Then when I climb the stairs to brush my teeth, I am petrified that a dead person lurks behind the shower curtain or, worse perhaps, one of Those We Don’t Speak Of.

An excellent scare, that. Highly effective filmmaking, Mr. Shyamalan. And I leap into my bed, lest a dead person try to grab my ankle on my way in.

Then we had the opportunity to see The Village again, and we took it. Why not? We enjoyed it the first time; it was interesting; it had potential to be something to think about; and it was the only film showing in the outdoor theater, the one where you bring your own blanket or folding chair. You know: the one out in the woods, surrounded by all those trees.

I liked it even better the second time, and talked it out with my husband as we walked to the car—holding his hand in a vise-grip and staying with the crowd. Those We Don’t Speak Of can’t really get you in a crowd, can they?

The film is visually stunning—gorgeous and distilled at the same time. Perhaps others wouldn’t share this view; perhaps it’s my Protestant upbringing that is inclined to prefer the spare, the muted colors, the stone and clapboard simplicity of Covington Village. Perhaps it’s my western Pennsylvanian childhood that finds an appeal in the bare, dun trees and fields yellowed towards winter. I see the characters in their amber cloaks, profiles framed by the grey woods and their own breath, and I remember the damp cold cleanness of the air. Again and again Shyamalan’s camera refers to those empty branches against the sky. They move just like that in winter; I know it well.

The context, too, rings with familiarity from my Lit survey days: didn’t Hawthorne’s characters fear the woods? Weren’t they also certain of evil lurking just beyond the hem of the trees? Evil and the unknown—they are, aren’t they?—one and the same. The Puritans thought so, and Hawthorne found it a useful metaphor. So, it would seem, does Shyamalan.

I saw it a third time, and a fourth; I can’t say why. This kind of thing doesn’t usually happen to me. But it presented itself and I took the opportunity wanting, perhaps subconsciously, to pry the metaphors loose from the haunting and beautiful story and get a good look at them.

Evil is outside the village. It hems them in, rings them round, lurks in the creaking opacity of the woods. The villagers have a truce with this evil; it knows its bounds, just as they know theirs. If they play their cards right—keep in the margins, wear the right colors, offer their sacrifices—Those We Don’t Speak Of will keep to themselves.

And yet. Evil comes. The life of the village comes to a halt. In a stunning sequence of cinematography and scene composition, individuals and pairs literally come to a full stop when they find their landscape pock-marked by death: mutilated animals lie scattered over the village grounds.

Who has done this? Even the elders seem stymied by this extraordinary behavior. The truce, it would seem, is at an end. Now the war will begin, and this meek people will be forced to turn plowshares into swords.

I wish, in truth, that the movie had gone this way. It would make the film—and this writing—so much easier. The bad guy would, eventually, be identified. Scooby-Doo would wrest the mask from the villain’s face and all would be revealed.

And wouldn’t that be nice? To have the evil always on the outside, to have it so easy to identify by, say, its color, or its size, or its family of origin, or its nationality, or the fact that it dwells in the woods. And wouldn’t it be nice if we could somehow hem ourselves in? If we could pick the right neighborhood—or maybe not a neighborhood at all, but a place out in the country where rowdy kids and gangs and drug deals would never come to pass? And wouldn’t it be nice to know that, by performing certain rituals such as, say, taking communion or going to church or sending one’s children to the right schools or reading the right books and attending the right conferences and listening to the right music, we could have a happy, safe life without any problems beyond that of a flat tire? Wouldn’t that be nice?

But this is Shyamalan we are dealing with here, and he is far more interested in something else to make it all so simple.

In fact, I don’t believe we ever know (and correct me, please, if I’m wrong here. I may have missed it; I’ve only seen the film four times) the origins of these horrid mutilations. Instead we learn that evil is lurking in the village already, and it comes in the form of attempted murder. But this time it is a human life that is almost taken, and a human hand that tries to take it. More troubling still, this attempted murder stains the hands of the character who seems to be the most innocent of them all.

“That, in the end, is what we have protected here—innocence,” says Edward Walker, an elder of the village. But it would seem that innocence is elusive, that it has leaked through the boundary of the woods, or that they never truly enjoyed innocence in the first place. If even the most innocent is capable of such atrocity, what does that say for the rest of us?

Terrifying, isn’t it? Our capacity to wreak pain and inflict hurt even, and this is perhaps most terrifying, when we do not mean to.

In fact, this life is terrifying. Our safety is fragile at best. Even in the western world, even in America, where we enjoy brilliant technology and the best hospitals, running water and fast food, death lurks at every corner. People are accidentally struck down by busses; drivers fall asleep at the wheel. Perfectly healthy people are suddenly diagnosed with cancer.

We can’t be blamed for wanting to enforce whatever perceived safety we have. Everyone wants a healthy, full life; and everyone wants the same for his children.

I think that Shyamalan speaks to this, though I am not certain he means to. In fact, I am guessing that some will argue with me here, finding that I am stretching my metaphors a bit too far. But bear with me for a few paragraphs more.

One of the most terrifying moments in the film comes when Walker shows his blind daughter what it is they are afraid of. “Do your best not to scream,” he tells her, and so she follows him, her confidence only in this man she has known all her life, her hand outstretched to meet what it is he needs her to see. And when her hand makes contact—recoiling terror, panicked breathing, disbelief. “Do not be frightened,” her father breathes into her ear. “Do not be frightened.”

Yes, I may be stretching things here. But in Walker’s words, I hear the words of my own Father, the heavenly One, who sees with a perspective none of us share. There is much I fear about this life; there are potential losses that will devastate. I have faced and lived through a few of them, and always in my soul came those words “Do not be frightened.”

One might argue that these words are easy for God to say, for Him who lives outside time’s boundary, whose eternal existence protects Him. But we need then to remember His incarnate Self, who asked that the cup be taken from Him. And we need to remember his Father Self, who lost His only Son.

“Do not be frightened,” He says to us. Because if you are frightened, then you won’t trust Me, and you will live only for yourself and for your own safety. And you won’t be delivered from the enemy who plagues you, who haunts you from within that self.

Do not be frightened.