Horror director preys on his own fears
Ari Aster readily owns up to the many films and directors that influenced the making of his feature horror debut Hereditary, which is now heading to regular multiplexes after first terrifying audiences at its Sundance bow in January.
Titles come tripping off his tongue, as he sits for an interview during a recent Toronto visit: Rosemary’s Baby, Don’t Look Now, In the Bedroom, The Innocents, The Shining, Ordinary People, The Ice Storm, The Witch, Autumn Sonata, Psycho and more.
So do names: Roman Polanski, Nicolas Roeg, Jack Clayton, Stanley Kubrick, Mike Leigh, Kenji Mizoguchi, Ingmar Bergman and onwards, all auteurs of stories dealing with what Aster calls “the horrors of family life.”
Such candour is bracing, since filmmakers often try to pretend their ideas came straight out of their fevered imaginations. Not Aster, a selfprofessed film school nerd — he studied at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, later returning to hometown New York — who cares more about getting a deep response from an audience than attempting to wow it with novelty.
“It’s very fun to work in genre, especially the horror genre, because there are expectations that you just can’t get around,” says Aster, 31, whose scholarly spectacles and regular-dude shirt make him seem more like a potential horror film victim than a diabolical frightmeister.
“People recognize tropes and they recognize devices and if you set something up, people know where that’s going to go. In some ways, the audience becomes complacent when they go to a horror film. And so it’s fun to take that attitude and then to upend it.”
That’s exactly what writer/ director Aster does in Hereditary, a film starring seasoned pros Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne and Ann Dowd, plus arresting younger talents Alex Wolff and Milly Shapiro. It’s the story of a dysfunctional Pacific Northwest family haunted by its tragic legacy.
“Something happens about 30 minutes into the film and anybody who’s seen the film will know what I’m talking about,” Aster continues.
“That should serve as a left turn, but really the function there is for that moment to actually serve as a chute that opens up under the audience and drops them into something that they weren’t really ready for, and I’m hoping that that shocks them out of that complacency.”
He’s been getting the response he wants, just as he did for his earlier short films, in particular Munchausen and The Strange Things About the Johnsons, which both dealt with themes of unhealthy family obsessions.
Collette has said that the careful design of Aster’s previous films, and the surefootedness of the script for Hereditary, made her rethink a vow she’d made to avoid doing horror movies for a while. She’s been Rolodexed for fright films since shocking audiences — and earning an Oscar nomination — for playing Haley Joel Osment’s mom in The Sixth Sense in 1999.
“She was the first actor who attached herself (to Hereditary) and that really put the train on the tracks,” Aster says. “When she came aboard, that suddenly made the film real. So I’ll always be grateful to her for that.”
Did Collette fully understand what she was getting herself into? The script subjects her character Annie to some truly traumatic situations involving more than just heavy emoting, which is something you can glean right from the trailer.
“It’s all in the script, the challenge is there on the page, and to Toni’s credit, she was game for it. And she had even told her agents before she had gotten the script that she didn’t want to do anything more that was dark, she didn’t want to do anything heavy.
“So, further to her credit, she came into the film not having previously wanted to go anywhere dark and understanding that this required total kamikaze commitment … it was certainly thrilling to sit at the monitor and see her chewing apart the scene!”
He also got 100 per cent commitment from Alex Wolff, a musician turned actor whose character Peter is also in for a rough ride.
“Alex and his brothers were in a boy band, The Naked Brothers Band, which was a Nickelodeon thing. And I did not know that when I first cast him, but you know, he came into the room and gave an undeniable audition. It was clear that it was him (for the role), and he’s incredibly committed. He’s pretty ‘method,’ so he essentially was Peter for two months, which took a lot out of him. I think that was a pretty brutal two months for him, but you see it on the screen.”
Aster doesn’t see himself as strictly a maker of horror films.
“I guess I view myself as a genre filmmaker. I like to play with transgression and upending conventions and I like the idea of rooting genre films in character.”
Nevertheless, he feels the need to defend the horror genre, which he feels is too often dismissed by audiences and critics as strictly “B” filmmaking.
“The horror genre has a stigma. I feel like horror films are guilty until proven innocent. Most horror films are made very cynically, and they’re usually made by studios for an audience that they know is there, no matter what they put out. And there are always exceptions — every year it seems we have a great one coming out.
“But I feel the genre can do so much. There’s so much to be mined there. A great horror film works as a communal experience more than almost anything else, except for maybe a comedy. That’s something that I’ve experienced, just taking this movie around and watching it with audiences. I didn’t even really know how much of a ride ( Hereditary) was until I sat with people.”
He got other reactions he didn’t expect.
“I was pretty stern with people (at first), telling them, ‘It’s not just a horror movie, there are very few jump scares.’ The film is determined to be alienating. It’s designed to just stay with you and linger, but it’s not fun. That’s what we thought we were making, and it turns out that it is more fun. It seems people feel that it’s more fun, certainly than I was expecting, and that’s a welcome surprise. The primary aim was always to make a film that was deeply upsetting.”
What scares Aster personally? He admits he got creeped out by the occult legends he researched for his screenplay, but he’s more frightened by the loss of control within a family — something he experienced in his own life during a three-year run of family misfortune.
“I see Hereditary as being an existential horror film and I see it as dealing with fears that are irremediable — fears that there are no answers for, like the fear of death, or fear of abandonment, or fear that you don’t really know the people who you’re closest to.
“And so when I think about my nightmares, I think about somebody I love dying or I think about dying myself, or I think about loss of quality of life. I think about somebody that I love changing or turning on me, and ultimately I think about me inadvertently harming somebody whom I love and having to live with the guilt of that. Or doing something that makes somebody I love hate me. So this film preys on those fears.”
If you like where Aster is going, he’s got a lot more in mind, including other genre excursions that could include comedy and sci-fi movies.
“I’ve got 10 features that I’ve written that I really want to make. I’m in preproduction on another one now, and it’s the only other horror film that I have, so when I’m done with this one, that’ll be it for horror for a while.”
Never say never, as Toni Collette would tell him. Aster does expect to eventually make a Hereditary sequel.
“I have an idea for a sequel that’s very unconventional and we’ll see if anybody lets me do that.”