First look at the film that’s scaring people witless
‘Hereditary’, which opens here next week, is being hailed as the most frightening horror movie of 2018.
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. (Not surprising, perhaps, as they had come to see a screening of Peter Rabbit.) And even horror aficionados have admitted that the film has scared them witless. There is no question that new film Hereditary 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. Secrets are held till they can’t help but burst free – and every shuddering jolt is fully earned.
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, disconcertingly 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.” To intensify this impression, he used a custom-made set for the family home, as if the characters themselves were inside one of Annie’s creations. For Aster, 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. But prior to her reading the script, the 45-year-old wasn’t looking for a horror movie – and especially not such an oppressively serious one. “I had specifically said ‘I don’t want to work on anything heavy’,” she explains. “But then when it came up, it was kind of a beautiful, poetic study on grief and family dynamics and how people navigate one of the most painful experiences in their lives. It was done in such an honest way, that I couldn’t say no.
“There are so many films out there that are neutralised, watered-down, rehashed same old bull---- and this was a great opportunity to tell a story about something really important.”
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. “Home-invasion horror has always managed to unsettle the viewer in a far more relevant, personal and significant manner than most other subgenres are able to,” says Adrian Roe, horror expert and author of First Scream to the Last. “The truth is we can relate to it, visualise it and above all, fear it. By definition alone it is horror where we least expect it, and where we should all feel safe – there really is nowhere to hide, and that’s the point.”
Hereditary is particularly horrifying because the threat, the viewer comes to realise, is connected to Annie’s heritage; something she and her family can never escape.
On set, Collette says, she needed to emotionally separate herself from Annie and her ordeal. “There’s not one light scene in there,” she says. “Normally there’s a couple of days of just easing in, a couple of scenes where it’s just like putting your toe into the water. But this was just like plunging right into the middle of it.”
Her 20-year-old co-star Wolff says he felt like he had PTSD after filming, “like I had been through this extremely traumatic thing and I didn’t know how to cope”, he says.
The former child star and musician has taken on a number of tough parts in recent years, playing terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in Patriot’s Day and starring in My Friend Dahmer as a high-schooler who befriends the young murderer. Hereditary, however, was his most difficult challenge yet: “When you sit on a heater, your instinct is to go ‘Ow!’ and jump off. With this movie, I had to sit on the heater and let it burn. I was trying to find that burning; trying to find all the things that made me most upset and just living in that.”
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.
“It’s gratifying,” says Aster. “Because we knew that we were making something extremely dark and punishing and potentially alienating. It’s exciting to see that people want that. That there’s a home for it.”
Hereditary is released on June 15