The timeline ofMalignantbeing unleashed on the world is so pure that it’s worth recounting. What we knew, for sure, is that James Wan had just made Warner Bros. one billion goddamn dollars with anAquamanmovie, and instead of being canonically recognized as a saint for performing this miracle, he was given free rein to return to his horror roots. The assumption, strengthened by an initial trailer that didn’t offer much, was Wan would produce something close toThe Conjuring, his 2013 horror hit that became a franchise through an incredibly back-to-basics bump-in-the-night style scares. We had forgotten, like a bunch of clowns, that James Wanalsoonce ushered horror into its nu-metal phase withSaw. This was not aConjuringredux, this was the return of the early-2000s king.
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I still remember the first whispers out of a few select press screenings thatMalignantmight actually be less of an old-school Ed and Lorraine Warren aesthetic, more “the greatest hits of Korn as remixed byMario Bava.” Idefinitelystill remember the screening I attended roughly three hours before the film started streaming on HBO Max—attended by about 3 other critics—that I left floating on air, realizing this wonderful madman actually snuck an aggressively campy B-movie through a major studio system.Malignantis one of the most successful word-of-mouth movies of the last few decades, spreading not because of marketing, but like the dusty VHS tapes and crinkly horror mag back-pages of old. It is both physically impossible and morally irresponsible to watchMalignantand not immediately tell someone they must also watchMalignant.
The batshit beauty of the film, which Wan directed from a script byAkela Cooper,is how hard it commits to its own bit. The plot isn’t anything too far outside the average midnight movie wheelhouse. A woman, Madison Lake (Wallis), believes she’s having visions of a gruesome series of murderers carried out by a leather-clad monster calling himself Gabriel. The twist, familiar to anyone withBasket Casesitting on their shelf, is that Gabriel is Madison’s parasitic twin, removed at birth but still clinging to the back of her brain, emerging every so often to pilot his sister in reverse. It’s not the story mechanics that makeMalignantspecial, but the way Wan orchestrates them on the razor’s edge between camp and craftsmanship. This is a movie that truly could only have been made at this scale with the type of blank check a billion-dollar win earns a filmmaker. It rejects almost all of what’s in vogue in mainstream horror right now, insteadrocketingback to a basement-floor-dirt aesthetic grit that screams 2004, while also singing with the type of gruesome playfulness clearly inspired by 1970s Italian horrors andEd Wood-style the-zipper-is-showing sci-fi. It’s a movie made with the DIY crowd in mind, a “low-budget” gorefest backed by a high budget, a love letter to anyone who ever swapped VHS copies ofYour Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key.
That hodgepodge of style and inspirations is also a key reasonMalignantspread so virally. Part of watchingMalignantis getting onMalignant’s wavelength, an experience that forces audiences to consider whether narrative and performance choices we’d normally consider “bad” in a mainstream blockbuster can actually, in fact, whip complete ass. (Anyone who has ever called Malignant “unintentionally funny” needs to, like Madison, have their head checked.) The hope is, by the time the film has a woman plummet several stories through a living room table and then immediately transitions to “Where Is My Mind” by Pixies—famously used to underscore the twist inFight Club—you realize Wan and Cooper not only know exactly what they’re doing, but you’re being guided through by rocksteady hands.
You’re basking in pure, uncut B-movie vibes by the timeMalignantcomes to itstruly unhinged climax, a set-piece that sees Gabriel reveal his demonic prune-looking face and slaughter an entire police precinct’s worth of people, backward. The setpiece is, in many ways, an amalgam of Wan’s entire career, a wild original horror idea orchestrated with the action pyrotechnicsAquamanand aFast & Furiousmovie will teach you, that’s still lovingly, practically hand-crafted. ContortionistMarina Mazepaactually performed a good deal of Gabriel’s rampageon set with an animatronic of Annabelle Wallis’ face attached to the back of her head, a behind-the-scenes fact I cherish more than most of my extended family.
At the tail-end of 2021, we’re seeingSpider-Man: No Way Homeabsolutelydemolish box office numbersin ways we didn’t think were possible during an ongoing pandemic, a scenario that raises questions about the future of non-tentpole movies. We’re heading into 2022 off the heels of a gorgeousGuillermo del Toronoirand masterfulSteven Spielbergmusicalgoing soundly ignored, a fact that’d be easy to chalk up to COVID-19 if people weren’t also turning out in droves forNo Way Home. It’s an uncomfortable conversation with no easy answers. But it’s also whyMalignantfeels important. Wan’s film is proof that something wholly original anddecidedlyweird still has a place, can still dominate the pop culture conversation, even if it’s only for a brief stretch of time, even if it primarily lands on streaming, even if a million different variables are true. Gabriel, in a grand act of irony, feels like a way forward.
