M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap Is (Kind of) a True Story

M. Night Shyamalan is known for making movies with incredible premises and big twists, like The Sixth Sense and Signs. Trap seems like another in his long line of imaginative scenarios.

The premise revolves around Cooper (Josh Hartnett), a family man with a wife and two kids who takes his tween daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue), to a concert by her favorite pop star, Lady Raven (the director’s daughter Saleka Night Shyamalan). Cooper is just doing what good dads do when he notices that there’s an elevated police presence in the venue, and learns from a friendly merchandise seller that the whole concert is a trap to catch the Butcher, a serial killer who’s been chopping people up for years. This is alarming news for Cooper because he is the Butcher.

For the next 90 or so minutes we get to watch Cooper wriggle out of all the ways the Feds have to catch him, each more ridiculous than the last. However, the most shocking thing may be that Trap isn’t unthinkable. In fact, Shyamalan’s movie is based on a true story…somewhat. Let’s take a look at the loose inspiration for the movie Trap.

Trap’s Inspiration… Sort Of

The events of Trap are inspired by a real-life case called Operation Flagship. In 1985, the U.S. Marshals’ Fugitive Investigative Strike Team, or F.I.S.T., launched a plan to catch a bunch of fugitives in Washington D.C. They set up a fake sports network, the Flagship International Sports Television, a rift on F.I.S.T. As part of the network’s supposed launch, it sent letters to over 3,000 wanted men’s last known addresses telling them they’d won two free tickets to an upcoming game between the Washington Redskins (now called the Washington Commanders) and the Cincinnati Bengals, and had a chance to win tickets to the Super Bowl. At the time, the Redskins were a hot ticket and people were elated to have won entrance to a game.

The so-called winners showed up to a brunch at the Washington Convention Center on the morning of the game to receive their tickets. They were surrounded by U.S. Marshals who were all in character as maintenance crew, cheerleaders, mascots, ushers, and other staff who pretended to celebrate with the fugitives. They even checked the men in to make sure they were really fugitives. “A ‘confirmed winner’ was someone who was wanted; a ‘double winner’ was a dangerous person, someone that had aggravated assault or murder or robbery,” Toby Roche, at the time the Chief Deputy U.S. Marshall for the District of Columbia, said in 2016 documentary about the sting by NFL Films.

The feds then took small groups of up to 14 people to separate ballrooms. Once they were there, as soon as the MC said they were under arrest, the Special Operation Group rushed into the room to take them down. The ruse was so good, that some of the people were still confused even after the arrest, asking “Do we still get to go to the game?” The sting led to 101 arrests that day.

For the U.S. Marshals, though, there were several things that gave it away, if the fugitives were inclined to look. Besides the fake sports channel, the network president’s name I. Michael Detnaw was an anagram for “I am wanted.” Moreover, the business manager of the new network was called Markus Cran — Cran is “narc” spelled backward. So the Feds had fun with the operation even as they were planning to arrest a lot of criminals.

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Shyamalan Had Operation Flagship in Mind

While Trap is not the story of Operation Flagship, it bears certain parallels — and those parallels are not an accident. Shyamalan’s film doesn’t pull directly from the sting operation, but he remembered Operation Flagship as he was formulating his movie. “This notion came to me of, I remember as a kid, this event that happened in the ’80s where the police and the FBI created a sting operation at a public event,” Shyamalan told Dexerto.

So Shyamalan took the idea of a public event to trap fugitives as inspiration for his story. “It was just the spirit of the idea of being trapped in the absurdity of it,” Shyamalan told the BBC. “I thought it would be super funny, because when you see the footage of [Operation Flagship] it’s hilarious.”

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“[The authorities] used the absurdity against [the fugitives] because they lowered their guard, which I thought was quite brilliant,” said Shyamalan. “So it just stuck with me, and I guess when Saleka and I were thinking about a movie at a concert, I wondered, why would this person not be able to get out, and how can I keep them there?”

Cooper’s decision to take his daughter to her idol’s concert in Trap is as natural to that character as winning Redskins tickets was to those who were taken down by Operation Flagship. So, in the end, Trap isn’t quite as unrealistic as it initially appears.