By Gill Pringle
James Wan marks a return to his roots with his new original horror thriller, Malignant. After 17 years of successfully orchestrating the horror franchises Saw, Insidious and The Conjuring (as well as delving into big action spectacle with Fast & Furious 7 and Aquaman), Wan was ready to take a break, remembering all the things that scared him as a boy and the horror films that he loved growing up in Perth, Canberra and Melbourne.
In fact it was his wife, Romanian actress Ingrid Bisu, who inspired Wan to take the plunge back into his past, “Ingrid basically pitched me something that became the genesis of the villain [in Malignant]. When she would tell me these stories, I’d look at them immediately from a horror filmmaker’s point of view and think, ‘Ooh, that could make for a really cool and crazy, messed up thriller!’” says Wan, 44, who married Bisu two years ago.
As a teenager, Wan was intrigued by the Italian Giallo thriller genre, admiring directors like Dario Argento and Mario Bava, and today echoing their distinctive filmmaking styles with Malignant. The film stars Annabelle Wallis as Madison, whose abusive husband is killed in their home by an intruder who leaves her for dead. Pregnant at the time, she loses her baby and experiences major trauma from the incident. As a result, Madison develops a psychic connection to her attacker, Gabriel, having grisly visions and nightmares about his other murderous deeds. Her life continues to be in danger as she assists the police in trying to capture the killer while, at the same time, trying to unravel the mystery of why she is connected to him.
You have another unconventional villain in the film…
“I do think it’s very obvious when a killer is coming at you with a knife or a machete or a machine gun. But, to me, it’s the smaller things that I find more frightening and I think the things that I’ve tapped into with my ghostly, supernatural films is that it’s the simplest things – like a door creaking open – that can be the scariest. I’m very much drawn to the haunted house sub-genre because it allows me a strong foundation to play with all those themes and ideas. So in the case of Gabriel, you literally have someone inside your head that can do a lot of harm to you and the people around you and the people you love. I enjoy these themes and yes, my movies do touch on them time and time again.”
How did you and your wife, Ingrid Bisu, develop this story?
“When Ingrid and I started developing the idea, it just took on a life of its own. At first, we were just having fun working together, and then it became a full-blown story. We had never worked together in that capacity before, so it was really great to cook up crazy ideas and set-pieces together.”
What is the difference for you between directing a movie based on a true story like The Conjuring and then a movie based on your own original idea like Malignant?
“The difference is obvious. When you’re basing a film on people that are still around, you have to be respectful of that. It would be different if I was making a documentary. With documentaries, you can be objective, but I’m making a movie which is a bit more subjective and seen from their point of view. So obviously when you’re doing a film that you’ve just cooked up from scratch, you really have the freedom to take the characters anywhere you want to take them and it’s good and bad obviously because sometimes there’s no limitation and having a bit of that limitation is sometimes a good thing. But Malignant wants to break outside of that box! It’s a genre movie but it’s also very punk to some degree! It wants to go against the system if you will.”
Did the pandemic affect the film?
“The film was actually shot before the pandemic hit us in terms of photography, but having said that, it really did shut us down for post-production. I was half way through editing the film and we were just completely shut down. It was so weird to shut a movie edit half way through it and say, ‘No, you can’t do it anymore. You have to stop and go off!’ So I went off and I did some gardening and played some beer games and then, at some point, we were allowed to edit remotely, and I got back into the movie again. But the pandemic did help me out because it allowed me some time away from the film where I could come back and reassess the film.”
For fans who might be unfamiliar with Giallo, can you describe the Giallo style and how that influences the film?
“Giallo is literally Italian for Yellow, and is used to describe a type of lurid detective/crime novel that has become a genre of its own. A style of murder mystery made popular in movies by Italian filmmakers such as Mario Bava, Dario Argento and many others, who took a well-worn style and reinvented it through their own filmmaking sensibility. You can see shades of my love for this in Saw, and Malignant is basically my take on the Giallo genre.”
Malignant utilises a unique filming style with a camera on the ceiling following the action. Where did that inspiration come from?
“There were lots of filmmakers, especially in the 70s, who would literally break the fourth wall by crossing the camera from one room into another room. That method was used a lot in older films, especially by filmmakers like Brian De Palma. I was like, ‘How can I take that and go even beyond with that?’ I have used what they call a spider-cam which is like a sky camera that they use a lot in sporting events in big arenas where the camera can just fly everywhere. I loved the idea that when you’re following Madison at the start of the movie where she’s starting to spiral out of control, I thought it was a great tool to represent her psyche and her state of mind as she’s getting more and more paranoid. She thinks there’s a killer out there and is he breaking into her house? I wanted to capture her paranoia and I felt like this tool really allowed me to do that where we just follow her from room to room to room.”
The music is very suspenseful in a terrifying way. How did you make those choices?
“The music and the soundscape overall has always been a very important aspect of my filmmaking going all the way back to Saw and even the big-budget action films that I do. I can say a lot more rather than showing it and create a lot of emotion in the audience by how I use the music and sometimes I use it in a very jarring way to switch the emotion. It’s my way of putting the audience into the mindset of the characters and it’s an important aspect, especially in horror films, because a lot of times, I might have a shot looking down a hallway in darkness but then the score allows you to conjure up images that are not even physically there in the shot. And with Malignant, you have a character where the villain literally lives inside her head so she’s seeing and hearing things that are inside her head, so when you’re seeing things through the eyes of the protagonist, then the narrative becomes very untrustworthy. You’re following someone who you can no longer know if what she’s seeing is real or not real so I use the music to help me out there.”
Annabelle Wallis is so believable. How did she prepare for the action scenes?
“I first met Annabelle, actually on the Annabelle movie, and I loved her. She’s a really sweet person in that she’s so game to try things and that was very important for me in casting this film because I needed a lead actor that could just let the movie take hold of her and know that there’s no ego and know that she wasn’t going to go, ‘I’m not going to do this scene like this because it makes me look stupid or crazy or whatever.’ That happens a lot and Annabelle isn’t like that and she was so caught up in this script and in this world, and was so game to come along and play with us in this.”
And she looks very different with her brunette look?
“Yes, one of the things that I wanted to change with her was to make her a brunette. She hadn’t done that for a while and that’s a big part of her transformation as well. So much of the movie is about transforming to this other thing, and so we felt like it was a good starting ground and her hair played a big part. When we did that transformation, I remember looking at her and thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’ve turned you into Barbara Steele!’ I couldn’t believe how much she looked like Barbara Steele with her skin tone and her big eyes. I lit her with a red light and she looked very iconic to me, almost like the old-school actors that would be in these kind of films. There’s something very classical about Annabelle and I’m just really thankful that she loved the theme of the film and was willing to go with it because the movie really needed someone who could waver between playing vulnerable and then playing it strong and then dark at the same time because so much of the film is just trying to watch her and gauge whether she is the killer or she’s not.”
Malignant is in cinemas now.
