The creator of the Saw, Insidious and The Conjuring franchises is an executive producer on the new Netflix series Archive 81, based on the found-footage podcast drama that premiered in 2016. The show (which hits Netflix on Friday, Jan. 14) tells the story of Dan (MamoudouAthie), a young archivist hired to restore a collection of nineties videotapes damaged in a fire. As Dan delves into the tapes, he begins to piece together the story of a documentary filmmaker, Melody (DinaShihabi), who was investigating a sinister New York City cult. The more footage Dan restores, the more invested he becomes in Melody’s story—until fates become dangerously, supernaturally entwined. Archive 81 is only the third horror series produced by Wan (the others being DC Universe’s Swamp Thing and Prime’s I Know What You Did Last Summer) and it plays to one of his favorite themes: old toys and gadgets that hide evil secrets. But there’s much more to Wan’s work than scary dolls and shocking deaths. The Australian filmmaker, born in Malaysia to Malaysian-Chinese parents, began his career as an upstart independent director with his 2004 debut Saw. By 2019, the Aquaman and Furious 7 director was ranked among The Hollywood Reporter’s 100 Most Powerful People in Entertainment.
James Wan movies
1. Saw (2004)
One of the all-time great directorial debuts of the horror genre, the low-budget Saw is credited with reviving the ’70s and ’80s splatter film (rechristened “torture porn”) for a new generation. Though it’s full of jaw-dropping violence (literally, in the case of a woman whose face is locked in a reverse bear trap), Wan’s film has significantly less gore than the sequels and imitators that followed in its wake. (“We didn’t set out to make a torture movie,” Wan has said.) The genius of Saw is that its extreme murders are contained in an old-fashioned, locked-room mystery, more Agatha Christie than Grand Guignol. The premise, conceived by Wan and frequent collaborator Leigh Whannell, plays like a classic brain teaser: two strangers (The Princess Bride’s CaryElwes and screenwriter Whannell) are trapped in a room, chained to opposite walls, a dead body between them. How did they get there? How do they escape? The men are offered a grisly ultimatum by an unseen serial killer, whom two police detectives (Danny Glover and Ken Leung) are simultaneously chasing. The Jigsaw Killer has shades of the villain in David Fincher’s 1995 thriller Se7en; he, too, sees his carefully orchestrated murders as self-inflicted by the victims, and his actions as a gift to a fallen world. But while Se7ven’s killer reveled in anonymity, Saw’s killer is deliciously theatrical, wearing a terrifying puppet head that quickly gave Ghostface and Jason a run for Halloween supremacy. Saw’s final claim to fame is its twist ending. Arguably scarier than every bloody death scene that proceeds it, it’s a chilling “gotcha” that no film in the franchise ever managed to top. Saw is streaming on Starz.
2. Dead Silence (2007)
For his second feature, Wan attempted to revive a more niche horror subgenre: the scary-puppet film. Ventriloquists and talking dolls have a long history of creating onscreen terror, with memorably evil dummies appearing in the 1945 thriller The Dead of Night, a 1962 Twilight Zone episode, and the 1978 horror film Magic. Dead Silence, unfortunately, made less of an impression. Written by Saw’s Whannell (who later denounced the film, saying it was ruined by interference from studio producers), Dead Silence tells the grotesque tale of a family haunted by a dead ventriloquist, Mary Shaw (JudithRoberts), who rips out the tongues of her murder victims. Though the film flaunts Wan’s gift for ratcheting the tension of a jump scare, the convoluted story alienated critics and failed to lure moviegoers. Dead Silence has since developed a cult following, as evidenced by popular remixes of the theme song and millions of YouTube views for its more deranged scenes. Wan’s greatest revenge, however, was returning to the theme in 2013’s The Conjuring—this time, creating a haunted puppet so memorable that she launched her own franchise.
3. Death Sentence (2007)
Wan’s throwback vigilante film bears more than a passing resemblance to the 1974 revenge-and-testosterone action flick Death Wish, starring CharlesBronson. This one stars KevinBacon as the mild-mannered family man turned merciless vengeance-seeker. Death Sentence is, in fact, loosely based on the sequel to the novel that inspired Death Wish, though Wan uses little more than the book’s title and its somewhat ambiguous condemnation of vigilante justice. In Wan’s film, businessman Nick Hume (Bacon) is radicalized after his hockey-player teenage son is murdered in a gang initiation. The wheels of justice do not turn quickly or efficiently enough for Nick, who sabotages the trial of a gang member (MattO’Leary) in order to stage his own attack. The rest of the gang (led by GarrettHedlund) puts the pieces together, triggering a cycle of violence and revenge that turns Nick into a person he doesn’t recognize. John Goodman has a very John Goodman cameo as a gun dealer who’s more than he appears, and there’s a memorable scene in which a parking garage becomes a murder weapon. Though Wan has expressed pride in the film, Death Sentence received mixed reviews and lost money at the box office.
