From Kuching to Conjuring, why I still chase the feeling that started it all

When I was seven, I watched Poltergeist, and it broke something open in me. It scared me, scarred me, and set the tone for everything that came after. I didn’t know it then, sitting in a small house in Kuching with ghost stories in the air and jungle spirits in the trees, but that moment would echo through every movie I’ve made.

My path to filmmaking was never linear. From Malaysia to Perth, Canberra, and Melbourne, I always felt like an outsider trying to fit in. That perspective, watching from the edges, shaped the way I tell stories. I’m drawn to characters who don’t quite belong, to places with something hidden just beneath the surface. Maybe that’s why horror feels like home to me. It’s a genre where the unseen matters more than what’s in plain sight.

It’s wild to think that Saw, a movie Leigh Whannell and I wrote with no budget, no connections, and one haunted puppet made of ping pong balls, would be the start of everything. We weren’t trying to reinvent horror; we were trying to get a foot in the door. But when the movie hit, it hit big. Suddenly, we were being talked about in the same breath as the franchises we grew up watching on VHS.

I’ve made films that look nothing like Saw since then: Aquaman, Furious 7, The Conjuring, Insidious, but the feeling I chase has stayed the same. It’s that pulse of excitement I got as a teenager sneaking into movies I was too young to watch. It’s a mixture of dread, curiosity, and joy. If a scene doesn’t give me that, I’ll keep working on it until it does.

I still get tagged by immigrant kids, Asian kids, Aussie kids, telling me they want to do what I did. And I tell them the same thing: you don’t need a studio or a big break. You need a vision, some grit, and a way to bring your ideas to life.

That’s why I love what I see in tools like Aux Machina. It’s the kind of platform I wish I had back in the day. You don’t need to build a creepy puppet out of spare parts or beg your friends to help with a proof-of-concept reel. You can generate mood boards, characters, scenes, and anything your story needs with uncanny realism and no technical friction. It's not a shortcut, it's a spark.

Because the truth is, good horror doesn’t start with a camera. It begins with a feeling, an image, an itch in your brain that won’t disappear. And now, anyone can chase that feeling, too.