How does James Wan turn an ordinary family home into the scariest place in the movie, and why does it work on audiences who think they've seen everything?
Spoiler warning: we discuss endings, including Saw's.
James Wan, the Malaysian-born Australian filmmaker behind Saw, Insidious and The Conjuring, redefined 21st century horror on budgets that started with a puppet built in his own apartment. Cathy leads this Part 1 on the craft: how Wan builds fear like architecture.
Therapists Shannon and Cathy break down why we sit down to horror wanting to be manipulated, and how Wan does it to a jaded modern audience the way a panic attack does it to the body: never the same way twice.
CHAPTERS:
0:00 James Wan and the architecture of fear
1:18 Sundance and the Saw screening
2:05 Who is James Wan?
4:48 Horror like a panic attack
7:15 Saw, Dead Silence, Insidious, The Conjuring and beyond
10:34 Fun facts: the Splat Pack and how Billy was built
14:36 Bringing back 70s torture horror, with characters you care about
16:16 Haunted houses and haunted dolls
18:49 Doing more with less
20:11 The house as a trap
23:08 Which house would you refuse to sleep in?
27:30 Suspense like a blueprint
28:44 Long shots, silence and The Changeling
30:07 Lighting, and fearing what you can't see
33:02 The geometry of a James Wan jump scare
36:02 Halloween's schoolyard scene and false safety
37:36 The Insidious demon reveal
39:28 Lightning round
42:08 Coming up in Part 2
IN THIS EPISODE:
- Saw (2004), Dead Silence (2007), Insidious (2010), The Conjuring (2013), Furious 7 (2015), Aquaman (2018) and Malignant (2021)
- Saw II's needle pit and the reverse bear trap
- Leigh Whannell, Tobin Bell, Lin Shaye and Donnie Wahlberg
- The Splat Pack: Eli Roth, Rob Zombie and Alexandre Aja
- The real Raggedy Ann behind Annabelle
- Why Wan starts every haunting in comfort: the cinematic equivalent of love bombing
- Long takes and the micro delay versus rapid cuts and the fake-out jump scare
- Misdirection, negative space and the threat outside the frame
- The Changeling (1980), Black Christmas (1974), Se7en (1995), Poltergeist (1982) and John Carpenter's Halloween (1978)
- Which household object would haunt you in a Wan film
CLINICAL TERMS: fear response, panic attacks, panic disorder, habituation, hypervigilance, love bombing, abusive dynamics, projection, safe and sacred space, psychology of horror
SERIES: James Wan Part 1 of 2. Part 2 takes on The Conjuring universe through six psychological questions.
Two licensed therapists, one forensic psychologist, one clinical LMFT, take apart the minds behind the crimes.
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