james wan – Horror Ghouls

The Conjuring 2 (2016)

Posted on December 12, 2023December 12, 2023 by HorrorGhouls

The Conjuring 2 opens with the well-known Amityville case which took place in the late 1970s. The Warrens are gathered in the living room where a seance is about to begin. Lorraine goes into a trance which reminds me of The Further where she witnesses Ronald DeFeo murdering his own family of six with a shotgun. An intense segment that surpasses most of the countless Amityville films alone. Lorraine gets led down the cellar where she gets attacked by a creepy nun (yes, The Nun) that looks like the twin sister of Marilyn Manson and is about to see the most terrifying thing in her life. This is as close to Hell I ever wanna get, Lorraine says after waking up from the trance while sobbing in Ed’s arms. She’s had enough and wants to retire. Dream on, lady, cuz London is calling.

We then meet the struggling and freshly divorced mother Peggy Hodgson with her four kids who lives in a council house in the town of Enfield, north of London where the strong odor of black mold hits you like a brick. So does the old, brown leather chair that rots in the corner of the living room. The economy is in the toilet, times are bleak, and the only joy in life is to chew on biscuits while Margaret Thatcher is on TV bragging about her red dress. Things haven’t changed much.

Anyway, in order to avoid dying of total boredom under the already dire circumstances, the two daughters, Janet and Margaret, have made themselves a cute little spirit board to do exactly what it’s for. Janet starts to sleepwalk around the house and finds herself in the chair in the living room. She starts to behave like a Regan by growling and speaking in a raspy man’s voice and mumbling things like This is MY house! This, of course, scares her older sisters shitless, whom she shares the bedroom with and suggests that maybe it’s best to sleep with the lights on.

One of the sons in the house is also experiencing some creepy stuff at night, such as his toys starting to move by themselves and someone shouting BLAEEEEEERGHH from the tent in the hallway.

After Janet behaves more like she’s under the influence of some serious possession, the Hodgsons is being visited by a group of local paranormal investigators, lead by Maurice Grosse. The skeptic and psychologist Anita Gregory is also on the spot, who can’t wait to debunk the whole thing as a hoax. In real-life she described the Enfield case as “greatly exaggerated” and “pathetic”.

We soon learn that the entity who has claimed the meat suit of Janet is a fellow named Bill Wilkins, and that he’s an old, grumpy man straight from the grave who only wants his house back. And while our experts scratch their heads and bollocks and don’t know what to do, the case goes to Ed and Lorraine Warren. Lorraine is very reluctant to do another case due to what she saw in the cellar in the Amityville house, while Ed is ready for action like a kid on Christmas Eve. And it also happens to be around Christmastime. How convenient.

And here’s a quick history class: Guy Lyon Playfair, one of the original paranormal investigators on The Enfield Poltergeist Case who worked alongside with Maurise Grosse, came forward prior to the movie’s release and said that the Warrens had showed up “uninvited” and only stayed for a day. Ed, on the other hand, claimed that he visited the place three times by himself while Lorraine was home presumably feeding her roosters. So who’s lying?

One of the few facts we can take from the film is Bill Wilkins, who lived in the house before the Hodgsons and had died of a brain hemorrhage while he sat in the chair we see in the film. This has been confirmed by his son, Terry. Other than this, there’s no info to find about this poor old bloke Billy, and no gravestones were vandalized this time.

The family’s mother, Peggy, kept living in the house until she died in 2003. Rumors say that she died in the same chair as Bill. That’s grim. So its appropriate to ask if it was the chair all along that was the cursed villain here and why Ed didn’t claim the chair to bring it home to his occult museum so we could have the spin-off The Chair, from the producers of Killer Sofa.

Now, back to the movie:

Yeah, so what more is there to say other than “if you liked the first one you’d also like this?” This one has longer screen time which ticks over two hours, but thanks to James Wan being the master of suspense that he is, it flew away in a ghoulish heartbeat. While the story isn’t the strongest, this is still a rock-solid and highly entertaining sequel. A first-class ghost ride filled with atmosphere, great scares, and James Wan’s unique ability to manipulate us to get the sense of something evil lurking in every corner despite we don’t see it. All performances are solid all the way and they also really nailed the look of Maurice Grosse.

