An Analysis of the Village
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M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village is a “psychological thriller”. Classical conditioning, mental disorders, and senses are some of the categories of psychology found in the movie, everything else stems from these three categories.
There are several examples of classical conditioning in The Village. The villagers exhibit fear around the color red because they have had it drilled into their heads since birth that red is “the bad color”. The color red attracts “those we do not speak of”, monsters with whom there is a tentative treaty, or so the villagers believe. Threats of violence or harm are the unconditioned stimulus, which evoke the unconditioned response: fear. Threats paired with warnings of the color red result in fear. Finally, red brings about fear all on its own even though a color cannot physically harm a person.
Similarly, the villagers have been told that yellow is the safe color and it will protect a person from “those we do not speak of”. Through the same series, yellow evokes feelings of safety in the people. Ivy, when traveling through the woods, knows that the monsters are not real and yet she is still fearful when her yellow robe becomes completely covered in mud. This conditioning is so deeply ingrained in her mind that it will not be easily extinct.
Each elder experienced the death of someone close to him or her at the hands of another person. They got together and each story that they heard increasingly convinced them that these people and money where evil. Because they had all had these terrible things happen to them once they began to believe that this might be a pretty common occurrence and that maybe all of the people, or at least most, of the world where bad people at heart. They generalized their fear to include all people, not just the ones that had wronged them. They therefore came up with “The Village” where they could live in