M. Night Shyamalan’s career has been filled with unexpected surprises, to say the least. Once hailed as “The Next Spielberg,” audiences started to grow tired of Shyamalan’s reliance on twist endings, and his films saw a drastic decline in quality. I’ve personally documented my defense of maligned Shyamalan films in the past, yet I come to you today not necessarily to defend one of his most-hated films, but rather to make the case that maybe what makes this film so bad is exactly what we should embrace it for. The film is, of course, 2008’s The Happening.

After The Village in 2004, Shyamalan released the woeful Lady in the Water (2006). When word got out in 2007 about Shyamalan’s script entitled The Green Effect, there was hope that maybe the once-hailed wunderkind might be returning to his roots. But when M. Night shopped the project around, no studios were anxious to throw money at it. After a rewrite–and a new title–Shyamalan finally managed to work a deal so that India-based company UTV co-financed half of the film’s budget, with 20th Century Fox taking care of the rest.

Buzz on The Happening focused on the fact that this was going to be Shyamalan’s first R-rated film, and it was scheduled for a nice Friday the 13th opening date of June 13, 2008. Yet storm clouds were brewing on the horizon. In early June, only a few days before the film was to be released, Shyamalan did an interview with the New York Daily News and dropped this odd bit of information: “We’re making an excellent B movie, that’s our goal.” Was Shyamalan trying to save face after test audiences found the film laughable, perhaps? Was this just the equivalent of trying to shrug off something disgraceful with the old “Oh, I was only joking!” excuse? Or did the filmmaker really set out to make an intentionally cheesy movie with a big budget and big stars?

It seems hard to believe that anyone would willfully throw money or commit to an intentionally “bad” movie, but watching the remarkable tone deafness of The Happening unfold does hint at just that. If this were an intentional B movie, Shyamalan seemed to be the only one in on the joke. After The Happening sunk like a stone and was maligned by audiences and critics, even the film’s star Mark Wahlberg tried to distance himself from the project by saying he regretted taking part in it–and this is from the guy who starred in Max Payne and Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes!

Yet there’s such a weird, head-injury induced charm to The Happening. It truly must be seen to be believed. The film opens with a genuinely disturbing sequence, as two young women in Central Park slowly realize something is not quite right: all the people in the park have suddenly stopped in their tracks, and some of them are disjointedly walking backwards. It’s truly chilling,and only escalates as one of the women pulls a long silver chopstick from her hair and stabs herself in the neck with it. From there we’re onto a construction site, where workers begin leaping to their deaths, splattering onto the ground in horrifyingly graphic manners. A shot from below looking up at a flock of men in hard hats flinging themselves to their deaths in a carefree manner is downright disturbing.

It’s all downhill from here, though, because Shyamalan quickly cuts to Wahlberg practically yelling to a classroom of students: “Did you guys hear about honeybees disappearing?!” Wahlberg can be a pretty good actor with the right material–see: Boogie Nights and The Departed–but he flounders in every scene in The Happening, delivering his lines in a sort of high-pitched keening manner. Wahlberg plays Philadelphia science teacher Elliot Moore, who is going through a rough patch with his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel). As baffling as Wahlberg’s performance is here, Deschanel’s is downright flabbergasting. Deschanel trips through the film as if she were once abducted by aliens who removed part of her frontal lobe and then returned her back to Earth in a daze. Her huge, expressive eyes hinder her here, as they only seem to play into her take on the character as a giant baby trapped in the body of a full-grown woman.

There’s an event happening, school principal Alan Ruck tells us. Everyone thinks it’s terrorists, but whatever it is causes people to suddenly, and violently, kill themselves. Elliot, Alma and their friend Julian (John Leguizamo) decide to get the hell out of Philadelphia, bringing Julian’s daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez) along with them. Julian’s wife and Jess’ mom is somewhere in Princeton, which Julian announces as “the town of Princeton,” even though no one from the Greater Philadelphia area would ever say such a thing. From here, The Happening turns into something of a road movie, as our characters travel from town to town trying to avoid the strange airborne toxic event that’s causing people to off themselves. We get wonderfully hilarious glimpses of this as the film progresses, including a magnificently bad scene in which Elliot watches a video on a woman’s cell phone of a zookeeper casually feeding himself to lions.

