You know what James Wan is very good at? Scaring the bejesus out of you. And with Malignant, he’s back in seemingly very fine form.
Warner Bros. has just dropped the first trailer for Malignant, being heralded as Wan’s directorial return to the horror genre after some time away in the DC Comics universe and blowing up so, so, so many cars.
Written by The Nun 2‘s Akela Cooper and based on a story by Wan, Cooper, and Ingrid Bisu (who also stars), Malignant follows a woman named Madison (Annabelle and The Mummy’s Annabelle Wallis) who finds herself afflicted with horrifying visions of both the world warping around her and fragments of murder victims’ final moments, watching them perish at the hands of an unseen killer in real time.
But when Madison starts to pry into the mysterious circumstances around her visions, she discovers the killer is a) linked to her traumatic past, b) possibly the devil incarnate, and c) distressingly flexible.
It’s a whole lot, especially when Madison’s old imaginary friend Gabriel not only starts leveraging those strange wall-warps she’s been seeing as a form of travel, but when it seems like he starts taking possession of Madison as well, both haunting her and using her as some kind of vessel to talk to the people trying to help her. As the bodies start flying, literally in some cases, Gabriel’s grip on the world and Madison herself just gets more and more intense, and, well, it makes for an unpleasant time for all involved, to say the least.
Malignant, also starring Maddie Hasson, George Young, Michole Briana White, Jacqueline McKenzie, and Jake Abel alongside Wallis and Bisu, is set to receive a VOD release through HBO Max on September 10. Stay tuned for where it’ll end up in Australia.