“This is amazing”: The first movie to show James Wan the magic of cinema
If you want an example of just how mainstream horror has become over the past few decades, then look no further than the career of James Wan.
The Malaysian-born Australian filmmaker got his start with a little indie chiller called Saw, and over the next few years, his empire expanded to include Insidious, The Conjuring, and all of their various sequels and spin-offs, which is all well and good, but the true eye-watering successes were yet to come.
In 2015, Wan took on his biggest and most mainstream project yet, helming Furious 7, the latest in a long line of confusingly titled Fast and Furious movies. The film was a gigantic hit, helped by the fact that it featured the final appearance of Paul Walker (for now) following his death two years prior. Three years later, Wan directed yet another billion-dollar smash when he took the reins of DC’s Aquaman. His combined efforts as a director have resulted in $3.7billion of box office revenue, and that’s before you even begin to consider all the money he’s made as a producer and writer.
Wan is somebody who understands the appeal of ‘big’ cinema. In a conversation with Collider, he spoke about his childhood and the one blockbuster that made him realise that a career in Hollywood was within his reach.
“Growing up there was one movie that I just go, ‘This is amazing’ and that’s when I start to realise that movies weren’t just magic,” he said, “They didn’t just come out of nowhere, people actually made it, that a lot of effort and a lot of humans went into crafting a film and that film for me was The Terminator. I’m a big [James] Cameron fan. I love what Cameron did with the first Terminator.”
Born in 1977, Wan would have been a child when Cameron’s first time-travelling, Linda Hamilton-hunting romp hit the big screens. It’s possible that the movie’s ground-breaking visual effects were what clued him into the humanity behind the scenes. The scene in which Arnie’s T-800 inspects his wounds in a hotel bathroom is notorious for the very obvious rubber face the actor is wearing. While it’s a little funny to us modern viewers, it must have been captivating for a young boy in the 1980s, curious about how movies were made.
When it comes to Wan’s introduction to scary movies, however, one man and one man alone takes the credit, as he admitted, “In terms of the first two horror films that really scarred me and terrified me. They were Spielberg’s Jaws and Poltergeist”.
The former of those movies was released before Wan was even born, which represents just how powerful the enduring shark-based classic truly is, and as for the latter, it’s interesting that he credits it to the same director, as technically, Poltergeist was directed by Texas Chain Saw Massacre guru Tobe Hooper. However, rumours have persisted for years that Spielberg, who officially produced and co-wrote the film, actually did most of the heavy lifting.
These three films all contributed to Wan’s monumental victories in Hollywood decades later, and just looking at this line-up of instructors, it’s no wonder he did so well for himself.
