M. Night Shyamalan

Shyamalan was born in Mahé, India, a town in the Union Territory of Puducherry. His father, Dr. Nelliyattu C. Shyamalan, is a Malayali neurologist from Mahé and a JIPMER graduate; his mother, Dr. Jayalakshmi Shyamalan, a Tamil from Chennai, is an OB-GYN.

Shyamalan's parents immigrated to the United States when he was six weeks old. Shyamalan was raised Hindu in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania. He attended the private Roman Catholic grammar school Waldron Mercy Academy. He felt like an outsider and remembers that teachers would say that whoever was not baptized would go to hell. When he was a student there, a teacher once became upset because he "got the best grade in religion class and [he] wasn't Catholic". He later attended the Episcopal Academy, a private Episcopal high school located at the time in Merion Station, Pennsylvania.

Shyamalan earned the New York University Merit Scholarship in 1988, and was also a National Merit Scholar. Shyamalan is an alumnus of New York University Tisch School of the Arts in Manhattan, graduating in 1992. It was while studying there that he adopted "Night" as his second name.

Shyamalan had an early desire to be a filmmaker when he was given a Super 8 camera at a young age. Though his father wanted him to follow in the family practice of medicine, his mother encouraged him to follow his passion. By the time he was seventeen, he had made forty-five home movies. On each DVD release of his films, beginning with The Sixth Sense and with the exception of Lady in the Water, he has included a scene from one of these childhood movies, which, he feels, represents his first attempt at the same kind of film.