National Post (National Edition)
Serious suffering
The director of Hereditary talks horror, dark comedy and sort-of Westerns
Scary movies start with scary screenplays. This much is evident when I talk to New Yorkbased writer/director Ari Aster about his terrifying new movie Hereditary, which opens across Canada on June 8.
That scene where Toni Collette talks to her character’s son, and there is no noise at all except their voices? “That was in the script that there would be no room tone,” Aster says, referring to the background noise we take for granted until it disappears like a phantasm.
“I thought that would work when I was writing it, and I’m really pleased with how well it works. I think in the script it says, ‘It’s as though they’re speaking in a vacuum.’ People aren’t used to watching a film without room tone. They become very uncomfortable with any movement or any noise that they might be making. Everything gets heightened.”
What about those images where the camera refuses to look away? That’s also in the script. “It’ll often say: We hold on this just a little too long.”
There were also a lot of scenes in the screenplay that were shot but not used. “The original cut was three hours long,” Aster says of his movie, which now clocks in at a reasonably trim 127 minutes. “There were 35 scenes that we cut out of the film. And all of those were family drama scenes. And so now a lot of that minutiae has been removed, but a lot of that stuff is still inherent in the dynamic.”
Aster alludes to some tragedy in his own background before going on. “Writing and directing the film was a very therapeutic process for me,” he says. “And what’s great about the horror genre is that it demands a certain level of catharsis, so you have to find the catharsis in the story you’re telling. And life often doesn’t have that catharsis. It’s often just a gruelling stretch of suffering. Or it can be.
“I wanted to make a film that took suffering seriously, that was a serious inquiry into questions about grief and trauma while also hopefully serving as a satisfying genre film.”
And he’s happy with every jolt it delivers. “Isn’t that why people are watching a horror movie in the first place?” he asks. “There’s this collective, unspoken dare. They’re coming in and they’re daring the filmmaker to scare them or to bother them, and ultimately the filmmaker is daring you to sit down and brave whatever this is going to be.”
Aster is full of ideas, but he’s adamant he’s not a horror filmmaker, despite this first feature and its follow-up, Mid-sommar, which Variety refers to as “an esoteric folk horror film based on Swedish midsummer traditions.” Aster is in pre-production on that one now.
“I have 10 scripts that I’ve written,” he says, “and that’s the only other horror film that I have. I do consider myself a genre filmmaker. I love genre; I hope to root everything I do in a place of characters. I want to make characterdriven, character-centric genre films.”
For instance, he wants to shoot a musical one day. “And I have a sci-fi film that I’m writing right now.”
What about a Western? “I do have a Western,” he replies. “Although it’s sort of a – I don’t know if you’d call it a revisionist Western. It’s contemporary; one foot is in the Western and one foot is even more heavily in the noir genre. So it’s like a film noir ensemble western dark comedy.”
In fact, he says, everything he plans to do has that last element lurking in it somewhere. “Dark comedy is where my heart is,” he says. I ask him about a montage in Hereditary that finds Collette’s character crying over the course of many shots. It’s not exactly funny, but something about the repetition caused a burp of laughter to escape me.
“I really like how that came out,” he says of the scene. “That’s something that I always enjoyed watching. I’ve never had a laugh but I would not be upset if that received a laugh. But ... if I ever laugh it’s because I feel the audience is deeply uncomfortable through that sequence.” Until Aster makes that film noir ensemble Western dark comedy, the last laugh remains his own.
THEY’RE DARING US TO SCARE THEM, AND THE FILMMAKER IS DARING YOU TO SIT DOWN. — ARI ASTER