New Malignant trailer is pure nightmare fuel from James Wan

In case you were worried the spooky season wasn't ramping up the scares enough, grab your pillow and clutch it tight. James Wan's upcoming Malignant has dropped its final trailer.

In the movie Annabelle Wallis stars as Madison Mitchell, a woman plagued by nightmarish visions of grisly murders. When she wakes up, she learns the crimes were in fact real. What's in doubt is the creepy figure who looms over her at every sinister opportunity. Going by the name Gabriel, the figure is perhaps... an imaginary friend?

Earlier trailers signaled the frights we'd no doubt experience by his very presence, but remained enigmatic. And this latest trailer maintains the same objective: creep out viewers without giving the game completely away. The clip – which also includes interviews with the director – opens up the story, hinting at Gabriel's presence as something akin to, dare we say, Freddy Krueger?

"I wanted to do something that was a bit different, but yet hark back to my roots," Wan says in the trailer. "You gotta take chances. If you don't, you end up making the same thing again and again. I think audiences are starved for something different."

It's encouraging to hear Wan discuss the concept of maintaining freshness in his work. His first directorial film Saw kicked off a mammoth franchise, spawning multiple sequels, followed by his other franchise-starter The Conjuring, which went one better and invoked a whole cinematic universe.

What's more intriguing is Warner Bros. Twitter post, asking fans, at the behest of Wan himself who is no longer on the platform, to keep the ending a secret. Could it be that Malignant is somehow tied into another Wan movie? It seems unlikely this would turn into another Conjuring tie-in, given Wan's comments about it being different. But, only time will tell.

Maddie Hasson, Mckenna Grace, Jake Abel, George Young, Michole Briana White, and Jacqueline McKenzie co-star in Malignant which is scheduled to arrive on HBO Max and in theaters on September 10. Stay on top of all the scary films scheduled for release, with our rundown of the most anticipated upcoming horror movies of 2021 and beyond.

Gem Seddon is GamesRadar+'s west coast Entertainment News Reporter, working to keep all of you updated on all of the latest and greatest movies and shows on streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime. Outside of entertainment journalism, Gem can frequently be found writing about the alternative health and wellness industry, and obsessing over all things Aliens and Terminator on Twitter.