ABOUT THIS EPISODE
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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🎶 Music by Mannequin Uprising
