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When it comes to the age-old question, ‘where do you get your ideas,’ there are all manner of potential responses — but the screenwriter behind M3GAN, The Nun II, and Malignant has a particularly unexpected answer when it comes to that latter acclaimed 2021 body horror hit.

“Malignant was actually an idea that James Wan and his partner, Ingrid Bisu, brought to me,” Akela Cooper explained during an appearance at San Diego Comic-Con 2025. “Ingrid is into body horror, and she had done research about what's called fetus in fetu, if I'm saying that correct, where there are twins in a womb and one will basically eat the other. Now, usually they will eat and it'll be fine, but sometimes that second twin will manifest as a tumor. And so, I had written Megan already for them, and they liked my work, and so they brought me in to talk about this idea. And when Ingrid brought it up, I'm like, ‘Oh, I know exactly what you're talking about.’ Because one of my friends had absorbed her twin in the womb.”

See? Now you’re interested. For those unfamiliar with Malignant, the official description of the movie runs, “From James Wan comes this innovative horror film about a young woman whose shocking visions are in fact terrifying realities.” The movie itself, however, involves a woman with a very unlikely alter ego: her own unborn twin.

Cooper continued to talk about her friend. “When she was 15 or 16, they thought she had cancer, but it turns out she was growing her twin on her spine. And so, she had to have surgery and they cut it out of her and it looked like the old troll doll that had hair and teeth, everything,” she explained, adding that she told Wan and Bisu, “‘I know exactly what that is, I had a friend,’ blah, blah, blah. They were like, ‘Okay, great. You have this job.’

“Taking that experience, I was like, ‘I know how you get in. It is that the main character who is having a very white lady bad day is pregnant, and her twin has been feeding off of the hormones and all that good stuff from her fetus rebuilding itself.’ And James is like, ‘Great. Go write it,'" Cooper explained.

It really is about who you know as much as what you know, it turns out — even if that might not mean exactly what many people might have expected, and requires a childhood friend with a very rare pre-life history. 

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