4. Insidious (2010)
Ghosts are lurking everywhere in Insidious: behind half-closed doors, in the static of a baby monitor, and worse, in the people you love. Wan’s comeback film marked a return to indie horror, after his two post-Saw studio films flopped. Determined to challenge his reputation as a guru of gore, and almost certainly inspired by the success of 2007’s Paranormal Activity (with which Insidious shares a producer), Wan set out to make “a scary movie that didn’t have an ounce of blood in it.“Insidious is essentially a haunted-house story, dense with atmosphere and emotion. Rose Byrne and Patrick Wilson play the parents of three young children, one of whom falls into a mysterious coma shortly after the family moves to a creepy old Victorian. When the mother begins to see and hear strange intruders, she decides that the house is trying to kill them—quite a rational conclusion for anyone who’s ever seen a horror movie. In Insidious, however, it’s not that simple, and the boy in the coma is the key to everything. The story turns on the terrific performance of veteran horror actress LinShaye, playing a medium who immediately diagnoses the family’s problem and delivers tons of exposition telling them how to solve it. For all its sinister apparitions, nothing in Insidious is more frightening than Wan’s camera. It floats around the characters like a butterfly net, catching eerie glimpses of the supernatural in the most unlikely places, keeping the audience off-balance for the whole film. Insidious was a hit, making nearly $100 million dollars worldwide on a budget of around $1 million.
5. The Conjuring (2013)
Wan’s masterpiece of terror retells an allegedly true story about paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren. Best known for the case that became The Amityville Horror, the Warrens kept this lesser-known story “locked away” because it was “so malevolent,” as the film’s breathless opening credits tell us. In many ways, The Conjuring plays like a more sophisticated Poltergeist (a film that Wan has named as an influence). It begins as the story of a loving family whose children start to experience strange occurrences in their new home until it becomes clear that the house is haunted by a malevolent spirit that must be exorcised before it kills them all. The key storytelling difference is the Warrens. Whereas Poltergeist’s medium, played by ZeldaRubenstein, was somewhat of an otherworldly creature herself, Ed (Patrick Wilson again) and Lorraine (VeraFarmiga) are presented as devout scholars. They show exorcism videos to college classrooms and keep a museum’s worth of well-researched demonic relics locked up in their home. The characters’ authority gives their scenes an almost documentary-like quality; it’s impossible not to wonder which parts of the story are real. That’s all the opening that Wan needs to scare the living daylights out of an audience. The story of the haunted Perron family unspools slowly, relaxing viewers into the ordinary rhythm of their lives before the jarring revelations begin. For more than 40 minutes, nothing supernatural is shown onscreen. The chills are generated, instead, by the characters’ reactions: the shock of the mother (an excellent LiliTaylor) when she hears a sound coming from the wrong place, the horror of a child (JoeyKing) when an invisible something touches her feet, Lorraine’s wary eyes as she turns the crank of an antique music box. The dread mounts to unbearable levels before unleashing a full nightmare of evil spirits, vengeful witches, matricide, and one extremely creepy doll (Annabelle, who inspired her own spin-off franchise). The Conjuring famously received an R rating simply for being so scary, despite its lack of extreme violence, nudity and foul language. The low-budget film was a surprise blockbuster, making over $300 million at the worldwide box office. To date, it’s Wan’s highest-earning horror film in the U.S. The Conjuringis streaming on Netflix and HBO Max.
6. Insidious: Chapter 2(2013)
The Insidious sequel picks up right at the first movie’s cliffhanger ending, in which one major character is killed and another appears to be possessed by a demon. In continuing the story of the Lambert family, the movie weaves together several different timelines and introduces multiple haunted locations. Like the first film, Chapter 2 delivers truly frightening ghosts without gore. There’s also an added found-footage element, courtesy of two characters whose video camera unlocks some awful secrets. The film seems engineered to contain as many scares as possible, even as the story becomes nearly impossible to follow. Nevertheless, Chapter 2 is an effective fright machine that builds on the mythology of the spirit realm known as “The Further.” This is the highest-grossing of the Insidious films (four to date) and the last directed by Wan, who actually left halfway through filming to make Furious 7. Insidious 2is streaming on Netflix.
