Starring Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, June 13, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense) is best known for crafting suspense the old-fashioned way. Typically, Shyamalan’s approach to horror favours a minimum of gore and lots of questions about our place in the universe. Unfortunately, his latest effort is so talky that it could have really used a maniac in a hockey mask to perk things up. So here’s fair warning: if you insist on being kept in the dark about the lame premise at the heart of The Happening, read no further.

The rest of us can consider that the villain here is a pissed-off Mother Nature, who decides to get all bad-ass with us environmentally piggish humans by spreading a deadly plant toxin that compels people to commit suicide whenever the wind shifts. The premise is so old-school that it plays like a woefully stretched-out version of The Twilight Zone. All that’s missing is Rod Serling saying, “Ladies and gentleman, let us consider the humble tree…”

Almost all of the thrills here are stacked in the first third of Shyamalan’s script. It’s a little creepy to see people turn into suicidal zombies and throw themselves off buildings. And its fun to watch desperately earnest high school science teacher Elliot Moore (a stilted Mark Wahlberg) try to figure out what the hell is going on. But there’s really nowhere to go after that. Freaked-out citizens run around, trying their best to stay away from anything greener than a celery stalk. There’s a feeble subplot involving Elliot’s restless wife (Zooey Deschanel) and the child that ends up in her care (Ashlyn Sanchez). But when the scariest part of a horror move involves former sitcom mom Betty Buckley ending it all by shoving her head through a plate-glass window, something has gone awfully wrong.