Evil was always more than the sum of its parts

Malignant always deserved better than it got. After enduring three changes of venue — first on CBS, then on the fledgling streaming service CBS All Access, then on the rebranded Paramount Plus — the horror series managed to attract critical acclaim and a loyal audience. It was canceled in its fourth season anyway, with four extra episodes added to tie up all the loose ends. Many of those threads remain, some in hoping for a second coming of the show on another platform; the show’s final episodes carry all the tension of a hasty and abbreviated conclusion. But it’s fitting in a way: this kind of ambiguity and uncertainty was where Malignant lived and what made it so different from anything else on TV.

Not that anyone would know that from the script, of course. Creators Robert and Michelle King have shaped the show in the image of a typical procedural, bringing a new case each week to our central trio, who assess supernatural phenomena for the Catholic Church. If someone needs an exorcism, they evaluate the circumstances. If someone witnesses a miracle, they investigate its authenticity. Psychologist Kristen Bouchard (Katja Herbers) is the skeptic, priest David Acosta (Mike Colter) is the believer, and eternal techie Ben Shakir (Aasif Mandvi) is also the skeptic.

It is difficult to write about this for the combination of believer and sceptic(s) alone Malignant without bringing it up The X-Files. But it was much more than just a Catholic reinterpretation; you’d be hard-pressed to find a X-files episode that doesn’t validate the paranormal for the viewer, Malignant played coyly. Especially in the early seasons, the show rarely confirmed the supernatural outright. There were always caveats, always rationalizations. People imagined demons and angels because they wanted to believe; their minds filtered the world through predetermined beliefs. In the first episode, Kristen was upset when a man who claimed to have possessed them revealed impossible knowledge of her personal life, but he had only been given stolen notes from her therapy sessions.
As the show progressed, it became more explicit about the supernatural. The Assessors’ arch-nemesis, sinister therapist Leland Townsend (Michael Emerson), would deal with goat-headed demons in the daylight; Nurse Andrea (Andrea Martin) would stomp, stab, and otherwise physically exterminate all manner of creepy creatures as a zealous exterminator. But even as MalignantAs the show’s demons became more visible, much of the show’s fun still came from how it could write itself out of a corner that seemed particularly unambiguous. It acknowledged that the human capacity for evil could be just as fraught as demonic influence. After all, isn’t it more disturbing for a mother to seek social media clout by faking a ghost that physically hurts her children than for a ghost to be responsible?

The procedural structure prepared us for something familiar, something explainable. Instead, Malignant plunged us into a world of uncertainty, full of storylines that had no clear resolution. One of the show’s most audacious endings found the assessors all set to exorcise a young boy who had begun threatening his younger sister—only to discover that the boy’s parents had killed the boy instead. In a later episode, the investigation into a police shooting was simply abandoned because it wouldn’t even go to trial, with the officer at the center being acquitted by a grand jury. The show’s frequent, apparent lack of answers never felt like a cheat or a shortcut, but rather a logical reflection of the show’s focus on religion: after all, credence is rarely given to concrete evidence.

Among horror in particular, Malignant stood out for its reluctance to simply dwell on familiar fears, particularly in a field as crowded as religion and exorcism-based horror. So much of the genre confronts the world as it once was, extrapolating what we’ve learned to fear through fiction. It still echoes the Satanic Panic or the advent of serial killers, often going so far as to set itself in that distant past. Long legs unfolds in the 90s, while the entire Conjuring empire is firmly rooted in the decades before. A steady stream of sequels and prequels to classic horror films carry on the fears of yesteryear.

Like many procedurals (and like the creators’ other shows, The good woman And The good fight), Malignant‘s stories were inspired by current events. Often, these involved looking at the full breadth of new technology and its potential to cause harm; one of the final episodes revolved around a chatbot aimed at grieving people, while other cases involved VR games or stand-ins for Amazon and TikTok. The modern world formed the backbone of Malignant‘s themes, in which a more interconnected society reliant on invasive technology makes it easier for bad actors to find us, or for bad actors to find each other.

At the same time, it’s easy to see why so much horror resists modern technology. It’s too streamlined, too sterile, too frictionless, lacking the character of more tangible media. There’s a reason that cell phone signals are often the first casualty of a modern horror story; an atmosphere of dread and isolation is hard to cultivate when the ever-present technology seems designed to puncture it. Malignant was certainly not immune to the silly depictions of the very technology it sought to critique. There’s simply nothing creepy about watching kids wander around in VR goggles or Ben scrolling through TikTok.

But the secret of the series was that, amidst all the ruminations on modern society and religious soul-searching, it never had to be serious or even scary. There was no small amount of camp behind it Malignant‘s appeal. The weird, chilling TV hacker line was all for laughs, next to Kristen’s dancing sleep paralysis demon, or Leland pulling up 8chan, or a laser-focused takedown of the man who Law and orderOne episode featured impressive practical effects creatures, only to have angry CGI eyes trained on a cat in the next.

The immediate effect, of course, was pure entertainment. Malignant was so much fun because it was so unpredictable, with everything from the silliest moments to the most astute, all working toward that goal of throwing the audience off balance. This was a show that continued to push “grounded” explanations that were arguably more ridiculous than demons walking the earth, while also making room for deeper questions about religious faith and its place in modern society — if, as several characters wondered aloud, it still has a place.

In a broader sense, the tonal hodgepodge was Malignant uniquely suited to address the horrors of our era, where so many terrible realities are wrapped in nonsense. Its demons can be hilariously mundane, working out on a cross-trainer or fumbling with the mute button on a video call. To capture the noise, disorientation and information overload of modern life, Malignant strange and unique. And it was, even as it used some of the most familiar tools in television history. In the hands of this series, we saw just how far the concept of evil could really go — and how it could spread more efficiently than ever before.