Something terrifying stalked the corn fields in M. Night Shyamalan's Signs and ghosts walked the streets of his The Sixth Sense.

The characters in his Unbreakable had dual natures and subversive motives.

Similar things and more come into play in Shyamalan's newest thriller, The Village.

As a filmmaker Shyamalan is a master of deception. He puts the tricks into the treats.

With The Village, the tricks get in the way of the treats, yielding fewer genuine scares and shocks than he delivered in The Sixth Sense and Signs, the two films that connected most with viewers.

Shyamalan knows that what he doesn't show chills and frightens us more than what he allows us to see and this is his most effective tool in The Village.

He presents us with a group of people living a 19th-century lifestyle similar to the Amish.

Their homes are in an isolated, self-supporting community in a meadow surrounded by woods.

They have no contact with the outside world.

They are hard-working, God-fearing, law-abiding folks who live under rules as strict as their resources are limited.

They live in fear of creatures that dwell in the forests surrounding their village. They call them Those We Don't Speak Of and keep them at bay each night with a ring of torches.

The villagers also appease the creatures by offering sacrifices of food.

The uneasy truce is threatened when someone from the village insists on entering the forest during the day.

The creatures express their anger by skinning smaller livestock and villagers' pets and leaving dreaded red blood marks on certain houses.

It's not just in the forest that danger lies.

Each home has a black box that sits in a darkened corner of the main meeting room. And the village elders seem almost as frightened of what lies inside those boxes as they are of what lurks in the forest.

Shyamalan builds the terror and suspense using music and sound effects, while cinematographer Roger Deakins manages to suggest movement and shadows at all times and in all places.

There's no question Shyamalan is capable of creating the appropriate mood and atmosphere. But the suspense and terror are blunted by the film's love triangle of the young blind girl Ivy Walker (Bryce Dallas Howard), the unquiet rebel Lucius Hunt (Joaquin Phoenix) and the village simpleton Noah Percy (Adrien Brody).

It unfolds much too slowly, although its purpose is essential to the scary final third of the movie when someone is forced to venture into the forest.

The Village will work best for those viewers who don't catch the clues Shyamalan scatters so liberally throughout the first half of the movie.

The less you realize, the more chance you'll be shocked and amazed.

Ironically, The Village yields more genuine rewards in retrospect or on subsequent viewings.

When you're not concerned with figuring out the secrets and motivations of the characters, you can concentrate on the way Shyamalan tells his cautionary tale.

Like Alfred Hitchcock, he is a master of subversive plotting and it's great fun watching him play his cards.

There's a major problem with casting: Brody and Phoenix are too old. The young people in this village should have been in their teens, not pushing 30.

That's not to say the performances aren't effective and beautifully delineated.

As the chief elders, Sigourney Weaver, Brendan Gleeson and William Hurt make sure all their speeches and gestures are sprinkled with foreboding.

We've come to think of Shyamalan's films as cinematic funhouses with potential thrills, chills, shocks and surprises around every corner.

The devices he uses may be clever and ingenious but in the final analysis, there's just not as much fun in his newest funhouse.

(This film is rated 14-A)

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