Characters do drive The Birds and the Dead movies. The Birds starts with strong characters and develops them more fully through the crucible of an apocalyptic nightmare. In the Dead films, Romero cuts straight to character development through crisis. Unlike Hitchcock, he can’t pay for for A-list actors or a lengthy prelude, but he makes up for these deficiencies in the raw urgency and passion he gets from his cast. Audiences care when major characters go down in Romero films. Romero's actors, regardless of acting skill, always sell their situation.

In The Happening, though, Shyamalan sacrifices character to situation. Mark Wahlberg's is the only well-realized character among the major cast. A few small players – the soldier and horticulturist in particular – manage to make their characters resonate. But most of the cast has trouble getting the audience to care deeply about their characters' plight or even their deaths. Whether this is a function of the writing or the acting, it is ultimately the responsibility of the director.

Shyamalan loves to present himself with tricky problems that he tries to solve in unique ways. But instead of high concept that can be distilled into a single sentence (eg. “tell a ghost story from the perspective of a ghost who does not come across as a ghost”), The Happening gives us multiple concepts that get tangled up in each other: 1) “transform the 'nature gone wild' subgenre from animal/insect threats into vegetation/environmental threats while remaining equivocal that the threat even has its origin in nature,” 2) “transform the end result of the toxin so that the infected do not attack the uninfected but the infected attack themselves,” 3) “transform pestilence movies from scientists racing to find a cure to characters racing against the wind,” and so forth.

The Happening ambitiously attempts to refresh old subgenres. It would like to be The Birds. It would like to be Night of the Living/Dawn of the Dead. But without the boldness of high concept, and without actors who can really sell its overly tangled and abstract threat, The Happening doesn’t ever quite happen.