I also like how they re-created the house of the Hodgsons with the grim 1970s esthetics and the fugly posters on the girl’s bedroom walls. If the film itself was shot on film instead of digital, the film would look like it was straight from that decade alongside with The Exorcist and The Omen.

I’m not the biggest fan of the Nun character, even though she was a creepy enough presence in this film and overall has a great look. The shot of her standing in the narrow hallway in Warren’s home where their daughter Judy points at her in pure shock is a scary and eerie moment. Too bad that the two spinoffs of hers have completely desensitized her creep factor, at least for my part, so I’m not alone blaming the character. The scene where Lorraine gets attacked by her in Ed’s office room, in some very creative and suspenseful fashion that only James Wan could pull off, is the creepiest scene you’d ever get with The Nun.

Then we have The Crooked Man, where I every time have to remind myself that he isn’t CGI, but actually a guy in a costume. The actor’s name is Javier Botet and has worked a lot with Guillermo del Toro.

The Conjuring 2 was also a hUUUge success, but despite that, James Wan hasn’t directed much other than two DC films. He returned to horror with the awesome Malignant in 2021, which was very much panned and ridiculed because people expected a new Conjuring. As for now, he seems more comfortable as a producer. In 2021 we also got the third installment The Conjuring: The Alcohol Made Me Do It, most known for not being directed by Wan. The fourth one with the undertitle The Last Rites is under pre-production, which looks to be a crossover with The Nun. Can’t say that I’m too excited…

Also check out the miniseries The Enfield Haunting from 2015 if you want a considerably more faithful film adaptation of the case.

Director: James Wan
Writers: Chad Hayes, Carey W. Hayes, James Wan
Country & year: US, UK, 2016
Actors: Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Madison Wolfe, Frances O’Connor, Lauren Esposito, Benjamin Haigh, Patrick McAuley, Simon McBurney, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Simon Delaney, Franka Potente, Bob Adrian, Robin Atkin Downes, Bonnie Aarons, Javier Botet
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt3065204/

The Conjuring (2013)

Posted on December 8, 2023February 7, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

Has it gone ten years since the release of this modern haunted house classic already? Oh my. Ed and Lorraine Warren are more commonly known now than ever, but here’s a quick summary of this oddly fascinating and charming couple.

Ed Warren was a self taught demonologist and his wife Lorraine was a clairvoyant who could “read” the human aura. Both were hardcore Christians. After they founded the New England Society for Psychic Research in 1952, the oldest ghost hunting group in New England, they claimed to investigate over 10,000 cases of paranormal and demonic activity over the course of four decades. Most of them were debunked while some required assistance from the Catholic Church to perform exorcisms.

Lorraine was the more quiet one (for lack of a better term), whereas Ed never seemed to have a filter and would claim bizarre things such as:

– I know sorcerers who have never worked a day in their life, yet they’re financially well-off. For them, everything falls into place. Life is easy; good things always come their way. They have no troubles at all. Money finds them. Why? Because they’ve made a metaphysical arrangement and work in league with the demonic. –

This is a real quote from the book The Demonologist: The Extraordinary Career of Ed and Lorraine Warren. So it’s fair to say that our dear uncle Ed surely had some screws loose on his top floor. But I don’t doubt that he was harmless like a soft teddybear as he and Lorraine were deeply devoted to each other. Aww.

They’ve gotten several books written about them, such as The Amityville Horror, In a Dark Place (The Haunting in Connecticut), Satan’s Harvest (Maurice “Frenchie” Theriault) and The Haunted (The Smurl family). The latter was already adapted in 1991 as an obscure movie made for TV. Great books, by the way, but they work more as horror fiction than they do as “documentaries”, so keep that in mind if you’d like to read them. I was hoping one of the installments in the Conjuring franchise would be about Maurice Theriault, based on Satan’s Harvest, which we also see some glimpses of during Ed and Lorraine’s classes in the first movie. The mix of grim and tragic drama with horror would be perfect here, but since they already have already completely butchered Maurice’s character arc in the two Nun films, it’s not likely to happen. Bummer.

