Let's go out a limb here, though, and venture that Koepp's film - in production before Shyamalan's Oscar nominee and based on a book by the veteran Richard (I Am Legend, Incredible Shrinking Man) Matheson - is the better of the two. Certainly there is less sense, in this tale of ordinary blue-collar worker Tom Witzky (Kevin Bacon) opening up his own superhighway to the supernatural, of things being covered up. Koepp's film is working out Witzky's dilemma. No one leaves Stir of Echoes bamboozled.

Witzky lives in Chicago with wife Maggie (Kathryn Erbe) and young son Jake (Zachary David Cope). Despite his scepticism, at a party he challenges New Agey sister-in-law Lisa (Illeana Douglas) to hypnotise him. But her simple suggestion that Tom be 'a little more open-minded' establishes a conduit to the dead - something Jake is also privy to - and an increasingly manic Tom becomes convinced that something bad has happened in the family home.

Stir of Echoes is much the less tricksy picture. Jake's communication with the other side is largely played down in favour of his father's incipient madness as Tom is overtaken by Close Encounters-like obsessions that see him plough up the back garden and take a jackhammer to the floorboards. His quest is as much about wrongs done in the real world as the spirit one.

The principles are excellent. Cope is likeably unprecocious, Erbe strong in an essentially reactive role, and the reliable Bacon on something like peak form as a very ordinary man dealing with extraordinary events. Scares are all the more effective for being carefully and frugally paid out within an entirely believable milieu; the tone owes a lot to Cronenberg's Dead Zone. And Stir of Echoes is thankfully another picture leading the fight-back against the encroaching CGI orthodoxy - its effects are all pretty much in-camera.

There is something a little prosaic in the wrap-up, but Koepp is intent on telling a proper story here. Possibly exploitative moments are downplayed and as a director he shows real empathy for his characters. Gimmicks are out, sympathetic playing and good, solid scares in, making this one of the very best Matheson adaptations we've seen.