7. Furious7 (2015)
Wan took a hard turn from low-budget horror to direct Furious 7, the most expensive film of 2015 after Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Avengers: Age of Ultron. The testosterone-and-gasoline-fueled Fast and Furious franchise began in 2001 with the simple story of Dominic Torretto (VinDiesel), the leader of an illegal street-racing gang, and Brian O’Conner (PaulWalker), the LAPD officer who gets drawn into his world. By Fast Five, the auto-shop pals were performing high-tech international heists; by this seventh installment, they were practically superheroes. This evolution worked out well for Wan, who has a gift for blending the real and fantastical. In Furious 7, Toretto and O’Conner’s crew is threatened by a vengeful new enemy, Deckard Shaw (played by JasonStatham), and enlists the help of a government agent (KurtRussell), who in turn asks them to recover a dangerous identity-hacking device from the hands of terrorists. Naturally, this mission involves parachuting cars from a cargo plane, driving through mid-air from one of Abu Dhabi’s Etihad Towers to the other, and lots of hand-to-hand fighting in moving vehicles and fancy outfits. One of the movie’s memorable action sequences involves the fewest special effects: an adrenaline-spiking fight between Shaw and DSS agent Hobbes (DwayneJohnson) that makes their eventual spin-off all but inevitable. There’s an element of the supernatural in the plot of Furious 7, which turns the cross necklace worn by Letty (MichelleRodriguez) into a near-magical talisman. But the film’s most haunting ghost is one that Wan didn’t plan for: Walker, who died during production. Using an elaborate series of digital effects and lookalikes, Wan created a new ending for O’Conner that doubles as an emotional tribute to the actor’s work. Furious 7 quickly became the most successful film of the franchise (a title it still holds, several sequels later) and the song commissioned for Walker’s final scene, Wiz Khalifa’s “See You Again,” was the No. 1 song in the country for twelve weeks.
8. The Conjuring 2 (2016)
This worthy sequel to The Conjuring delves back into the Warrens’ case files, this time for a more famous case of possession: the Enfield poltergeist. Lorraine and Ed (played once again by Wilson and Farmiga) are called to the London suburbs to investigate a child, Janet (MadisonWolfe), who has been videotaped speaking in the voice of an old man after a series of frightening occurrences in her family’s home. As they try to determine whether Janet’s possession is real or a hoax, Lorraine is distracted by her own visions of a demonic nun (BonnieAarons) and premonitions of her husband’s death. Written by Christian screenwriters as an explicit faith-conquers-all story, The Conjuring 2 is heavy on Catholic imagery while also drawings scare from Wan’s favorite tropes: analog toys (a zoetrope, a firetruck), malevolent ghosts (the Nun and Crooked Man are especially terrifying), and sounds that emerge from all the wrong places. It’s not quite as good as the original: the long story meanders, and the family at the story’s center is thinly drawn (their main characteristic is “working-class British”).Even so, it captures the spark and surprising gravitas that made The Conjuring a modern classic. The sequel was nearly as successful as the first film at the U.S. box office, and did better than the first in international markets. The Conjuring 2is streaming on Netflix and HBO Max.
9. Aquaman (2018)
When Wan entered the DC Extended Universe, the franchise was known for its violent, brooding take on heroes like Batman and Superman. The rapturously-received Wonder Woman (2017) challenged the notion that DC’s films should permanently reside in a gritty, monochromatic world. But it was Wan who really blew things up, making a film as big, goofy and preposterous as the very idea of a superhero who talks to fish. Aquaman stars JasonMomoa as title character Arthur Curry, a half-human, half-Atlantean prince with a surfer’s laidback charisma. After spending his whole life on land, Arthur is attacked by apirate (later to be known as the villain Black Manta, played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and drawn into an undersea war involving his half-brother Orm (played by Wan fave Wilson). Determined to reclaim his place on the thrown, Arthur joins sea princess Mera (AmberHeard) in an epic quest that takes them to Italy, the Sahara desert, a hidden sea-monster realm called The Trench, and most impressively, to the secret lair of an ancient squid creature voiced by JulieAndrews.Aquaman’s playful tone and bombastic, neon-tinted battles polarized critics, but audiences were all in. Wan’s superhero debut drowned the competition at the box office, making over a billion dollars worldwide. Aquaman is streaming on HBO Max.
10. Malignant (2021)
A return to horror, but a major departure from his signature haunted-house films, Wan’s grotesque and captivating Malignant is a film best described as “downright bonkers.” The movie, based on an original idea by Wan and his wife IngridBisu, follows a mild-mannered woman named Madison (AnnabelleWatson) who begins to experience shocking premonitions of murder. Attempting to understand the source of her visions, Madison’s sister Sydney (MaddieHasson) reveals a family secret that leads the women down a dangerous path, to a mysteriously powerful killer named Gabriel. To say more is to spoil the film’s Krazy Straw of a plot, which veers from chilling psychodrama to extreme body horror to total absurdity. Malignant showed a different side of Wan as a horror director, with shades of Italian Giallo films and 1980s slasher movies. (Wan told EW that he specifically wanted a chance to play with practical effects: “blood and guts and all the cool animatronic stuff.”) The unexpected film seemed destined to be a sleeper hit—but since it was released during a Covid surge, the box office never gained momentum. The movie was released simultaneously for streaming on HBO Max for one month and generated plenty of online buzz. In December, Malignant was voted the best horror film of the year by Reddit’s 2.5-million-member Horror subreddit. Next, We Ranked the 151 Best Horror Movies Ever—From Frankenstein to Malignant