Ed died back in 2006 at the age of 79, while Lorraine kept fighting the good fight until she met her maker in 2019 at the age of 92. Their son-in-law Tony Spera kept their legacy alive for a while with their famous Warren Occult Museum (which is now permanently closed) and was alongside with Lorraine a consultant on the two first Conjuring films. He now runs the Official Ed and Lorraine Warren Channel where he has given some lectures on ghost hunting to show people like Zak Bagans how you really do it. He was also one of the producers of the Netflix reality series 28 Days Haunted, a complete fake amateurish nothingburger of a show yet still the most unintentionally batshit-funny thing I’ve ever seen in the ghost hunting genre.

One of their more known cases of the Warrens was with the Perron family, who lived in an ancient farmhouse in Harrisville, Rhode Island from 1970 to 1980. The house was built in 1736 and surrounded by a big dark cloud of terrifying rumors that several suicides took place there throughout many years. The house was also haunted by an evil paranormal entity by the name Bathsheba Thayer Sherman who terrorized the family over the whole decade they lived there where Ed and Lorraine visited regularly to bless them. The mother of the family, Carilyn Perron, believed that Batsheba was jealous of her, which opened an iceberg of conspiracies, one of which that she once upon a time was an evil witch after allegedly a baby had died whom she was babysitting. The legend says that a sewing needle was found in the baby’s dead body. The only official documents we can dig up from this Bathsheba is that she lived a long life from 1812 to 1885 as a wife and mother.

The rest is based on urban legends, rumors, myths, dark morbid fairytales and totally fabricated boolshit. In other words: there’s no documents of her being an evil satanic witch that drank infant blood and threw babies in the fireplace before she cursed everyone who dared to take her land and hang herself on a tree branch outside her house three past midnight. But that’s at least what the movie and the oldest daughter Andrea Perron want us to believe, who was a part of the promotion of the film and also has written a series of self-published books based on the whole alleged experience. And there were sure some airheads who actually believed it all. Sherman’s gravestone in Harrisville Cemetery was vandalized several times after the release of The Conjuring, and was broken to pieces in 2016. It has been fixed since. If Bathsheba had lived during the more recent decades, it’s not unlikely that some relatives would sue Warner Brothers for pure defamation.

Other “victims” of the release of the film were none other than the owners who have lived in the real conjuring house since 1987, seven years after the Perrons moved out. The big fat irony is that the couple who took over the house after the Perrons have never experienced any paranormal activity, but were instead haunted by curious trespassers on a daily basis after the release of the film. It’s not far from the same story with the owners of the Amityville house who had to remove the two distinct and iconic “eye windows” so no one would recognize the house. The no trespassers signs on the property didn’t help much either. It got to the point where they sued Warner Brothers, a case that didn’t go anywhere. After they eventually moved out, a young couple bought the house in 2019, and they knew exactly what they moved into. They launched the property into a lucrative business to allow investigations and day tours. A documentary called The Harrisville Haunting: The Real Conjuring House was made, and the place is now a landmark tourist attraction. G r o o v y.

Anyway … the movie:

After the opening with a quick introduction of Ed and Lorraine Warren and their case with the Annabelle doll, the film starts off like a classic episode of the TV-series A Haunting where the Perron family (Roger and Carolyn with their five daughters) is moving into their new house in the quiet and idyllic countryside in Harrisville, Rhode Island. It’s the summer of 1971 and everyone is so happy and excited about their new home, except for their dog Sadie, who refuses to enter the house. First red flag. After some exploring, they see that the door to the cellar is boarded. Second red flag. The cellar is creepy. Third red flag. They’re ready to spend the first night in the house and the dog still refuses to be inside. Fourth red flag. Next day, Carolyn wakes up with bruises on her leg. Fifth red flag. The toilet in the house doesn’t work. Sixth red flag. One of the kids’ bedrooms smells like someone had died there. Seventh red flag. All the clocks in the house stop ticking around three past midnight. Eighth red flag. The house is freezing. Ninth red flag. They find the dog dead outside the house. Tenth red fla…they’re fucked!

