By Dr. Joel Ramsey, The Paranormal Professor

My daughter used to wake me up by standing next to my bed and staring at me until I opened my eyes.

If you have seen Signs, you know exactly the image that brings to mind.

Signs is on my Halloween movie list because it belongs there. But I also have a personal connection to this film that goes deeper than the subject matter, and I think that connection is worth sharing before we get to the crop circles. Because Signs is not really about aliens. It is about an individual whose belief was tested. He lost his faith, and I cannot blame him, because his wife was taken from him in a freak accident. I understand the confusion that leaves a person with. I understand why he could not hold onto what he had believed before.

I have sat in that place.

But first, the film itself, because Shyamalan built something considerably more careful than it sometimes gets credit for.

What Shyamalan Actually Built

Signs came from two ideas that Shyamalan combined: a family discovering a crop circle on their property, and an end of the world premise told from the perspective of a single house, in the spirit of War of the Worlds and Night of the Living Dead (The Ringer, 2020). He began filming within days of September 11, 2001, in a world that had just learned what it felt like to watch an incomprehensible catastrophe unfold on television screens in real time. It is difficult to watch the film's mediated fear and uncertainty without noticing that historical context.

Shyamalan has described wanting to tell a story about a place that had been marked by something, where the central question is what that marking means. That framing is the thesis of the entire film. Graham Hess spends the movie trying to determine whether the events surrounding him are signs of something, evidence of intention and design in the universe, or whether they are simply things that happened. In the same 2020 interview, Shyamalan identified the late night sofa conversation between Graham and Merrill as essentially what the entire movie is about: the question of whether events have meaning or are simply chance, and the possibility of regaining faith in oneself and in the world (The Ringer, 2020). That is worth holding onto, because it becomes important later.

Crop Circles: What the Research Actually Shows

The crop circles at the center of Signs are not a Hollywood invention. Crop circles have been appearing in fields around the world since at least the late 1970s, with the earliest modern formations documented in Wiltshire, England, eventually spreading globally and accumulating thousands of reported cases (NPR, 2011).

They became so embedded in UFO culture that they entered the permanent vocabulary of alleged extraterrestrial contact, which is exactly why Shyamalan built his film around them.

Graham's first instinct when he finds the formation in his field is the right investigative posture: he assumes pranksters. He looks for the ordinary explanation before he considers anything extraordinary. In the case of real-world crop circles, human construction has been demonstrated repeatedly, including by people who publicly acknowledged creating them. Two British men named Doug Bower and Dave Chorley came forward in 1991 and demonstrated publicly that they had been creating crop circles since 1978 using wooden planks and a center pivot rope (NPR, 2011). Their confession did not close every question, but it changed the landscape of the debate considerably, and honest investigators had to account for it.

Graham standing in his field saying it cannot be by hand, it is too perfect, is a recognizable moment for anyone who has investigated claims of the unexplained. The experience of certainty that something defies ordinary explanation is not the same as that something actually defying ordinary explanation. The gap between those two things is where most of the work of investigation lives.

How the Hess Family Actually Learns What Is Happening

One of the most accurate things Signs does, and one that almost nobody discusses, is show how a family in a rural farmhouse actually constructs its understanding of a global event they cannot witness directly.

They watch it on television.

The film is shot through with the fear and uncertainty of mediated information (The Spool, 2002). News broadcasts provide fragmented, confused reports. Anchors sound uncertain. Reports arrive from India, from cities, from places the Hess family has never been, filtered through cameras and satellite signals and editorial decisions made by people nobody in that farmhouse knows. When Merrill watches the broadcasts and says it is like War of the Worlds, he can only comprehend what he is seeing by comparing it to a story he already knows. That is exactly what people do when confronted with events that exceed their existing categories of understanding.

Graham eventually decides they will stop watching. People get obsessed, he tells his children. He is trying to protect them from the mediated version of a catastrophe he cannot control. He fails, of course. Merrill moves the television into a closet and watches it continuously because the pull of the information is stronger than the instruction to avoid it. Young Morgan looks at the screen and says, the history of the world's future is on TV right now.

As a communication scholar, that dynamic is worth pausing on. The Hess family's understanding of the event around them is almost entirely constructed from secondhand sources, filtered through technology and editorial framing, interpreted through prior cultural frameworks. They are not experiencing an alien invasion. They are experiencing a mediated representation of one, and the distinction shapes every decision they make. That is not unique to fiction. It is how most people process most events that fall outside their direct experience, including experiences they would describe as paranormal.

The Birthday Party Footage

The most memorable single moment in Signs for many viewers is not a crop circle or an alien in the cornfield. It is a few seconds of shaky home video from a birthday party in Brazil, in which something walks across the frame for just long enough to register before the footage cuts.

Roger Ebert, in his original review, called it a glimpse of the most alarming thing (Ebert, 2002). What makes it work is not what it shows but what it establishes: somewhere, someone was filming something ordinary, and something extraordinary walked through the shot, and now everyone watching that clip on television is trying to decide what they saw.

