M. Night Shyamalan’s Old features several terrifying death scenes, the most disturbing of which connects to Mr. Glass from his own films, Unbreakable and Glass. Old (2021) follows several groups of people vacationing at a hotel who are brought by the staff to a remote, secret beach that they soon discover has supernatural powers. Suddenly, each character ages rapidly while feeling effects from their own diseases that brought each family on vacation in the first place, reducing their normal life spans into one day.
As the characters in Old begin to die, the deaths become more disturbing as some of their preexisting physical ailments are drastically affected by the fast aging. Aside from two characters drowning, one falling to her death, one dying only seconds after its birth, and one’s blood being poisoned by rust, the most distressing death of all happens to be the scariest horror moment in Old. Said death occurs when Chrystal, who has a calcium deficiency, has gone mad from her rapid aging and chases Trent and Maddox around the cave, breaking all of her bones into a twisted, pretzel-like form before dying.
Chrystal’s death scene is especially disturbing by the way her bones twist and make her look like a deformed spider-like woman, the dark lighting in a cave, the makeup smeared on her face, and her delusional talk as she chases the two younger Old characters, but the actual fragility of her bones that led to her death shares a connection to Unbreakable’s villain Mr. Glass. In Shyamalan’s Unbreakable series, Elijah “Mr. Glass” Price is a man who was born with osteogenesis imperfecta, a rare disease that causes his bones to be extremely brittle and break easily. Mr. Glass’s condition is similar to Chrystal’s hypocalcemia calcium deficiency, which accelerated her osteoporosis and led her bones to break with increasing ease.
For most of Old, Chrystal’s calcium deficiency isn’t noticeable. She takes precautions to have proper posture to avoid becoming hunched as she grows older and makes sure to consume food and drinks rich in calcium, which leads to her main issue on the beach. As the rapid aging takes effect in Old’s adults, wrinkles, memory loss, and sight and hearing issues appear, but Chrystal’s disease has increased the side-effects very quickly, causing her osteoporosis to contort her bones. While Mr. Glass simply has to be cautious about putting himself in situations that could possibly harm him, he has time to heal if that should happen. Chrystal, on the other hand, would break her bones again immediately after moving from the pain of another break, with the bones healing instantly into contorted positions.
For both Chrystal and Mr. Glass, their bone diseases would end up causing their eventual deaths. Chrystal’s would be accelerated by every bone snapping in succession, while Mr. Glass would see his demise after Split’s The Beast mortally wounded him by breaking all of his bones. Shyamalan deals with several illnesses throughout his films, including supernatural and mental abilities that can serve as either powers or weaknesses for his characters. In Old, M. Night Shyamalan uses all of the characters’ diseases as their weakness as they rapidly transgress, which is what also befalls Mr. Glass, only at a much more prolonged rate.
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