10 Upcoming Movies That Aren't What You Think
5. It's A Giallo Film - Malignant
The first trailer for James Wan's new horror film Malignant doesn't give too much concrete away, though nevertheless paints the film as a pretty typical supernatural horror flick.
Word has been doing the rounds online since early last year that the film tanked catastrophically with test audiences, largely due to the fact that it's actually far from the conventional horror film it's being marketed as.
Instead, it's Wan's homage to giallo - the Italian subgenre of horror films which peaked in popularity around the 1970s.
These films were often noted for being melodramatic murder mysteries involving graphic murder of women by masked killers, with bright neon being a popular aesthetic choice (popularised by Dario Argento's contributions to the genre).
Wan's film being a more niche love-letter to a film genre which has no appeal to the mainstream whatsoever would absolutely explain why it test-screened so poorly, and why the studio has taken almost two years since shooting wrapped to release it.
Though the trailer is desperately trying to sell it as a more typical bump-in-the-night movie, it seems primed to be something much weirder and more divisive - which, depending on who you are, is either a good thing or a bad thing.