Julian decides to head off to the “town of Princeton” to find his wife on his own, which turns out to be a mistake, because the Jeep he’s traveling in has a hole in the roof and everyone inside gets infected. Meanwhile, Elliot, Alma and Jess have hooked up with a group of fleeing people, and at one point Elliot suggests they all split up into two groups. Infected by the airborne toxin, the other group’s members start to kill themselves one by one with a pistol. “Oh no…” Elliot says in a childlike manner when he hears the gun shots. “What oh no?” Alma cries, and as the gunfire continues, everyone stands around looking to Elliot for an idea, as if he were their leader. “We can’t just stand here as uninvolved observers!” Alma pleads. “Why can’t anyone give me a goddamn second!?” Elliot cries to the crowd, then says to himself perhaps the best line in cinema history: “Be scientific, douchebag!”

Elliot is able to use his science teacher brain to deduce that what’s causing all the suicides is in fact plants. Yes, plants, trees, grass, you name it–they’re letting off a harmful chemical that causes people to go bonkers and 86 themselves. This certainly ties into Shyamalan “B movie” claim, as it fits with the type of schlocky picture popular in the 1950’s, when the atomic age could transform the mundane into the murderous. Films like 1957’s The Beginning of the End, where Peter Graves was forced to battle giant grasshoppers. The type of films that often ended with someone warning that this was what happened when man tampered in god’s domain. The plants-as-destroyers theme also gives way to a jaw-droppingly hilarious scene in which Elliot tries to reason with a plant, only to discover it’s plastic. Surely, this had to be Shyamalan tipping a wink to the audience to let them know he fully understood how utterly stupid killer plants were. Also, I suppose the wind is in cahoots with the plants, because every time Shyamalan wants to show a plant attack is happening, he has the wind spookily ruffle tall grass.

Elliot, Alma and Jess end up at the secluded farmhouse of Mrs. Jones (Betty Buckley), and it’s here where The Happening throws up its hands and says, “Oh boy, I don’t know what’s going on anymore!” Mrs. Jones lives cut off from society, and as such has no idea of the happening that is happening. It doesn’t matter, because she’s clearly a goddamn lunatic. When Elliot first spots her sitting on her porch drinking some lemonade, she growls, “Why you eyeing my lemon drink?” Instead of instantly saying, “Oh no, this woman is crazy!!” Elliot and the gang stay at Mrs. Jones’ house where she makes them dinner and then slaps Jess’ hand when Jess tries to reach for a cookie. As everyone is just about to go to bed, Mrs. Jones catches Elliot in the hallway and asks him, in true lunatic fashion: “Plan on murdering me in my sleep?!” Elliot, justifiably confused, replies: “WHAT?! No!” The following day, Elliot wanders into a bedroom and finds the world’s scariest fucking doll lying on a bed. Elliot says to the doll: “Mrs. Jones…?” Elliot can be forgiven for believing that perhaps their elderly host has transmogrified into a scary doll, because this movie is just that nuts.

But Mrs. Jones has not assumed doll form; instead, she’s now infected with the suicide plant disease, and starts slamming her head into windows. Jess and Alma are secluded in a little barn across a field, and what results is a shockingly beautiful sequence for such a schizophrenic film. Elliot and Alma decide that if they’re going to die, they’re going to die together (Jess doesn’t get a say–sorry, kid!), and cross a field of wild whipping grass to each other as James Newton Howard’s sad, exquisite score mournfully intones that the end is nigh.

When I first witnessed the pure, unfiltered lunacy that was The Happening, I was convinced that Shyamalan was going to end things in a dark, hilarious manner by having the infected Elliot and Alma embrace and then violently murder each other. Instead, they’re fine! The strange plant attack has ended just as suddenly as it began, and everyone is left wondering just what the hell that was all about.

Shyamalan ends the film on a creepy note that matches the effectiveness of the opening scene: at the Tuileries Gardens at the Louvre Palace in France, two young men are walking and chatting about a party they might go to, because that’s what young French dudes talk about. One of them starts spookily mentioning his bicycle over and over again, people freeze in place, someone screams, and dark storm clouds roll in.

I would never venture to say something so ludicrous as The Happening is a good movie. But it’s inherently watchable. I’ve seen plenty of bad movies, and the worst types of bad movies are those that are an utter chore to sit through. That never happens with The Happening. Instead, it manages to catch your attention like the world’s strangest car accident, or a stand-up comedian bombing so catastrophically that he or she achieves a type of transcendence. I do not ask you to forgive Shyamalan’s tone-deaf’s buffoonery here; all I ask is that you embrace The Happening for the glorious B movie it truly is. In other words: be scientific, douchebag.

Note: This piece was originally published on May 14, 2015