It doesn’t get more peaceful from here on and after the paranormal activities reach the breaking point when an angry, demonic, scary-looking witch (yeah, guess who) pops up from nowhere like a deranged ninja-monkey to attack the kids, it’s time to call you-know-who.

On the surface, there isn’t anything new and groundbreaking about The Conjuring, not even back in 2013, other than it’s based on Ed and Lorrie Warren, which at least gives it a unique take. As a ghost story, it’s very formulaic and James Wan with his two screenwriters doesn’t re-invent the wheel, but – most of us knew already then that Wan was a master of building up tension and creating some great, claustrophobic suspense that eventually reach the climax in full rollercoaster mode. And that’s even more than I expect from a film like this. A big plus is that he worked with the same crew from the first Insidious movie to create a haunting atmosphere only with the set-design. The whole house here looks cursed, all from the old, dusty organ in the cellar to a certain cabinet wardrobe and the walls themselves. I would love to move in by a heartbeat.

Both Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga as Ed and Lorraine is a perfect match and they take their roles pretty seriously. Their chemistry really sparks where I have no doubt that they love each other like two college teens. Joey King stands out among the six child actors and I still, ten years later, believe her when she says that “someone is behind the door”, yet I’m also still asking “what is…”. Music composer Joesph Bishara, who also played the lipstick-face demon in Insidious, is terrifying behind the Bathsheba make-up, and her introduction in the film has become a really classic moment by itself. I have some very fond memories by watching this in a packed movie theater twice as people were screaming their lungs off. Bishara’s distinct soundtrack with the mix of strings, brass, woodwinds, percussion, electronic instruments and more also amps up the mood. Some clever jump-scare here as well. Clap-clap.

The Conjuring became a hUUUge financial success, both praised by the critics and audiences and sat the gold-standard for modern haunted house films. A formula that countless of directors have tried to copy but mostly failed time after time. The Neverending Amityville Franchise Inc. is always hiring directors though. Instead of rehashing sequels we got The Conjuring Universe with spin-offs like the pretty decent trilogy with the Annabelle doll and the pretty lousy Nun films which I hope we’ve seen the last of. Three years later James Wan followed-up with the sequel The Conjuring 2.

Director: James Wan
Writers: Chad Hayes, Carey W. Hayes
Country & year: US, 2013
Actors: Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Lili Taylor, Ron Livingston, Shanley Caswell, Hayley McFarland, Joey King, Mackenzie Foy, Kyla Deaver, Shannon Kook, John Brotherton, Sterling Jerins, Joseph Bishara
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt1457767/

Insidious: Chapter 2 (2013)

Posted on July 11, 2023July 21, 2023 by HorrorGhouls

The year is 1986, and the demonologist Elise Rainier is called to help Lorraine Lambert and her son Josh, who is being hunted by an evil spirit in the form of a black bride. Apparently, Josh has been using his astral projection abilities, and thus gotten the spirit’s attention. Elise says his abilities must be suppressed, and manages to plant altered memories in his brain so he can forget about it all and live a normal life. Now, twenty five years later, Josh and his wife Renai are being questioned after the death of Elise, where Josh is considered the prime suspect of her murder. Renai and their children relocate to Lorraine’s house, and paranormal events continue to happen all around them. A woman in a white dress is giving Dalton nightmares, and she also manifests and attacks Renai. Elise’s former associates, Specs and Tucker, attempts to contact Elise’s spirit and are told that they need to find answers at an abandoned hospital where Lorraine once used to work. Soon, the mystery of the black bride and the woman in the white dress starts to unravel.

Insidious: Chapter 2 is the second installment to Insidious from 2010, and is a direct sequel from the first one. Of course, after the success of the first there was bound to be more movies which would later spawn a franchise. This one is also directed by James Wan, and written by Leigh Whannell. The film was promoted in different ways, the first theatrical trailer for the film was actually screened to a live audience on location at the Linda Vista Community Hospital (where the hospital scenes in the movie were filmed), and a maze attraction called “Insidious: Into the Further” was featured in 2013’s Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios Hollywood.

