits, coupled with James Newton Howard's spooky score, The Sixth Sense immediately draws you into its ghostly atmosphere. The first scene is one that anyone can relate to: a woman, Anna Crowe (Olivia Williams), is getting wine from her basement. After she gets the bottle she wants, she suddenly gets a chill and looks around, all by herself in the dusty old basement. Although there is no obvious danger, she immediately runs upstairs. Like all great thrillers and horror movies, The Sixth Sense uses fears that we all experience to extract its suspense. It consistently evokes that cold and unexplainable dread we feel when we're alone, like there's some strange, unforeseeable force lurking around in the shadows somewhere. Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan also evokes the old, historic quality of his hometown of Philadelphia, where every building holds dark secrets from the past that are still unsettled.

The concept of the dead still lingering in the world of the living because they still have things to do here is pretty common in ghost stories. Also common in these kinds of films is the child who is able to see the ghosts, in this case Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment). What makes Shyamalan's movie so fresh is the way he handles these conventions. The ghosts are (literally) lost souls who need people like Cole to hear them out and do tasks for them so that they can completely depart into the spiritual world. Some are angry and frightening, for sure, but they should still be heard and understood.

One of the most critical scenes of the film occurs when Cole encounters the ghost of the young girl Kyra (Mischa Barton). When Cole runs away from her, she becomes covered over by Cole's hiding tent. After he gets over his initial fear, Cole comes over to her and takes the tent off her. Basically, he is uncovering the typical image of the ghost in bed sheets to see the real person within. After Kyra speaks, Cole asks her, "Do you want to tell me something?" At that moment, the screen goes black. A new phase of Cole's life has just begun. In this way, Cole is very much like his psychologist Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis): they both listen and talk to people (dead or young, respectively) and try to work out their problems. Kyra is the first ghost that Cole helps. The second one is Malcolm (when Cole suggests to him how to talk to his wife Anna) and the third is his grandmother (when he gives her answer to his mother's question).

CONTINUED IN PART 2...