A Filmmaker's Biography: James Wan

As you may all know, James Wan is one of my personal favourite directors because of his contribution to the post-modern horror film using almost hitchcockian efforts. James Wan’s contribution to modern horror and post-modern horror are pretty unrivalled and his work on the “Conjuring” universe and “Insidious” series just go to show how much he is involved with the process even if he isn’t entirely responsible for the film or in the role of director.

James Wan was born in Malaysia on the 26th of February 1977 and is from a Chinese family. His family moved to Western Australia when he was only 7 years’ old and he attended school in Canberra and returned to Perth as an adult. He then went to Melbourne to attend RMIT University and graduated with a BA in Media in 1998.

In the early 2000’s, James Wan and his friends began working on a script which would later become the “Saw” films. He chose to pitch the film and then shot it with relatively no budget at all. After the release, the film was met with a lot of success, both domestically and internationally. It ended up grossing £55M in American and $48M in other countries and totalled more than $103M worldwide. This was over 80x more than the budget of the film and led the studio to go ahead and make a franchise out of it.

In the later 2000s, James Wan shot a film called “Dead Silence” featuring Australian actors. But after this, he had realised that after working on films almost continuously for the past few years, that he required a break. He would return at the start of the 2010s for the film “Insidious”.

After the success of the “Insidious” series, Wan went on to direct the “Conjuring”. He created a universe for it and directing “Lights Out”. Wan produced the film “Demonic” for Dimension Films and then produced “Annabelle” as well. After this all, he then did “Annabelle: Creation”, the prequel to the first film.

He was bitter that “Aquaman” did not receive an Oscar nomination stating that it was because it was a comic book film and the Academy were snobby towards it. (Personally, I think all of Wan’s films deserve Oscars).

As of 2015, Wan signed on to produce New Line Cinema’s Mortal Kombat reboot. So far, Wan’s career has been going up and up, and in the future it will only go up again with all of his exciting future projects on the way.

In my opinion, these are the ten best films directed or produced by James Wan:

10. The Curse of La Llorona

9. Annabelle Comes Home

8. Saw III

7. Insidious: Chapter 2

6. Annabelle: Creation

5. Saw

4. Insidious

3. The Nun

2. The Conjuring 2

1. The Conjuring

My personal favourite is obviously “The Nun” but if you want to concentrate on technicality, I think that “The Conjuring” establishes James Wan’s classic style which is a mixture between Hitchcock and Kubrick, very well. Here are a list of some of the themes you may find in a James Wan film if you’re watching:

Innocence

Violence

Hurt and Harm

Terror and Revenge

Captivity vs. Freedom

Oppression

Deprivation and Solitude

Idealism vs. Evil

Believability and Unbelievability

There are many other themes that you may see pop up in the films, but I think these are the main ones. The films have similar films because most of them are connected but also because there are many metaphors in which one thing represents another thing, one idea is connected to another idea and one concept could be represented by a style or haunting that happens within the movie. If you think about it, I’m sure you’ll understand what I mean.

All in all, the style of James Wan has developed from blood and gore in the “Saw” films to that very impressive arching upside-down shot in “The Conjuring” and to those twisted shots from the latter “Conjuring” films. I believe that this is because Wan is trying to show his style more than just making films to make films. Wan is actually trying establish himself as the horror film maker. But with people like Jordan Peele coming out, I think Wan’s output is going to get more extreme in the coming years to counter this.