James Wan brings Aquaman special effects to the haunted house in Malignant trailer
The creepy crawly king is back with a stylish-looking horror movie that’s not in the Conjuring-verse
Film News James Wan
Over the last two decades, James Wan’s helmed some of the biggest movies in history, helping to build multiple cinematic universes and long-running franchises while also making classic haunted house stories cool again. However, while his profile has extended outside of horror, tackling the underwater world of Aquaman and the skyscraper-to-skyscraper driving mayhem of Furious 7, Wan’s still got his heart in things that go bump in the night. And honestly, it’s still what he does best.
By the looks of things, Malignant, Wan’s latest tale of suburban terror, trauma manifesting as demons, and whirling cameras, is a marriage of all his interests. Owing as much to his time in Atlantis as his time with Patrick Wilson’s family-focused haunts, Malignant promises a stylish, special effects-heavy horror movie.
Malignant appears to lean heavier on the Insidious side of things, what with a plot focused on childhood trauma literally haunting a woman well into adulthood. Conjuring-verse vet Annabelle Wallis (Annabelle) plays Madison, a woman with the psychic ability to see murders as they occur. Meanwhile, a demon with really long nails named Gabriel that’s been haunting her since childhood returns for another bite at the apple.
The trailer looks like a mixed bag for the most part. There are flourishes of style, with Wan bathing his visuals in hard blues and reds, evoking the Italian horror films of Dario Argento—one might even say it’s pitched toward Giallo at times. However, the CGI transformation effects don’t elicit the tactile scares that made The Conjuring and Insidious so effective. Still, Wan’s track record for delivering classically staged horror movies (well, aside from Saw) is strong enough to be excited for his latest. Let’s just hope he doesn’t go overboard with the massive budget Warner Bros. seemingly laid out for him.
Malignant comes to theaters and HBO Max on September 10, 2021.
11 Comments
damn, my eyes do not deceive me, there are truly three different franchises called Insidious, Sinister, Malignant made by basically the same people
With one good movie among them (the one James Wan wasn’t involved with).
And Wan had already written an entirely unrelated graphic novel titled “Malignant Man”. I don’t know if I’d call this Malignant a “franchise” yet though.
Lets hope it’s benig.
Aquaman=Ben Shapiro’s favorite superhero and real estate mogul.
Conjuring has some of the best scare mechanics of any movie I’ve seen. Not a particularly great movie—the acting is wooden, the plot silly and contrived—but hot damn almighty, the “promise of the premise” scare sequences are so good it will make you laugh at loud at how well they turn the scare screws.This movie looks too CGI to hope for them to match that.
I went with a lot of my staff to go see The Conjuring in the cinema. When the wardrobe scene with “hide and go clap” came on my nighttime supervisor literally ran out and didn’t come back for about five minutes. I will not lie, I haven’t revisited the film (mainly because it is one of the few recent horror films that did get to me), but I did end up being a bad boss and asking her at random times for the next year, “Hey! You want to play a game of hide and go clap?!?”. Our regulars luckily never got into it, but she was always like, you’re such a dick.
This trailer just reminds me that for all the good work James Wan has done in the horror genre, he’s also the dude that made Dead Silence.
It’s not a tumah.
I’m a big fan of Insidious and Sinister. The Conjuring to me, is a laughably bad movie. I like WAN as a Director but his horror lately with the Conjuring franchise has been pretty weak. I hope this one takes him back to form, but the trailer to me doesn’t look like much more than a bunch of jump scares.
It’s normally spelled “Gabriel” not “Gaberiel”. I don’t know if there’s a press release for this film with a different spelling.
I find it curious that this film has a story credit for Ingrid Bisu, a Romanian actress who appeared in The Nun and the recent Conjuring 3, but no previous Wan films.