While James Wan has taken on the likes of Aquaman and Furious 7, he is perhaps best known for his entries into the horror genre. He introduced the world to Saw, only to launch Insidious in 2010 and kick off The Conjuring franchise in 2013. Now, Wan is back at it again with his new film Malignant, but there's more to this film than its thrills. During a press conference attended by CBR, Wan shared how this horror movie blends genres together.

"When people ask me how to describe this film, I say it's a genre bender, but then the more correct way of describing it would be a genre blender, and the blender is my head, and all the stuff that I've filtered all through the years, growing up with all these filmmakers that I love, and this is the output of that blending," Wan explained. "[Sam] Raimi is in there. [David] Cronenberg, [Dario] Argento, [Mario] Bava and [Brian] De Palma as well. It's a combination of things, and it's hard for me to sort of pinpoint it to one person, per se."

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Wan also looked back at his childhood and how the scary movies found in video stores sparked what would eventually become Malignant. "When people ask me, 'What is the feel of the film?' or 'How would I describe it in a way where I don't describe the story?', I would say it's the kind of movie for me when I was growing up in the late '80s and early '90s where I would go to the video store," Wan recalled. "We would travel all the way to the back of the video store to the horror section, and we'll go even deeper than that to the back shelves of the horror section, and the movie that we will pull out will be this film that we would have never seen before, but it has a cool cover. We've never heard of it, and I want Malignant to be that movie."

Given some of the directors he referenced (specifically Cronenberg) as well as his fond memories of those horror movies hidden in the back of a video store, it makes sense that Wan found a way to integrate body horror into his latest film. "Obviously it is body horror," he said. "It allows me to delve in that world and play with practical special makeup effects, which I'm a huge fan of, and this movie really gave me the opportunity to do so. But also, what it allowed me to do is... kind of allow me to create a world that feels supernatural, but it's really psychological."

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His inspirations go beyond just the horror genre. While it may not always be a direct inspiration, the stories and movies Wan grew up with, along with his heritage, have influenced his works to varying to degrees. "As for sort of Asian influences in my work, I'm heavily inspired by and influenced by Asian stories that I grew up hearing my whole life, in Malaysia and then eventually being exposed to just great Asian cinema around the world," he revealed. "Great supernatural stories from around the world. A lot of times, I would say even if they don't outright inspire me from the get go, it's always in the back of my mind."

Pulling from so many different inspirations directly and indirectly set the bar high for Wan. This, along with his reputation in the horror community, gave the director and his crew an impressive challenge, which he was not afraid to take on, even if it meant pushing things in a new direction. "At the end of the day, I really wanted to create a villain that we haven't quite seen before and do him justice and do the concept justice," he teased. "If we're going to come up with something so extreme, let's see if we can execute it correctly, and that was a big part of the challenge."

Malignant, directed by James Wan, will hit theaters and HBO Max on September 10. 

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