Now, as this is a direct sequel to the first movie, compared to the first it’s not quite as effective in its scares and lacks the same tension, but there are some good things to find and we get to know a bit more about one of the villains presented in the first movie. The setting is spooky, and some of the scenes are filled with that good, eerie atmosphere. The backstory of the creepy “black bride” is what mainly fuels the story here, which proves to be an interesting character with both a tragic and horrific background. The movie also focus a bit more on explaining some of the things that happened in the first movie, which makes consecutive viewing mandatory in order to get the best experience.

Aside from spooky settings in creepy houses and an old hospital, we do of course get further glimpses into the netherworld-like area The Further, which is arguably the franchise’s best selling point. While there are loads of depictions of otherworldly dimensions seen in both other movies and TV series, there is just something fascinating about The Further’s somewhat simplistic take on it. It’s surreal and dreamy, vast, dark and for the most part appears to be rather empty. It’s like one of those surreal horror exploration games where the seemingly apparent emptiness still holds both dangerous and fascinating things hidden away in a corner here and there, if you manage to find it.

Overall, Insidious: Chapter 2 works well as a sequel to the successful first film, not on par with the first but still a creepy and decent supernatural horror flick.

Director: James Wan
Writers: Leigh Whannell, James Wan
Country & year: USA, Canada, 2013
Actors: Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Ty Simpkins, Lin Shaye, Leigh Whannell, Angus Sampson, Barbara Hershey, Andrew Astor, Joseph Bishara, Philip Friedman
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2226417/

Insidious (2010)

Posted on July 7, 2023July 21, 2023 by HorrorGhouls

Renai and Josh are a married couple with two sons, Dalton and Foster, and an infant daughter named Cali. They move into their new home, and there things quickly ends with disaster: after Dalton sneaks into the attic one evening, he inexplicably slips into a coma. The days, weeks and months passes by, with no sign of Dalton waking up. Despairing while trying to keep their hopes up, they take their son back home from the hospital to care for him there, and then they start experiencing frightening things that appear to be paranormal. Everything reaches its peak when Renai finds a bloody inhuman-looking handprint on the sheet of Dalton’s bed. Convinced that their house is haunted, they decide to move, only to find that the paranormal activity continues to happen in their new home as well. Sometimes, it’s not the house that’s haunted…

Insidious is a supernatural horror film from 2010, directed by James Wan and written by Leigh Whannell. James Wan previously got his foot into the horror genre with his Saw film from 2004, a film which he admitted being very proud of, but he also felt all the violence and gore put some people off from working with him. Thus, he decided to make Insidious to prove that he could also make a horror movie that is not focused on violence. Although he did, actually, make another horror movie called Dead Silence in 2007, but this was a largely overlooked film and received rather poor reception, which is a shame, because it’s not that bad. However, you can get a little idea of how this movie harbours a “could’ve been” scenario, as screenwriter Whannell revealed in a blog post that the film was an “extreme, coal-face lesson in what not to do“, where he talks about the origins of the film within the context of the Hollywood film industry, where they had to play by the rules of agents and script-doctors. Insidious was made independently, which probably saved the movie from Hollywood’s meddlesome and destructive claws.

The movie starts off with seeming like your typical haunted house movie, and there’s enough atmosphere and creepy, subtle scenes that gradually builds in an insidious way. So yeah, there you have it, the title pretty much explains the movie’s progression (although it was originally planned to be called something else. More about that later). There are more than a few truly effective scenes that actually manages to deliver a scare, and expertly used angles, color and music achieves the perfect mood. The music score was composed by Joseph Bishara, who also plays the demon in the movie. They wanted to go for a score with mixing some “weird piano bangs” and “scratchy violin”, and there were a total of thirty-three violins used for the theme music. Wow.

