This essay is laden with spoilers.

Signs, the third feature film from M. Night Shyamalan, released in 2002 has widely been interpreted as a science-fiction film concerning an alien invasion. While the ‘invasion’ takes place globally the film remains fixed on a single Pennsylvanian farm family head by Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) a former priest who has lost his faith following the traffic accident death of his wife. Throughout the story is peppered with disconnected actions and random quirks of characters, the wife’s dying words seemingly referring to a baseball game, the youngest daughter’s habit of abandoning half full glasses of water, the older boy’s asthma, but by the end of the film each item is precisely placed to ensure the family’s survival. The accumulation of these ‘random’ events restores Graham’s faith in religion and that ‘everything happens for a reason.’

The film, while successful upon release with a US domestic box office total of more than 200 million dollars, was criticized for the unlikely occurrence that a spacefaring race would ‘invade’ Earth when half a tumbler of water was more than enough to cause them serious physical damage.

As science-fiction the film makes no sense. Presuming some form of life may exist without liquid water the nature of that life would be so radically different from terrestrial life as to render our entire environment lethal to them. To walk upon the Earth without benefit of protective gear would be like a person walking on a planet with acid hanging in the air. Let’s not talk about the absurdity of ‘crop circles’ as a method of navigation to a race capable of crossing the nearly unimageable distance between stars. Patterns in local crops are visible to only a few hundred or thousand kilometers,

Additionally, the concept that ‘everything happened for a reason’ is wholly incompatible with a universe governed by blind physical laws devoid of a creator or guiding intelligence. Science-Fiction is a rationalist medium and requires that the fantastic be ‘explained’ by natural law and physical processes. That is not to say that SF is incompatible with horror, author Gregory Benford in his short story A Dance to Strange Music crafter a terrifying tale of planetary exploration with disturbing imagery and events that were fully explained by physical laws but remained terrifying.

Signs makes no attempt to justify how all these little random things existed to save the Hess household other than that ‘they were there for a reason.’ Simply put, the story does not work as science-fiction.

But what if it is not science-fiction? What if Signs belongs to another genre of horror?

Consider, we never actually saw the ‘starships’ that brought the ‘aliens’ to Earth. Why do we ‘know’ that they are actually aliens? They never stopped to announce such a thing to us, never proclaimed that they originated from the star system we call Zeta Reticuli. (Bonus points for spotting that SF Horror reference.)

What if Signs is a better fit for an Occult Horror movie than a science-fiction one? So much that is incompatible with science-fiction works if we consider everything to be occult driven.

Not aliens, but demons.

Strange glyphs and symbols are traditionally part of the occult.

 Water makes much more sense against supernatural creature than naturally evolved organisms.

And of course, then there is a ‘purpose’ to life, existence, and all the ‘random’ things and quirks are part of the grand plan.

Signs is much more akin to The Exorcist, a priest with shattered faith finds it again when confront by a demon, than War of the Worlds.

Nothing in the record supports that writer/director Shyamalan intended such an interpretation so call this my personal head cannon, but it resolves all the films issues without contradicting anything on the screen.