Between Saw and The Conjuring, James Wan serves up a spooky, if familiar, horror tale.
James Wan has to be considered the most successful horror director of his generation. He’s helmed three popular franchises (Saw, Insidious & The Conjuring) that have seen both critical and commercial popularity. My gut instinct has been to take Wan’s success with a grain of salt. Surely his name doesn’t belong next to the masters of horror like Craven, Barker and Carpenter, right? I generally don’t do torture porn, so I’ve never seen the Saw films, and the first Wan feature I watched was the solid but unexceptional Conjuring II. Yet, I found the first Conjuring to be a modern horror masterpiece, and there has to be a reason that he keeps getting high profile work in the genre. Enter Insidious, a well-regarded possession movie that I completely ignored upon its release, conflating it with the slew of J-Horror knock-offs that flooded the market post-Ring. I don’t know that it has convinced me of Wan’s place in the pantheon, but I’m starting to see how he’s been able to pull off such a prolific career.
Wan consistently does two things exceptionally well. First, he gives us the space to develop a relationship with his characters. You could make the case that his films are slow, particularly compared to the 80’s slashers of my youth, but that investment in quiet moments with the endangered protagonists pays huge dividends down the line when we are expected to care if they are in mortal danger. In Insidious, the characters in question are a young family who had recently moved into a new house when their oldest son falls into a mysterious coma. They are not particularly memorable as movie characters go, but they are played as something of an archetypal suburban family, a cipher for viewers to project themselves onto and wonder how they would react in the increasingly supernatural situations. Refreshingly, they subvert a common haunted house trope by moving away as soon as the bad stuff starts to become undeniably not-of-this-world. Unfortunately for them, it doesn’t help.
That brings me to the second hallmark of Wan films, which is crafting a well-defined set of rules and structure for the paranormal activity at the center of the story. Regardless of the writer, all of his movies eke out information that paints a clear picture of how things work, which sets up clear stakes and keeps us invested in the action at the climax. Now, there are plenty of examples of great horror films that leave much of those specifics to mystery (It Follows, for example), but they still require adherence to an internal logic to be effective. Insidious expresses its internal logic through an expert (much like the Warrens in the Conjuring series), a paranormal investigator who helpfully orients us as to what we should expect. Perhaps not the most elegant storytelling device, and certainly not the most original (1983’s Poltergeist was an obvious inspiration – even down to the way that family patriarch Patrick Wilson resembles that film’s Craig T. Nelson), but it definitely greases the wheels for an exciting third act.
Look, I still wouldn’t place Wan on the horror director Mount Rushmore. He is probably more consistent than some of the greats, but I also haven’t seen him taking too many risks. The three movies I’ve seen from him have the same basic premise and much of the same structure (and Patrick Wilson). Sure, Wes Craven has some clunkers like Shocker on his resume, but that also points to a willingness to try new things. Overall, though, Wan is clearly a talented guy. I may even give Saw a try since my assumptions about that franchise seem to be run very counter to the type of movies he makes.
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