It’s that Night vision

“IT’S not a mermaid story, “ says spookmeister M. Night Shyamalan, debunking a widespread myth that his upcoming “Lady in the Water” would involve anything as prosaic as a Daryl Hannah wannabe. “A mermaid is just one story of hundreds of stories of creatures that lived in the water. There have been stories of entities that lived in the water since the time of Babylon. In some of these stories from earlier times, these entities would lure boats to the rocks and crash them. They were a [reflection] of the psychosis of being out at sea for so long. Mine is an entirely made-up version of the sea nymph story.”

As he scrambles to finish editing the film, the 35-year-old India-born, Pennsylvania-bred, Catholic school-educated director says the film, made for a reported $75 million, began life three years ago as an epic serial that he’d tell his daughters as they drifted off to sleep every night. The film, now officially billed a “bedtime story” on the poster, tells the tale of lonely apartment building superintendent Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), who discovers a mysterious young woman (Bryce Dallas Howard) swimming at night in the pool of his building.

“He comes to believe or suspect that she’s a character in an old bedtime story,” says Shyamalan, a so-called narf who’s being menaced by evil creatures called scrunts. Heep, in turn, tries to explain to other inhabitants of the apartment building their destined role in the narf’s story. “At first they feel very silly, a lot of them,” says the director. “It’s ultimately about finding one’s own childlike innocence, opening yourself up to the absurd, and being rewarded for that.”

If Shyamalan sounds cryptic, that’s his intention. This is a man who’s scrupulous about maintaining the mystery before a film’s release. In fact, he describes his latest venture using only references to his own films.

“It’s an evolution of the things I’ve been doing. It has kind of an oddity about it -- that can be related to ‘Unbreakable,’ in it’s odd childlike nature. In its optimism and spirituality -- that would probably be related to ‘Signs.’ But there’s also a kind of deep philosophical thing going on, more in the realm of ‘The Village.’ It was made in the similar time period of ‘The Village’ and borrows from all the stuff that I learned.”

“Lady in the Water,” which opens July 21, features the director’s long, long takes and his sense of eeriness but no twist ending, which is his signature. “I do tell the kids stories with twist endings,” he admits. “This wasn’t one of those. This was a beautiful straight fairy tale.”

This film caused a break with Shyamalan’s long-term corporate benefactor -- the Walt Disney Co., which had released all of his films since “The Sixth Sense.” Disney did offer him $50 million to make the film, but it was apparent that neither production president Nina Jacobson nor Walt Disney Studios Chairman Dick Cook really gravitated to the more fanciful material.

“I needed to have people around me who believed 1,000%. I just kept thinking I wasn’t going to be good otherwise,” says Shyamalan. “This movie, for me and Warner Bros., is this kind of vision of faith.” Drawing an analogy between himself and his film’s hero, he says, “It’s believing in something that is absurd at first and then becomes something of true meaning to you. “

With what seems like an existential shrug he adds: “I make really precise, original movies. Not all of them are going to be right for everybody.”