Going from the subtlety of the classical haunted-house vibe, the movie veers and jumps straight into the rabbit hole when “The Further” is introduced, with the medium Elise (Lin Shaye). This is some kind of dimension that houses the souls of the damned, and appears trippy as hell. Originally, the movie was actually planned to be called The Further too, but it almost goes without saying that Insidious is a way better choice of title. This dimension/heaven-hell-limbo or whatever one should call it, leaves a lot to be explained, but the mystery of what it is exactly is pretty much what is needed to make it work. It gives the movie a mystery and that extra flavour of something of its own, saving it from ending up as a typical derivative effort in the haunted house category. It adds a demonic and otherworldly element into the mix, and there’s a certain balance here between the serious paranormal parts and the spookily fun horror parts, which could have ended up as a disaster had it been made by the wrong people (or with any Hollywood interference) but instead ended up as gold since it was made by the right ones in the way they wanted the movie to be. It’s both scary, creepy and slightly amusing. Watching a ghost boy dancing to Tiny Tim’s version of “Tiptoe Through The Tulips” adds both an outlandish and uncanny feeling for sure!

Insidious became very much a success, and apparently filled a vacuum of sorts for supernatural horror movies that actually manage to come off as scary for a lot of people. It also includes some quite distinctive characters among the entities/demons, giving us actual recognizable villains for a change. The success not only gave enough fuel for more sequels/prequels, but also other franchises like The Conjuring and Annabelle. In the Insidious franchise, we are looking at a total of 5 films so far with the newest one being shown in theaters across the world at the moment.

Director: James Wan
Writer: Leigh Whannell
Country & year: USA, Canada, 2010
Actors: Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Ty Simpkins, Lin Shaye, Leigh Whannell, Angus Sampson, Barbara Hershey, Andrew Astor, Joseph Bishara, Philip Friedman
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1591095/

Dead Silence (2007)

Posted on May 13, 2022July 11, 2023 by HorrorGhouls

Jamie and Lisa are a married couple that one day receive a gift from an anonymous person: a box that includes a ventriloquist doll that is called Billy. When Jamie is out getting some take-away food, his pregnant wife is attacked by an entity that not only causes her to have a miscarriage, but literally rips her tongue out as well. Jamie is immediately suspected for having something to do with his wife’s gruesome murder, but he is soon released from custody due to lack of evidence. When he comes home, he inspects the mysterious gift and sees a message about some called “Mary Shaw”: a ventriloquist that lived in Raven’s Fair, Jamie’s hometown. He decides to visit the old town where he grew up, which is now looking dilapidated and forlorn. He visits his estranged wheelchair-bound father, who has now remarried to a much younger woman. When trying to find out more about Mary Shaw, the doll Billy, and the secrets of Raven’s Fair, Jamie ends up realizing that there are times when it’s best to keep your lips tightly sealed…

Before James Wan got renowned in the world of horror due to the Insidious and Conjuring franchise, he had previously made another (completely different) type of horror movie: “Saw“. Saw is of course a completely different beast, where that franchise pretty much turned into what could probably be considered (soft) torture porn. However: what few people seem to be aware of, is that Insidious (2010) and Conjuring (2013) were not Wan’s first entries into the supernatural horror genre. Predating them both, Dead Silence was released in 2007. Unfortunately it was a box office failure upon release (some believing it was ahead of its time, as creepy atmospheric ghost horror movies had a higher popularity some years later) but it has later been somewhat re-discovered. While not on par with some of James Wan’s later achievements, it is now considered a solid entry into the supernatural/ghost horror genre.

In the film, you can easily spot James Wan’s distinctiveness all over the place, where you can see the early hints of what to come as he’s now exploring the realm of spirits and creepy, atmospheric settings, while also having a little bit of the Saw-grittyness in it which includes some fairly nasty death scenes. Nothing over-the-top, but enough to blend in with the the rest. There’s a lot to appreciate when it comes to eerie scenery, there’s even an old theatre partly submerged by water from the nearby lake. It’s spooky and gothic, maybe a little cheesy here and there but with enough creepy atmosphere to keep the chills coming.

