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Malignant is not for everyone. Nor does it want to be. Directed by James Wan, this new horror release is an electric combination of Wan’s The Conjuring and Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead. It combines atmospheric “who’s around that corner?” scares with excellent practical effects and a willingness to go bugnuts bonkers in a way that most movies won’t or aren’t allowed to anymore. While the movie is available for streaming on HBO Max, I’d recommend going to see it in theaters if you can. This movie deserves the big screen.
It must be said here, before I go any further that Malignant is a stupid movie. It is not a “cerebral” horror movie, or a work of “elevated horror,” or any of the other words that critics use to justify liking a genre piece. The key thing is that it does not want to be any of those. It doesn’t bill itself as a re-imagining of the horror film, or about exploring the role of trauma in familial relationships, or something like that. It’s just James Wan flexing his horror chops and the actors, set designers, and everyone else clearly having a great time working in the world that he’s created. That’s why it works.
The best horror movies go after the rat part of your brain. The part of your brain that makes you jump at shadows in the night, the part that makes you do something that you know is stupid because there’s a chance that it might turn out okay. Like all pieces of art horror movies try to manipulate you. The best ones force you to tear down the walls of irony you’ve built between yourself and the world and deal with the horrors within.
I realize that previous sentence made me sound like one of those guys who is way too into A24 movies. I am way too A24 movies, so it fits, but I think it’s true. It’s just a fancier way of saying that horror flicks should make you scared.
The problem, for horror auteurs at least, is that there are not a lot of ways to scare people that look good on film. Most people deepest fears are highly individualized and impossible to show in narrative form. The other problem, and this is more of an industry-wide problem than a horror specific one, is that Hollywood doesn’t like to take risks. All movies, but horror ones specifically, require choices to be successful. A horror movie where you know when ever jump scare will come, who dies when, what the monster looks like etc etc, is not a good horror movie.
Choice come in all shapes and sizes. Whether it’s trying to invert a typical narrative, a new lighting choice, or changing the setting to something unusual, these are all creative choices, or risks. An artistic vision don’t have to be extraordinary, or graphic, or gruesome to be effective. It just needs to make some choices, to try to be a little different at least. This is one of the reasons why Malignant is so successful. It has a lot of the “ordinary” stuff of horror movies. A woman with a dark past, a gothic looking house that may or may not be haunted, science experiments gone wrong, detectives who are out of their league. All these things have been done before. Often in the same movie. Where Malignant distinguishes itself is in the small, and occasionally big, ways it chooses to display these things. It has the fingerprints of real choices and risks all over it. From the director’s choices, to that of the prop departments, to that of the actors, everyone is making decisions and sticking to them.
Compare that to any of Netflix’s new blockbuster releases. Netflix in its ongoing attempt to dominate entertainment, and with a budget larger than God itself has started to fund and produce its own movies. With a few exceptions, they’ve been uniformly trash. Most of them rely on a similar formula. Hire one big name star, surround them with one B-list person known for their acting, and a bunch of unknowns. Choreograph a few highly digitized fight scenes, add in a love story, hire a bunch of non-union CGI artists to create the backgrounds, use apparently the only lighting guy they have in the company who makes everything look like shit, wash, rinse and repeat. Kate, 6 Underground, Triple Frontier, and The Old Guard all follow this pattern. None of them are any good, mostly because none of these movies take any risks.
This is, per multiple rumors, part of Netflix’s whole thing. Multiple creators have claimed that executives at the streaming service forced them to make specific choices based on various recommendations by some sort of secret algorithm that calculated what people most wanted to see in movies. Even if this is only half true, it makes sense. Above all Netflix is interested in making money for its shareholders. That’s it. Art is only secondary to making money for them. Movies are just another way in which they can increase their profit margins. It is not a place where risks are willingly taken. Why spend money on something that could be a total bomb, or a PR disaster, or a controversy magnet, when you can just keep putting out stuff that people sort of pay attention to when they look at their phones? It’s worked so far, no need to change it.
But that’s enough about Netflix. I could talk about that shit all day. Back to Malignant. Like I said, it’s a stupid film, but in a good way, not a Die Another Day way. When I watched it there were only about three other people in the theater. One guy was laughing through the previews, and even at some of the movie. Which is fine. But in the last thirty minutes, which will make or break your appreciation for the movie, he was silent, enrapt with what was happening on the screen. That’s the power of a good movie, making someone who, as far as I could tell, did not give a shit about this movie, making them care about the product. Not a lot of films can claim to do that. But Malignant can. For that reason alone, you should give it a shot.
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