[Editor's note: The following contains spoilers for Malignant.] I've crunched the numbers and compiled the data, and with all due respect to anyone who got married, had children, graduated college etc etc this year, there was unfortunately only one brief stretch of 2021 that was Objectively Good. I'm speaking, obviously, of the time period wherein James Wan's Malignant burst onto HBO Max with the fury of a homicidal twin tumor emerging from the back of a woman's skull, followed by 2-3 weeks where the internet was mostly people tweeting "Malignant!!!" at regular intervals and no other conversation was necessary. Thank whatever higher power you subscribe to for Malignant, this gonzo Giallo-inspired piece of leather-clad camp that arrived when we needed it most and almost certainly propelled us across the finish line into 2022. Is it the "best" film of the year? Respectfully, words like "best" or "bad" or "good" or "film" mean less than nothing here; Annabelle Wallis is puppeteered backward by her parasitic sibling into launching a chair across the room at a couple of police detectives. That's a gift. A gift.

The timeline of Malignant being unleashed on the world is so pure that it's worth recounting. What we knew, for sure, is that James Wan had just made Warner Bros. one billion goddamn dollars with an Aquaman movie, and instead of being canonically recognized as a saint for performing this miracle, he was given free rein to return to his horror roots. The assumption, strengthened by an initial trailer that didn't offer much, was Wan would produce something close to The Conjuring, his 2013 horror hit that became a franchise through an incredibly back-to-basics bump-in-the-night style scares. We had forgotten, like a bunch of clowns, that James Wan also once ushered horror into its nu-metal phase with Saw. This was not a Conjuring redux, this was the return of the early-2000s king.

Annabelle Wallis in Malignant
Image via Warner Bros.

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I still remember the first whispers out of a few select press screenings that Malignant might actually be less of an old-school Ed and Lorraine Warren aesthetic, more "the greatest hits of Korn as remixed by Mario Bava." I definitely still remember the screening I attended roughly three hours before the film started streaming on HBO Max—attended by about 3 other critics—that I left floating on air, realizing this wonderful madman actually snuck an aggressively campy B-movie through a major studio system. Malignant is one of the most successful word-of-mouth movies of the last few decades, spreading not because of marketing, but like the dusty VHS tapes and crinkly horror mag back-pages of old. It is both physically impossible and morally irresponsible to watch Malignant and not immediately tell someone they must also watch Malignant.

The batshit beauty of the film, which Wan directed from a script by Akela Cooper, is how hard it commits to its own bit. The plot isn't anything too far outside the average midnight movie wheelhouse. A woman, Madison Lake (Wallis), believes she's having visions of a gruesome series of murderers carried out by a leather-clad monster calling himself Gabriel. The twist, familiar to anyone with Basket Case sitting on their shelf, is that Gabriel is Madison's parasitic twin, removed at birth but still clinging to the back of her brain, emerging every so often to pilot his sister in reverse. It's not the story mechanics that make Malignant special, but the way Wan orchestrates them on the razor's edge between camp and craftsmanship. This is a movie that truly could only have been made at this scale with the type of blank check a billion-dollar win earns a filmmaker. It rejects almost all of what's in vogue in mainstream horror right now, instead rocketing back to a basement-floor-dirt aesthetic grit that screams 2004, while also singing with the type of gruesome playfulness clearly inspired by 1970s Italian horrors and Ed Wood-style the-zipper-is-showing sci-fi. It's a movie made with the DIY crowd in mind, a "low-budget" gorefest backed by a high budget, a love letter to anyone who ever swapped VHS copies of Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key.

malignant-annabelle-wallis-kitchen
Image via Warner Bros.

That hodgepodge of style and inspirations is also a key reason Malignant spread so virally. Part of watching Malignant is getting on Malignant's wavelength, an experience that forces audiences to consider whether narrative and performance choices we'd normally consider "bad" in a mainstream blockbuster can actually, in fact, whip complete ass. (Anyone who has ever called Malignant "unintentionally funny" needs to, like Madison, have their head checked.) The hope is, by the time the film has a woman plummet several stories through a living room table and then immediately transitions to "Where Is My Mind" by Pixies—famously used to underscore the twist in Fight Club—you realize Wan and Cooper not only know exactly what they're doing, but you're being guided through by rocksteady hands.

You're basking in pure, uncut B-movie vibes by the time Malignant comes to its truly unhinged climax, a set-piece that sees Gabriel reveal his demonic prune-looking face and slaughter an entire police precinct's worth of people, backward. The setpiece is, in many ways, an amalgam of Wan's entire career, a wild original horror idea orchestrated with the action pyrotechnics Aquaman and a Fast & Furious movie will teach you, that's still lovingly, practically hand-crafted. Contortionist Marina Mazepa actually performed a good deal of Gabriel's rampage on set with an animatronic of Annabelle Wallis' face attached to the back of her head, a behind-the-scenes fact I cherish more than most of my extended family.

At the tail-end of 2021, we're seeing Spider-Man: No Way Home absolutely demolish box office numbers in ways we didn't think were possible during an ongoing pandemic, a scenario that raises questions about the future of non-tentpole movies. We're heading into 2022 off the heels of a gorgeous Guillermo del Toro noir and masterful Steven Spielberg musical going soundly ignored, a fact that'd be easy to chalk up to COVID-19 if people weren't also turning out in droves for No Way Home. It's an uncomfortable conversation with no easy answers. But it's also why Malignant feels important. Wan's film is proof that something wholly original and decidedly weird still has a place, can still dominate the pop culture conversation, even if it's only for a brief stretch of time, even if it primarily lands on streaming, even if a million different variables are true. Gabriel, in a grand act of irony, feels like a way forward.