And, let’s not forget the villain of the movie, the undead ventriloquist Mary Shaw, played by Judith Roberts. As the nursery rhyme from the movie goes: Beware the stare of Mary Shaw. She had no children, only dolls. If you see her in your dreams, be sure you never, ever scream or she’ll rip your tongue out at the seam (and let’s be honest: if you saw someone like her, it would probably be hard not to scream…). She is somewhat reminiscent of “The Bride In Black” from the Insidious franchise, so you could say that Mary Shaw was a prototype of other ghostly villains to come.

Overall, Dead Silence is a horror movie that still holds up well after 15 years, and can easily be seen as a nice prelude to Jame’s Wan’s later films into the supernatural horror genre.

Fun fact: there is actually a little easter-egg during the climax of the movie: among Mary Shaw’s collection of dolls, you can see Jigsaw’s doll (from the “Saw” movies) among them.

Director: James Wan
Writers: Leigh Whannell, James Wan
Country & year: USA, 2007
Actors: Ryan Kwanten, Amber Valletta, Donnie Wahlberg, Michael Fairman, Joan Heney, Bob Gunton, Laura Regan, Dmitry Chepovetsky, Judith Roberts, Keir Gilchrist, Steven Taylor, Steve Adams
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0455760/

Malignant (2021)

Posted on September 11, 2021July 11, 2023 by HorrorGhouls

After going through a traumatizing event, Madison starts having visions of grisly murders which are carried out by her childhood imaginary friend, Gabriel. Having believed that Gabriel was just a figment of her own imagination, she must try to figure out who he really is and why he has come back to torment her and those around her.

James Wan, after an absence from the horror genre since Conjuring 2 (as a director, at least) he is now finally back with a brand new movie: Malignant. And while most people connect James Wan with haunted houses, ghosts and demons (because of the Conjuring and Insidious movies), he stated early on that Malignant would be something completely different. And that, indeed, it is.

At the movie’s opening, we go back to 1993 and witness a large, gothic building which is some kind of medical research facility, where the researchers are struggling with a patient called Gabriel, who kills and maims the nurses. We get a slight glimpse of this “Gabriel” fellow, and then we fast forward to present day and meet Madison, who lives in a beautiful victorian house with just the right exterior and interior for a proper creepy atmosphere. And of course, we step right into James Wan-ish territory with creepy hallways and things moving in the dark. While building up at first to be somewhat Conjuring-esque, it shifts and mixes in what is an obvious homage to giallo films (for those who don’t know, “Giallo” is a term for murder mystery thrillers with lots of blood and gruesome murders, mixed with detective/suspense elements).

While it definitely felt good to be able to see another horror movie directed by James Wan, I can easily see how people might be a bit divided regarding their experience with this movie. Those who expect James Wan to have done another movie in the same vein as his haunted house flicks, might be put off due to this being something completely different. In fact, while we were watching it at the big screen, there were some people who left the theater when the first bloody murder scene was shown. Clearly, some people didn’t expect the movie to take that route, despite it having been given a strict R rating…but perhaps they thought that this rating was given because of titty scenes or something (which there are none by the way). Who the fuck knows.

James Wan did indeed do something very different with Malignant, and to be honest it was quite a pleasant surprise. Therefore, my advice would be to see this movie and not expect some kind of “Conjuring 4” or whatever. This isn’t a new haunted house flick, it ain’t another jump-scare carousel. It’s a throwback to the late 80’s/90’s slasher/thriller/giallo films, and if you’re familiar with these kinds of movies you’re most likely going to take a lot of the references (like the color usage, the killer wearing black gloves, etc.). Malignant is a decent slasher with atmosphere and creepy scenes, and a good amount of effective blood ‘n gore.

Director: James Wan
Country & year: USA, 2021
Actors: Annabelle Wallis, Maddie Hasson, George Young, Michole Briana White, Jean Louisa Kelly, Susanna Thompson, Jake Abel, Jacqueline McKenzie, Christian Clemenson, Amir AboulEla, Mercedes Colon, Ingrid Bisu, Ruben Pla, Jon Lee Brody, Ray Chase, Mckenna Grace
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt3811906/