'The Sixth Sense' Ripped Off An 'Are You Afraid of the Dark'

[amigocabal]

http://www.bustle.com/articles/34374-th ... -heres-the

So, submitted for the approval of the Bustle society, The Tale of How M. Night Shyamalan Ripped Off Afraid of the Dark.

The Premise: Johnny and Erica are super close siblings. They hang out a ton and even work at the same bowling alley. Erica is a waitress and Johnny is the maintenance guy. Everything seems just peachy until Johnny finds a girl's class ring in his work locker, tries it on and it realizes it's stuck. Along with the ring comes visions of a beautiful girl named Donna who keeps calling to Johnny in very ghostly ways. At little research proves that she is a ghost - a teenage girl who died in a car accident with her boyfriend and she seems to have a thing for Johnny.

Click here for the complete story...

[Executor32]

It's a pretty common and old trope, actually. If one is to accuse The Sixth Sense of ripping off "The Tale of the Dream Girl" for using the 'ghost doesn't know it's a ghost' variant of it, one might as well accuse the latter of ripping off The Ghost Next Door from the Goosebumps book series, which was published nearly a year earlier.

[Elheru Aran]

There's lots and lots of media out there (movies, books, TV, games, whatever) that take old concepts and re-use them. Perhaps not intentionally-- quite possibly even more than half the time it's purely either unconscious or coincidental-- but the fact is there aren't that many new ideas out there as far as genre storytelling goes.

[Simon_Jester]

I strongly suspect that most of the basic stock tropes of ghost stories have been rattling around for thousands of years, so yeah.

[Elheru Aran]

I strongly suspect that most of the basic stock tropes of ghost stories have been rattling around for thousands of years, so yeah.

Human psychology does show that *in general* most people have vaguely similar mental operations. As such, certain situations will generally invoke certain responses. Take your usual slasher movie-- it's night, the villain is masked, sneaks up on people in creative ways, all that.

Or humor. At least in the Western world (I honestly don't know how well the concepts translate in the East or in Africa) there have been jokes about wives, mothers in law, mothers in general, penises, deities, and various iterations of property for millennia. The Bible has a crack where one king declares his piece is bigger than his father's, and another king makes a direct reference to his opponent's mother (though the KJV translation loses a lot of its punch)... In a way, it's really a rather fascinating phenomenon.

[Lord Revan]

so what you're saying is that they've been making "yo momma!" jokes since the biblical times at least?

[Elheru Aran]

so what you're saying is that they've been making "yo momma!" jokes since the biblical times at least?

Pretty much. If you think about it, makes sense; people are (usually) reasonably close to their parents, and as such insulting them would hit a little close to home. Perhaps it would in fact hit home, given that people often lived in multi-generational households... so you get the idea.

EDIT: Also, because I really can't pass this up: If you want to check, you could always ask your mom

[Thanas]

so what you're saying is that they've been making "yo momma!" jokes since the biblical times at least?

At least since the middle ages, yeah.

[cmdrjones]

so what you're saying is that they've been making "yo momma!" jokes since the biblical times at least?

At least since the middle ages, yeah.

Especially considering all those Vile Scotsmen out there!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19CsMPqJR6A