Film that’s scaring people witless
‘Hereditary’ hailed as most frightening horror movie of the year, writes Rebecca Hawkes
IT HAS been called the scariest film in years, leaving hardened critics shaken and distressed. When the trailer was shown in a cinema in Australia audience members ran out and even horror aficionados have admitted that the film has scared them witless.
There is no question that new film Hereditary (which opens at Eastern Cape cinemas today) is causing a furore. But what makes it so fearsome?
Director Ari Aster’s debut is an accomplished horror movie that boasts a tour-de-force performance from Toni Collette and continues a trend for acclaimed, classy horrors.
Films such as It Follows, The Babadook, French cannibal drama Raw and A Quiet Place are winning accolades for a genre that, in the past, has been dismissed by critics. Perhaps most notable of all is Get Out, which claimed the Oscar for best screenplay and a nomination for best picture earlier this year.
“I think the cultural impact that some horrors are having is undeniable,” says Emily Leo, the Bafta-winning producer of Under the Shadow, another recent, critically lauded horror film.
“Horrors – certainly those with something to say, with incredibly talented film-makers behind them – are finding their audiences and getting taken seriously by critics.”
Hereditary may be part of a wider “horror renaissance” but it’s also a significantly different beast from the titles above. It’s more extreme and shocking in its imagery and violence (yes, even when compared to Raw) and, when it reaches its grim crescendo, does not hold back.
Unlike The Babadook, there’s no redemptive ending – and, unlike Get Out and Raw, even bleak humour is in short supply. The film terrifies, in part, because of its restraint early on.
Close-ups of a slowly unravelling Collette ensure we feel her terror as our own. But it also stands out for its relentless, claustrophobic bleakness – in this, it recalls Robert Eggers’s The Witch – and because of the unsettling relatability of its script. Aster didn’t just want to scare cinemagoers. He wanted to truly horrify them.
His film tells the story of a family besieged by a series of appalling incidents after the death of their mysterious matriarch, Ellen. Collette plays Ellen’s artist daughter Annie: unsettlingly ambivalent about the death of her mother, the most heartfelt adjective she can muster, when giving the funeral tribute, is “private”.
Gabriel Byrne plays Annie’s husband Steve, while Alex Wolff and young Broadway actress Milly Shapiro are impressive as older teenage son Peter and otherworldly, detached 13-year-old daughter Charlie.
According to Aster, his film was inspired by the baffled misery that humans can feel when confronted by unexpected tragedy; the sense that your life and loved ones are being battered about by strange, malicious forces.
“I feel like there’s a trend among American family dramas where a family unit suffers some horrible loss and goes through a tumultuous period but in the end they bond and it was all for the best.
“But sometimes something horrible happens and a person is taken down and their family follows suit. If you make a drama about that, no one’s going to show up. But what can be a deterrent for audiences in one genre can serve as a virtue in another.”
Visually, he drew inspiration from Annie’s job as an artist, a creator of detailed miniature tableaus and doll’s houses – real versions of which were built for the film by effects specialist Steve Newburn.
“Annie is somebody who feels very out of control, and like any artist [she works] to seize some measure of control. And of course, it’s all an illusion,” Aster says. “But for me, the doll’s houses served as a metaphor for the family’s situation, which is that they have no agency, and are like dolls in a doll’s house, being manipulated by outside forces.”
The 45-year-old Collette was a natural choice of lead: ever since her breakthrough performance in 1999’s The Sixth Sense, her ability to ensure audiences feel every flicker of emotion has been well-established.
In some ways, the character of Annie fits into a wider tradition of domestic horror: movies in which women (it’s almost always women) are terrorised by someone, or something, that has invaded a supposedly safe refuge.
Making such an unforgiving film was always going to be a risk – but judging by the overwhelmingly positive response Hereditary has received so far, it seems to have paid off. – The Daily Telegraph