The Forgotten John Carpenter Film That Inspired James Wan's Malignant
A long-forgotten John Carpenter movie from the late 1970s served as inspiration for filmmaker James Wan when creating Malignant. Though many predicted the movie was based on Wan's graphic novel Malignant Man, the film was an original tale written alongside Ingrid Bisu and Akela Cooper. That said, the story about a woman experiencing deadly visions paid tribute to existing horror titles.
The 2021 film, which simultaneously debuted on HBO Max the same day as theaters, officially serves as Wan's return to the horror genre after reaching wider audiences with Furious 7 and Aquaman. The filmmaker got his big break when he developed the Saw franchise in the early '00s, directing the first installment in 2004. Despite remaining involved in the sequels, Wan struck gold again when he helmed 2010's Insidious, which spawned three sequels. From there, Wan launched the Conjurverse with the release of his paranormal hit, The Conjuring. Aside from directing The Conjuring 2, Wan worked on other movies in the franchise, including the Annabelle movies, The Nun, and the most recent installment, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It.
Following the release of Malignant, there have been discussions of how the movie's cinematography and tone match that of an Italian Giallo, a subgenre for thrillers and mystery fiction. That was certainly the goal of Wan, considering he has widely shared how the latest horror title is a tribute to Italian filmmaker greats like Dario Argento and the Bava family in addition to other trailblazers like Brian De Palma and David Cronenberg. When crafting Malignant, Wan specifically looked at lesser-known indie titles and movies that were forgotten by the general public, including John Carpenter's Eyes of Laura Mars from 1978. The movie, which Irvin Kershner directed, starred big-name actors like Faye Dunaway and Tommy Lee Jones, but it came and went after a lukewarm reception from critics. Granted, Eyes of Laura Mars had the staying power with Wan as he used it as a direct inspiration for Malignant.
In an interview (via SciFiNow), Wan described how Carpenter's Eyes of Laura Mars stuck with him when he tackled Malignant: "One of the things I wanted to do was hark back to… there was a particular style of late-Eighties and early-Nineties serial killer stories. It’s that subgenre where you follow the victim or the main character, and you follow them through the eyes of the murderer." Evidently, Eyes of Laura Mars' plot point in focusing on a woman who can see through the eyes of a killer led to Maddie's initial connection to Gabriel's killings in Malignant. Considering Eyes of Laura Mars was also viewed as an American take on Italian Giallo, it made sense why Wan would draw inspiration from the cult title.
Even though Eyes of Laura Mars may be forgotten especially when compared to Carpenter's other 1978 film, Halloween, Wan's Malignant is certainly making an effort to resurrect the American version of the Giallo subgenre. Interestingly enough, Carpenter attempted to bring back an aspect of the 1978 movie through 1998's Vampires. Carpenter directed the neo-noir horror film, which included a psychic link between a woman and the master vampire in a similar fashion to the women's connection to killers in Eyes of Laura Mars and Malignant.