Over the weekend I rented the The Village (I just don't go to too many movies in the theater), and for the most part I liked it.  In my view it was not as good as Sixth Sense, simply because Sixth Sense totally caught me off guard.  I loved the surprise in the last five minutes of the movie. 

The Village though was a bit more predictable, though still enjoyable.  One thing that has captured my mind since my viewing was how the publicity for The Village shaped how I watched the movie.  That is, the movie is marketed as a horror movie, but it is not at all a horror movie.  In fact the movie is not really that scary, at least in an of itself.  What makes the movie scary is the marketing.  That is, because of the marketing one watches a non-scary movie expecting it to be scary, though the movie in and of itself is not scary, and because of aspects of the movie, one believes the movie to be scary.

In other words, what I am seeing is that the possibility exists that the movie was marketed in a way that corresponds to the theme of The Village, which is about social constructed reality.  That is, all those who belong to the village, except for the elders, believe that they are living in a valley surrounded by woods, which are inhabited by the creatures of which they will not speak.  But there are no creatures, the creatures are constructed by the elders.  Also, they may live in a valley, but the valley is really in the midst of a wildlife preserve.  The elders of the village constructed the whole reality.

So as the theme of the movie is about social construction of reality, so the marketing of the movie corresponds to this, so that we watch The Village looking for a scary movie, but the movie really isn't a horror movie.

Just some thoughts...