Interview: James Wan Reflects on Malignant, The Freedom of Horror

To celebrate its release on 4K Ultra HD, ComingSoon spoke with Malignant director James Wan about his return to the horror genre, what inspired the shocking film, and his dream horror projects.

“In the film, Madison is paralyzed by shocking visions of grisly murders, and her torment worsens as she discovers that these waking dreams are in fact terrifying realities,” says the synopsis.

Tyler Treese: I love that the film isn’t afraid to be strange and fun. From a narrative perspective, how freeing is it to work within the horror genre where people are wanting to buy into monsters and in the supernatural? It seems like there’s more of a built-in amount of suspension of disbelief there.

James Wan: You know, that’s a really great question. I do think that playing in a genre that has a sandbox, if you will, that allows people to kind of know what they’re coming into already helps a lot. And it does, it frees me up to then cook up a strange and interesting world for people to sort of inhabit this space. That’s part of my love for the horror sci-fi genre is you can kind of come up with a really out-there story, and people are more willing to accept it, you know? That’s a big part of why I love making these films.

This is your first horror film since the success of Aquaman. What were the biggest lessons you learned from the blockbusters that you worked on, that you were able to apply for Malignant?

I always say that I learn from every movie I make regardless of what genre they’re in. And I just apply everything that I’ve picked up over my years of making movies and doing TV and just storytelling in general. So I don’t have a specific thing I would say that I picked up, particularly from the bigger sort of movies I’ve made, maybe the obvious thing is I’ve picked up the knowledge on how to use certain toys and tools, if you will. Having played with sort of bigger pieces of equipment meant that going to making any of my movies, I kind of know roughly what I have at my disposal in terms of my filmmaking bag of tricks.

I read that you and your wife Ingrid were inspired by the urban legend of Edward Mordrake. You clearly have a great eye for horror and stories, so what really stood out about that myth that inspired this?

Well, interestingly enough, when Ingrid sort of brought the idea of an evil twin concept to me, I was like, “Oh you know, that’s cool,” but then I feel like we’ve sort of…the evil twin concept is almost kind of cliche and more used as a joke than anything these days, but the more we talked about it and the more we sort of fleshed out the concept of like, an evil twin that actually isn’t out there, but still lives inside of you was what made it really exciting. And then of course, then we did more research and then we found the story of this particular urban myth, or urban legend. And, it just said to me how weird this idea can be, and that’s part of the fun for me. I like strange and weird things, and I do that in all my movies. It doesn’t matter what genre I make them in, that may explain why I’m more drawn to the world of Aquaman, just because it allows me to come up with weirder and wonderful, strange characters and creatures, right? And it’s really no different for horror as well. Whether my villain is a traditional monster or my villain is a human monster. It’s just part of a package of what I love about horror filmmaking, or filmmaking in general.

Ray Chase is great as the voice of Gabriel and he’s such an accomplished voice actor in games and in anime. So how did you find him, and how did working with him come about?

We just auditioned. I listened to a lot of voices and at one point, we thought about maybe doing stunt casting. Casting someone who’s kind of well-known or famous if you will, to play the voice of Gabriel, but then I thought maybe that may take away from this character, you know? One moment, I fantasized that Michael Keaton would voice Gabriel, which could have been very interesting, but at the end of the day, I decided to not go with someone recognizable. So that way, I feel like you’ll be sort of more drawn into what this character is, his plight, and you’re not trying to go, “Oh my God, that’s so-and-so, famous actor, playing the voice.”

Do you ever look to horror anime as an influence?

You know, it’s funny. I grew up with, obviously with cartoons, animations. I didn’t necessarily grow up with the horror anime. So I wouldn’t say that that was necessarily my biggest influence. I would obviously, as I’ve pointed out in many of my interviews, that my biggest influence was the Italian horror films that I grew up with, and also just sort of like eighties schlock video horror. So, my idea was like, how do I make those kind of films, but sort of bring it to sort of a modern, updated sensibility and to do it at an elevated level.

In 2008, you put together this awesome Dead Space trailer. Is space horror something you’d like to explore more in the future?

I do. I feel like that is probably the sort of sub-genre of horrors that I would love to play in. The probably two that I would love to play in for me personally, if I were ever to direct them, it would be space horror and the zombie genre as well. I want to do my own version of what I feel a zombie movie can be. The perfect thing would be to blend those two together, space horror, space zombies. We’ll see if we ever get to anything like that.

The male lead here, George Young, is so great in his role as a detective. He’s also of Malaysian Chinese descent. Can you speak to just getting to cast him in such an action-packed role?

Yeah, I mean the great thing about Malignant is I was able to just cast whoever I want. I’m not sort of beholden to necessarily need to cast specific people to try make the budget work or to try and get financing and all that. So it just allowed me to pick the people that I wanted to work with the most, and George was one of those people. And, also obviously Annabel Wallace, whom I had worked with before that I really love, she’s so great. And it was just fun to try and discover new people, and the opportunity obviously to work with a fellow Malaysian or one of Malaysian Chinese ancestry was very exciting for me, because I’m always trying to dig into my roots. I mean, as far back as my first movie, working with Ken Leung, I’m always trying to find places to include sort of Asian actors in my work, given that I’m Asian, and I’m always trying to keep that door open for my people, if you will.

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