‘Poltergeist scarred me for life’: James Wan on Saw’s torture-porn label and The Conjuring 2
Scary movie maestro James Wan, who returns to the big screen with yet another spine-chilling sequel, talks about his earliest experience with horror films, his seeming obsession with the poltergeist narrative, and his belief that there are greater forces at work that we don’t understand
It is a testament to James Wan’s diverse accomplishments that his exhilarating direction of Furious 7 – at one point the box-office record holder in China, and currently the sixth highest-grossing film of all time in global receipts – barely constitutes a footnote on his relatively short CV.
Before he pushed the street-racing franchise to new heights with the 2015 instalment, the Malaysian-born, Australian-raised filmmaker of Chinese descent had already written his name into the lore of two cinematic traditions. Wan directed the low-budget psychological thriller Saw (2004) and produced all six sequels in the series, often regarded as the defining franchise in a new breed of shockingly violent horror films half-sarcastically, half-affectionately labelled as “torture porn”.
Just as he was pulling strings behind one of the most profitable horror film franchises in history, the Saw creator was also on hand to direct the well-received haunted house potboilers Insidious (2010), The Conjuring and Insidious: Chapter 2 (both 2013), which earned Wan the reputation of a horror maestro with their old-fashioned but exceptionally effective scares.
And if this slate of mostly gore-free stories of good families being haunted in their own homes by demonic forces come to be viewed as his most important contribution to Hollywood studio trends, it would be entirely appropriate: Wan’s earliest experience with horror movies was courtesy of his mother, who took him to see Poltergeist (1982) in a cinema when he was far too young.
“I think I was six or seven years old, and that film scared the hell out of me,” says Wan, now 39, of the Tobe Hooper-directed, Steven Spielberg-produced classic. “That film really scarred me for life. I was terrified of ghostly stories and creepy clown dolls.”
While creepy dolls have become a recurrent feature in his films – from Billy the Puppet in the Saw films, to the myriad ventriloquist dummies in Dead Silence (2007), and the based-on-true-stories Annabelle doll, which made a spine-chilling entrance in The Conjuring before heading a titular spin-off series, again produced by Wan – it is the director’s seeming obsession with the poltergeist narrative that has exerted the greatest influence on his own efforts.
On a Twitter post from May 2015, Wan called the first Insidious movie “this generation’s Poltergeist”.
