‘Malignant’ and Why Horror is The Most Powerful Genre
A movie in which the antagonist runs backwards is, by definition, a bad movie.
One side-effect of the new pandemic normal is that films just sort of appear on your streaming channels without warning1. Such was the case with Malignant, a horror film directed and co-written by James Wan, who broke in with the Saw franchise and is now busy making Aquaman movies, which suggests that Malignant is something of a side project for him. One day I turned on my magic televisual contraption and there it was, ready to stream, so I streamed2.
Starring Annabelle Wallis, probably best known from Peaky Blinders, Malignant is not, strictly speaking, a good movie. It is in equal measure absolutely ridiculous and not even the least bit terrifying. I’m going to spoil this film, and spoil it hard, in the next paragraph, so you might want to nope out now if you’re planning to watch this movie at some point. Ready?
SPOILER MARK FOR FOLKS WITH POOR READING COMPREHENSION SKILLS DON’T BE THAT PERSON
Wallis plays Madison, a young pregnant woman married to an abusive doofus. Madison has suffered miscarriages, and there’s tension between her and her husband—so much so that he slams her head against a wall hard enough to draw blood. Later, her husband is killed by a mysterious figure in their living room, and Madison suffers another miscarriage. As Madison tries to get her life back, she’s haunted by visions of gruesome murders and it’s revealed that she was adopted, and spent time in a psychiatric hospital3. And as it turns out, she had a parasitic twin named Gabriel who had some kind of psychic abilities4. Scientists at the hospital were experimenting on her and Gabriel, and ultimately decided to surgically remove Gabriel—but they couldn’t cut out his portion of their shared brain, so they just stuffed it into her head5. As one does. When Maddy’s head got slammed into the wall, Gabriel woke up, pushed his ‘face’ out through her skull, and began taking control of her body—walking backwards and twisting her limbs around.
All I can say is: Yep.
It’s all deeply silly. Once you realize that the “killer” is Maddy running backwards, it becomes impossible not to hear Yakety Sax in your head every time it happens6. SO, it’s dumb—but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth watching. Because it’s got one huge advantage: It’s a horror movie, and horror is possibly the most versatile and powerful genre in fiction7.
Zombies are Metaphors for ... Everything
More than any other genre, horror is universally accepted to be about anything other than what it is literally about. True Blood is about the AIDS crisis, Dawn of the Dead is about consumerist society, Hereditary is about despair and suicide—horror is a genre that almost automatically comments on something other than itself. Nothing in horror is what it seems. The torrents of blood in The Shining are a symbol of child abuse, Dracula is really about the destructive potency of feminine sexual desire, and Malignant is about PTSD and domestic abuse.
I mean, it’s obvious. Maddie is abused as a child, literally internalizes that suffering and claws her way to a normal life without ever dealing with her trauma, then finds that trauma consuming her when her husband physically abuses her. Having never actually dealt with her initial trauma, her adult suffering breaks her, and she goes on a rampage of revenge—it’s significant, of course, that her first victim is her husband8.
But this is the joy of horror as a genre. It’s never about what it’s supposed to be about. There’s always a subtext, often so powerful it might as well be text. Even your shittiest shoestring budget slasher film horror about an insane clown cutting kids into snack-sized bites is actually about the commodification of youth or something.
Let Me Take You Down
Horror also excels in fucking with you. It’s sometimes acceptable in other genres to fuck with you—Agatha Christie got away with it in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and there’s a rich tradition of unreliable narrators in literature great and small. In Malignant, one of the ways Wan fucks with his audience is by giving Gabriel those psychic abilities, which he uses to fool his sister when he takes over her body and makes her run backwards like some sort of less-threatening Exorcist girl. What Maddie experiences as uncanny visions is actually her witnessing the murders while under Gabriel’s influence. That allows Wan to keep up the pretense that Maddie and the killer are different people, because we assume she’s seeing visions when in fact she’s literally there in the room. Because she’s the one killing everyone, if I’m not being clear. Well, technically it’s her parasitic twin, taking control of her body and putting her into a trance, but ... I’m not sure any real-world court of law would accept that distinction9.
This is crucial because its the engine that allows horror to be both a story about a murderous possessed ventriloquist dummy and late-stage capitalism’s exploitation of the worker. Maddie’s hallucinations give us just enough pretext to ignore the extremely obvious fact that she’s clearly the killer, which in turn allows Wan to develop his themes. These sorts of tricks are like smoke grenades in horror stories—the writer is essentially kicking sand in your face while they tell the story so you don’t notice what’s really going on10.
Of course, subtext always seems thrilling when written about and analyzed, but we can’t forget that Malignant is a film where the monster runs backwards and a woman has an entire face pushing out of the back of her head but no one, including the woman herself, notices. Maybe the secret subtext here is that I have terrible taste in films. You’re welcome.
Next week: The Wheel of Time and rushing emotional beats.
To be fair, I’ve always lived my life like a life-sized Winnie the Pooh, startling out of naps with adorable little grunts and then blinking around, wondering what year it is and whether they’ve cured cancer yet.
I’d like to make some sort of intllectual-ish point about how streaming has made it soooo easy to watch trash, but then I remember actually going to a physical store and renting something called Meridian starring Sherilynn Fenn when I was like 20, which took actual physical effort and minor logistics, so … yeah.
I swear, if amnesia didn’t exist horror writers would have to invent it.
Rule 234 of horror stories is that if someone existed in the protagonist’s past but is presumed dead, they ain’t dead, even a little bit.
You gotta love movies that imagine children being subjected to horrifying experiments by what appear to be a group of fucking board-certified doctors with zero explanation about how in the fucking world they managed to do so. I mean, I can suspend my disbelief for stuff like that, really I can, but all I ask is a reach-around kind of explanation for the how.
For the uninitiated, I present to you the greatest achievement in television history.
Recently augmented by the zombie genre, which is basically a no-effort metaphor for … whatever you’ve got. Pandemics? Consumerism? Cults? People who buy Apple products? 60 percent of the time, it works every time.
On the other hand, if my wife suddenly snapped and transformed into a killing machine, I would be her first victim simply because I’m standing next to her. That would be the only reason. The only reason. Nothing else.
If courts of law accepted the whole “my sibling deserves to be punished” thing, my brother Yan would be in a shitload of trouble.
The whole kicking sand in your reader’s face is perhaps the greatest metaphor for the writing process I’ve ever come up with. You’re welcome.