Aussie director James Wan on horror, tech and his “Annabelle meets the Terminator” movie

The Aussie horror guru behind Saw and The Conjuring reveals why he’s worried about humanity’s obsession with technology and how it could all go terribly wrong.

James Wan, Akela Cooper and Jason Blum at the M3GAN Premiere in Hollywood last month. Picture: Alex J. Berliner/ABImages

There’s a rich tradition in the movies of machines gone wrong – from The Matrix and Blade Runner to The Terminator and 2001: A Space Odyssey, all the way back to Fritz Lang’s trailblazing 1925 silent movie, Metropolis.

But Australian director of Saw and the billion-dollar superhero smash Aquaman, James Wan, says the tall tales of humankind’s creations turning against it and wreaking havoc go back even further than that and says there is good reason the concept has become a storytelling staple.

“You can actually go as far back as (the book) Frankenstein as well, right?,” Wan says over Zoom call from his adopted home of Los Angeles. “The idea that mankind, we think we’re so smart, we’re able to create such incredible things, but the idea that these things that we create could end up turning against us just makes for great literature and great stories and so that’s why it’s been around for so long.”

In crafting the story for his new horror-sci-fi movie M3GAN, about a life-size, hyper-real artificial intelligence (AI) doll designed to be the perfect playmate for children of busy parents, Wan says he and his co-writers leaned into stories that have come before, but also took inspiration from the technological advances happening right now.

James Wan and Jason Blum at the premiere of M3GAN in Hollywood last month. Picture: Alex J. Berliner/ABImages

With humanity becoming more and more reliant on and entwined with smart technology and many scientists predicting that true AI is achievable within decades, Wan was inspired to come up with a terrifying what-if scenario that he describes as “Annabelle (the demonic doll from his Conjuring horror film universe) meets the Terminator”.

“If you’re telling a cautionary tale, then ultimately you’re pulling from similar things that other great literature writers have touched upon,” he says. “But the key thing for us is to do it in such a way that is modern to the world that we’re living in right now.

“For a lot of those stories, they were writing about stuff that could happen deep in the far future. But for us with M3GAN, it is science eventuality. A robotic character like a M3GAN, an AI character like M3GAN could exist in our world in a very short period of time.

“We are so obsessed with technology, obsessed with our phone, obsessed with everything that’s on the internet, and it just felt like it was the right kind of movie to make right now.”

Wan’s co-producer on M3GAN is Jason Blum, whose company Blumhouse Productions has become a horror powerhouse thanks to hits including Paranormal Activity, The Purge, Get Out, Us, Halloween and last year’s The Black Phone. Blum says he was not only attracted to the idea of working with Wan again – the pair had previously collaborated on the Insidious franchise – but, as a father, the idea of technology becoming a surrogate for parenting resonated with him in a rather uneasy fashion.

M3GAN and Cady (Violet McGraw) in a scene from M3GAN, directed by Gerard Johnstone.

“I think every parent carries a certain amount of guilt around that and I thought it was so clever the way the story that James came up with addresses that guilt and also the great parts of technology,” Blum says. “There’s obviously some good in technology – there are great things that children can discover through an iPad and there are also really terrible things. And I think M3GAN is exactly the same way.”

Like Wan, Blum says he sometimes despairs at humanity’s penchant for leaping enthusiastically into technology that is not yet fully understood and without thinking about the potential ramifications down the track.

“There’s no better example of that than social media, which we all thought 10 years ago, was going to free the world and create democracies around the world,” he says. “And it’s kind of done the exact opposite.”

Blum and Wan have been two of the most prolific and successful forces in horror over the last decade and fans of the genre are licking their lips at the news of a potential merger of Blumhouse Productions and Wan’s Atomic Monster. Blum says that talks are advancing and that their mutual strengths – he is more business focused and Wan is more of a creative force – could make for a formidable partnership.

“We both love horror, but for very different reasons,” Blum says. “I think this is one of the reasons we’re good partners. We’re both real fans of the genre. But ultimately, we’re both attracted to the same kind of horror movies, which are movies that are subversive, and odd and original, and unexpected. And I think the work that we’ve done together and the work that we’ve done separately, definitely checks all those boxes.”

James Wan presents the M3GAN Premiere at the TLC Chinese Theater last month in Hollywood. Picture: Alex J. Berliner/ABImages

Wan adds that another reason for their success, together or separately, is that they make the kind of movies that they would want to watch as horror fans, and says he’s always stayed true to that even when he’s making detours into blockbusters such the Fast and Furious and DC superhero franchises.

“I think that’s really important,” Wan says. “Don’t lose sight of what it is that we love about the genre while we’re catering to an audience. We want to make movies that are original and that say something. But we also love all those existing horror films that we grew up with and our hope is we get to play with those IPs in the future as well.”

Last year was something of a banner year for horror, with audiences flocking to films including Smile, The Black Phone, Barbarian, Nope, Scream and Halloween Ends. But while Wan admits that the fortunes of the genre wax and wane, it never really goes away, and particularly as a communal experience.

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“You sit in a dark theatre with a bunch of strangers and together you guys watch this story unfold on the screen,” he says. “It’s that classic thing of sitting around the campfire and listening to your elders tell you a great story. It makes people want to go into theatres to experience that and obviously for Jason myself, we’re very thankful that that’s the case.”

But having scared audiences around the world with killer dolls, demons, evil spirits and rampaging murderers, what terrifies the two masters of terror?

“Donald Trump scares me the most for sure,” says Blum without hesitation. “But global warming, I’d say it’s up there with him. Those are the two top of mind at the moment.”

Wan agrees: “Yes, the real world is far more terrifying than anything we get in our movies and anything we can cook up.”

M3GAN opens in cinemas on Thursday.

Originally published as Aussie director James Wan on horror, tech and his “Annabelle meets the Terminator” movie