As someone who writes regularly about paranormal photography and video evidence, I find this scene genuinely instructive. A piece of footage establishes that a camera was present and recording. It establishes that certain images appear in the frame. It does not establish what caused those images, whether the recording has been altered, or whether the interpretation being offered matches what is actually visible. What it does do, extremely effectively, is exploit the human tendency to treat visual information as more reliable than testimony. We trust images in ways we do not always trust words, even when the images are equally ambiguous. If you want to go deeper on why visual evidence in paranormal investigation is considerably more complicated than it appears, I explored that in my Spooky Science Behind Ghost Photos piece on this site. [link]

The Title

The word signs appears in the title, and the film uses it in at least three distinct ways.

First, a sign is a physical marking. A crop circle is a sign in this sense: something has been made, and the making of it appears to communicate something, though what it communicates is unclear.

Second, a sign is an indicator of something approaching. The crop circles, the animal behavior, the worldwide reports are signs in this sense: advance notice of an event.

Third, a sign can be interpreted as evidence of intention or design in the universe. This is what Graham is really struggling with throughout the film. He is not simply trying to figure out what the aliens are doing. He is trying to figure out whether his wife's death meant anything, whether the words she spoke in her final moments were random or purposeful, whether the universe is the kind of place in which things happen for a reason or simply the kind of place in which things happen.

By the end of the film, Shyamalan has assembled the pieces: Bo's water glasses, Morgan's asthma, Merrill's baseball swing, Graham's wife's last words. Retrospectively, they form a pattern. They become signs in the third sense. The apparently random becomes purposeful, and Graham's faith returns.

This raises a question paranormal investigators carry constantly: what is the difference between observing something and concluding that it has meaning? Evidence that an event occurred is not the same as evidence that the event was intended. Documentation of something anomalous is not the same as understanding what caused it, or whether anything caused it deliberately. These distinctions are easy to collapse under pressure, especially when what you are experiencing is frightening or painful, and especially when a coherent explanation feels better than not knowing.

The Conversation That Signs Is Really About

As previously mentioned, Shyamalan has said the late night sofa scene between Graham and Merrill is essentially what the movie is about (The Ringer, 2020). Two brothers, sitting together in the dark, trying to make sense of events that exceed their understanding, talking through whether the things happening around them are signs of something or simply things that are happening.

Graham lays it out plainly. There are people who see something go wrong and think it is luck. And there are people who think it means something. Graham used to be the second kind of person. He is no longer sure he is.

My brother and I used to talk that way. He would ask what I thought was happening about something, and I would work through it out loud, and we would go back and forth, trading thoughts and stories. When my brother watched Signs, he said he thought Graham and Merrill were a good picture of how the two of us used to communicate. He recognized something of us in that scene independently, before I said a word about it.

Shyamalan says that conversation is the heart of his film. That is the exact scene my brother and I both recognized.

What the Film Gets Wrong, and Why It Does Not Matter

The water.

An alien species capable of interstellar travel is fatally vulnerable to the most common substance on the surface of the planet they invaded. As someone who has spent fifteen years investigating the unexplained, I have learned never to assume that intelligence guarantees good planning. But this particular gap in the aliens' advance research does require some effort to forgive.

The door handles also present a challenge. And the tinfoil hats. Merrill's commitment to tinfoil hats is admirable in its dedication if not its scientific foundation.

I mention these things not to dismiss the film but because Signs earns the right to have its absurdities acknowledged. The water vulnerability is a genuine narrative problem. It is also the price Shyamalan pays for insisting on a resolution, on a design that makes everything cohere, on a universe in which the signs add up to something. That insistence is thematically essential to what the film is doing. The cost of it is aliens that did not adequately research their destination.

Graham and Me

There was a time when faith was an important part of my life. I loved being a father. I had a home and a family. Then things changed in ways I did not choose, and I lost my family and I lost my faith.

That is part of what I recognize in Graham Hess. Not the specific details, but the shape of it. A man who had something that held his world together, and then did not have it anymore, and is standing in a field trying to figure out what anything means.

Shyamalan gives Graham a resolution. The pieces align. The signs turn out to have been signs. His faith returns.

Would I love for my faith to be returned to me and understand that everything happens for a reason? I sure would. I wish that would happen. But that is Hollywood.

I do not know whether the things that happen to us mean something or whether they simply happen. Signs does not answer that question for me. But twenty-four years after the film was released, it still makes me ask it.

Listen first. Investigate what remains.

References

Ebert, R. (2002, August 2). Signs. RogerEbert.com. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/signs-2002

NPR. (2011, June 15). Mysterious crop circles: Alien messages or hoax? https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2011/06/15/137188796/mysterious-crop-circles-alien-messages-or-hoax

The Ringer. (2020, July 30). M. Night Shyamalan talks Signs, twists, and crop-circle tattoos. https://www.theringer.com/2020/07/30/movies/m-night-shyamalan-signs-unbreakable-the-sixth-sense-interview

The Spool. (2002). Signs and the mediated apocalypse. https://thespool.net/reviews/movies/signs-retro-review/

Syfy Wire. (2022). Crop circles and water allergies: The science behind Signs. https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/signs-crop-circles-water-allergies-science-real