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Director M. Night Shyamalan’s new thriller, “Trap,” is filled with twists and turns, but its premise is grounded in a real-life sting operation that took place in the ’80s.
“Trap,” now playing in theaters, stars Josh Hartnett as Cooper, a middle-aged man who takes his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to a concert for her favorite pop star, Lady Raven (played by Shyamalan’s real-life daughter and musician Saleka Night Shyamalan).
The “twist” revealed in the trailers is that Hartnett’s seemingly mundane dad is secretly a serial killer known as “The Butcher” and the concert is actually an elaborate trap designed by the feds to catch him.
As it turns out, the concept of “Trap” isn’t too far-fetched or unfathomable. The US government used a similar tactic to catch 100 fugitives by luring them to a football game with free tickets. Here’s how the sting operation partly inspired Shyamalan’s film.
Operation Flagship was an unconventional trap that resulted in the arrests of 101 wanted fugitives on December 15, 1985
In 1985, the DC police and US Marshals lured in wanted fugitives by capitalizing on the popularity of the football team then known as the Washington Redskins (now the Washington Commanders).
The elaborate ruse, known as Operation Flagship, began with the creation of the fictional Flagship International Sports Television, which was a riff on the acronym FIST, the Fugitive Investigative Strike Team.
The fake corporation mailed invitations to the last known addresses of more than 3,000 wanted people, telling them they won free tickets to a Redskins vs. Cincinnati Bengals football game.
The 101 criminals who responded to the phony invitations attended a brunch at the Washington Convention Center on the morning of the game to pick up their complimentary tickets, celebrate their good fortune, and get free transportation to the game.
In actuality, the fugitives were surrounded by over 100 undercover cops posing as cheerleaders, mascots, maintenance crew members, and other venue staff.
The fugitives were then split into smaller, more manageable groups. When it came time for the big surprise, members of the Special Operations Group burst into the room and arrested the fugitives.
According to The Washington Post, Operation Sting led to 144 arrests.
Shyamalan said that the sting operation was ‘hilarious’ and the absurdity of the fakeout stuck with him
Shyamalan told Empire magazine that Operation Flagship inadvertently led him to pitch a movie that raises the question, “What if ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ happened at a Taylor Swift concert?”
In the press notes for “Trap,” Shyamalan said that the idea for “Trap” was born out of conversations with his daughter about merging music with filmmaking by creating a thriller that’s also a music-driven movie.
“After I was thinking, ‘Hey, this could be a killer that’s in there,’ 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.
“It was hilarious,” Shyamalan told Empire magazine of the real-life operation. “The cops were literally cheerleaders and mascots. These guys were dancing as they came in. And they were all caught. It was so twisted and funny.”
“Trap” isn’t a comedy by any means, but the dark humor of Operation Flagship informed the movie.
“The tone of that absurdity — that you were dancing with them and then your life was over on that day — stuck with me as really strange and wonderful. And so we kind of took that language,” Shyamalan told Dexerto.
