Malignant writers James Wan and Ingrid Bisu share unlikely sources that inspired creation of the film’s killer
Wan and Bisu discuss their inspiration for coming up with the horror film's real star
Film Features Ingrid Bisu
[This piece discusses spoilers from Malignant that—if you’re curious about the movie—are a lot more fun to discover for yourself.]
There’s a moment near the end of James Wan’s Malignant when Gabriel, the shadowy killer we’ve been following throughout the story so far, is fully revealed. Within seconds of seeing him appear, it’s clear that the movie’s created one of the best horror villains in years—a freakish little practical delight on par with “opening your miiiind” to Total Recall’s mucosal chest-baby, Kuato.
Wan and story co-writer/cast member Ingrid Bisu spoke to Bloody Disgusting about how Gabriel was created and how his scenes, when he’s both in and out of control of his dear sister Madison, were filmed.
The idea for Gabriel came from Bisu’s interest in documentaries about “medical anomalies, twins, parasitic twins, [and] teratomas.” After discovering the story of a man who “had a smaller head in the back of his head” that “would torture him or give him horrible thoughts and ideas,” Bisu went on to look into the subject of parasitic twins and ended up with Gabriel and the story idea she worked on with Wan and screenwriter/fellow story co-writer Akela Cooper.
Wan says the skull-bursting version of Gabriel was achieved with animatronics but, instead of having to reverse the film to create scenes where the twin’s assumed control of Madison’s body, the backwards moving effect was created by performers like contortionists Marina Mazepa and “Twisty” Troy James.
“Whenever Gabriel comes out of Madison and possesses her, it’s a combination of a bunch of people,” Wan says. “First Annabelle Wallis’ performances [as the regular Madison], then we switched to Marina … [who] would wear an Annabelle Wallis mask on her face, and she would have an animatronic Gabriel in the back of her head [and] she would play out a lot of her scenes just backward, literally backward.”
James also twisted himself around to play Madison/Gabriel “in crucial scenes, like the murder of Madison’s husband, Derek.” Wan says the pair of contortionists “blew my mind” and “made our vision come to life” in ways he and Bisu could barely imagine when they would try to play-act the backward movement during the writing process.
Read the rest of the interview over at Bloody Disgusting.
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32 Comments
“Within seconds of seeing him appear, it’s clear that the movie’s created one of the best horror villains in years”Unless they get a sequel made (which I doubt given the box office results), I promise you that Gabriel will never be remembered ever again.
I DIDN’T LIKE IT SO NO ONE ELSE DID EITHER
It sucks. The reviews are also universally awful. James Wan is terrible. The fact that you have bad taste in horror movies doesnt somehow mean that it’s a good movie.
That’s not…what I said at all.What a sad individual you are.
wrong
There’s a very Comic Book Guy tone to this comment.
No, there really isnt. He is absolutely right. Nobody will remember this movie, it will be forgotten within a few months. So the assertion that he is one of the best horror villains in years” is ridiculous. This is an embarrassing and shameless puff piece that belongs on Entertainment Tonight or some shit, not a legitimate website.
He’ll be remembered, but more ironically than anything.
Badly aged comment
Oh honey . . . this is one of the dumbest horror movies I’ve seen in a long time. It’s just bad. And the mechanics for bad movies becoming cult classics are fading away very quickly in modern times. So no one is gonna remember this.I’m honestly wondering though if there is literally anyone who saw this movie who didn’t figure out the twist almost immediately? It wasn’t subtle.
I loved it
That says far more about your (lack of) taste than anything else…
Yes, there are people who didn’t see the twist coming. I’ve seen plenty of reviews that didn’t see it coming. A lot of people in the world were thrilled by the movies because how bonkers it got. Wan got money thrown at him to do whatever he wanted after all the money he made the studio. So, he made the kind of cheesy but grizzly movie you don’t see a lot of in mainstream cinema these days and a bunch of people enjoyed that. So, in short, speak for yourself and leave it at that.
I loved it, at least from the foot chase bit onwards. And despite watching loads of this kind of thing, I was still slightly wrong-footed. I knew from the opening that it was going to be about a parasitic twin, but I thought it was one which had been removed and somehow survived.
It struck me as a big bag of unrelated ideas and tones.
Yeah, it’s easy to see the twist a mile away, but the movie is still satisfying. That third act is *chef’s kiss*.
It’s schlock. If you can enjoy it as such that’s fine, but I’m not going to elevate it to high art.
Easily the worst movie I’ve seen this year, edging out Old.
I thought the twist was conjoined twin with a psychic link, they came up with something even dumber.
I don’t think any little revelation in a movie, like who/what the killer is, counts as a “twist,” or is intended as one by the filmmakers. It’s just a new place the movie is going to as it progresses. So if you think of Malignant as an M. Night movie with a shocking revelation that upends everything you thought you knew about the story, then of course it’s going to disappoint. I urge you to free yourself of this mindset, and you’ll be better able to enjoy what cinema has to offer.
Badly aged comment
I deduced fairly early that Gabriel was a parasitic twin brother, likely inspired by the tale of “Edward Mordake” (still often cited as true for having appeared in the otherwise largely credible Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, though the source of it, and another dubious article in the book, seems to have been an article by 19th century poet/sci-fi author C.L. Hildreth). But I’d assumed that he had been separated, ala Basket Case and that freak show-based episode of the X-Files co-staring Vincent Schiavelli. I thought the twist they actually took was pretty inspired, and I enjoyed the film for all its pulpy goodness.
this film had terrible acting, writing, and directing. but was it bonkers and entertaining? YES!
What? The writing could’ve been better, yeah. But James Wan is a superb director, and the acting wasn’t terrible.
The acting was unbelievably awful. The best acting of the whole film must have been Annabelle Wallis’ agent telling her she did great after screening it the first time.
“James Wan is a superb director”Hahahahahaha!!! Tell another one!
Some line reads are really bad but it’s so masterful elsewhere and with the same actors it comes off as intentional.
Gabriel will be THE Halloween costume of 2021.
My biggest problem with Malignant is that it withholds a lot of information you can reveal much earlier, like the relationship between Gabriel and Madison until the very end. There’s no reason you can’t at least say there was a brother who was removed from her head at least in the second act. It just feels like the movie is trying to be clever, and that it doesn’t have a lot of confidence in itself, like if the audience gets a little bit ahead of the story it won’t still be fun.Otherwise, I think Gabriel is great, and I would love to see him in more movies.
Yeah, the “cut out the cancer” focus and the bleeding from the back of her head would have been easy enough to misdirect people to assume it was a conjoined twin.The parasitic twin thing would have been the twist…stupid as it was.
I cant decide what’s more embarrassing: the fact that youre acting like this god-awful, generic, objectively terrible movie is good, or the fact that youre acting like the antagonist is somehow original in any way, when it has been done multiple times. This is just an embarrassing puff piece. Have some dignity and journalistic integrity…
When people tell me that their favorite horror movie is anything made by James Wan (Saw, Conjuring, etc), i immediately know that they have terrible taste and i probably dont want to be their friend.