HEREDITARY
IS HEREDITARY THE SCARIEST FILM OF THE YEAR? DIRECTOR ARI ASTER TELLS STEPHEN KELLY ABOUT SLOWBURN TERROR AND UNSPEAKABLE FEARS...
Some are calling it the scariest film of the year. Others are rocking gently in a state of advanced catatonic trauma.
When Hereditary first premiered at the Sundance film festival earlier this year, audiences – and by extension, critics – were left stunned. “Hereditary takes its place as a new generation’s the
exorcist,” wrote time Out. It has “the substance to match the scares,” claimed
Variety. “Hereditary is the most traumatically terrifying horror movie in ages,” announced the aV Club. not bad for a debut that wasn’t pitched as a horror movie at all.
“I wanted to make the kind of horror film I’d always been hoping to see,” explains writer and director Ari Aster. “I wanted to make a film harkening back to the slower burning horror films of the ’60s and ’70s – don’t Look Now,
rosemary’s Baby. But even as I was pitching the film around hoping to get financed, I never described it as a horror. I pitched it as a family tragedy – a drama – that curdles into a nightmare. Much in the same way that life can feel like a nightmare when disaster strikes.”
And what a nightmare Hereditary is. The less you know about it the better. Burn this magazine. Delete your Twitter account. Move to the moon. Its plot is a twisty, fiendish thing, a horror whose surprises manifest themselves not so much by shouting “boo!”, but by tapping into unspeakable fears. “That’s one reason I love working in genre,” says Aster. “It’s because genre audiences know the formulas and they know the tropes, and there’s a certain complacency that comes with watching a film like this. It’s almost like a warm, homely feeling to walk down this familiar path, to know generally where it’s going to go, and you can sink into that. And then something happens like a chute that drops them into hell.”
At its most general, Hereditary is the story of Annie Graham (Toni Collette), a talented but haunted artist who specialises in creating miniature models based on her life. (To give you an idea of Aster’s visual panache, the opening shot is a slow creep towards the interior of a dollhouse, a replica of her home, until suddenly its miniature bedroom becomes a real one, with actors inside.) Angry and grieving, recently Annie has found her work coloured by the death of her estranged mother, a cold and reclusive woman whose presence can still be felt – figuratively, but perhaps literally too – by her family: psychiatrist husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne), aloof teenage son Peter (Alex Wolff ), and the apparently troubled younger daughter Charlie (stage star Milly Shapiro), who was a favourite of her mysterious grandmother.
What follows is a study in trauma and grief, and how families can become trapped for generations in the cycles of both. It was a story inspired by Aster’s own struggles and experiences, a “roughly three-year period during which my family and I just went through a lot together. And it got to the point where the prevailing feeling was that we were cursed. So that’s ultimately where the idea of a family who feels cursed, but then discovers that they are literally cursed, came from.”
new blood
Although he’s a relatively unknown director (a graduate of the American Film Institute who has written and directed several short film), this is not the first time Aster has explored the dark unknown of family life. In 2011 he made his mark with the Strange thing about the
Johnsons, a controversial 30-minute film about a father who is being sexually abused by his son. Similarly, most of Hereditary’s more unsettling moments are rooted in the domestic rather than the supernatural.
There are cruel twists of fate – especially in one distressing scene, involving a mad dash to the hospital – unnerving in their plausibility. There is the idea that you can never truly know anyone, as evidenced by a funeral full of strange friends Annie never knew her mother had. There are literal evocations of Greek tragedy – in the question of whether we have any actual control over our lives, or whether things just happen to us.
“It is a film that reveals itself over time to be about a family that is totally powerless,” says Aster. “everything that is going to happen to them is inevitable. So the more that they try to outrun their fate, the more they’re running directly into it. For me, the motif of the dollhouses, which are replicas of actual spaces in the film, they serve as a metaphor for the family’s situation. They are essentially dolls in a dollhouse being manipulated by outside forces.” The family are not the only ones. What makes Hereditary such a remarkable experience is how these themes inform the scares, how deftly Aster traps you within his characters’ moods, and then turns those emotions – grief, anxiety, fear – against you. “The films that scared me the most as a kid were films that played with tone,” says Aster, “that kind of felt off and wrong and dissonant. For instance, nicolas Roeg was someone who really affected me. And Peter Greenaway’s [1989 graphic black comedy] the Cook, the thief, His Wife & Her Lover – whenever I was walking around in the dark as a kid I could not help but project its images onto the wall.” Much like this year’s other horror sensation, a Quiet Place, Hereditary maintains its mood through a chilling use of music and sound. The score, composed by avant-garde saxophonist Colin Stetson, is a tense and disorientating mix of electronics, percussion and strings. It nearly always pulsates with dread, it often explodes in screeches of terror and worst of all, it sometimes falls silent completely. In the case of the latter, one of the film’s biggest and most psychologically loaded scares takes the form of a single, unexpected sound. In isolation the sound would be perfectly innocuous. But in context? It will set your nerves on fire.
I pitched it as a family tragedy that curdles into a nightmare
It is one of Hereditary’s genuine jump scares, which are few in number but powerful in impact. Instead, Aster prefers the horror to flow from imagery – from shots that outstay their welcome, from visuals that will prove hard to unsee. Two minutes focused on a frightened face. A decapitated head covered in ants. Something stirring in the top left of the frame. A bright smile from the dark of a doorway. Aster doesn’t want to make you jump, he wants to infect your dreams.
“I’m not a fan of jump scares,” he says. “There’s been this trend in contemporary horror filmmaking where these cynical exercises are released in rapid succession and the fears that they’re preying on are pretty superficial. I wanted to make something that was preying on more existential fears. I wanted its value as something frightening to come not from having jumps blast out of the shadows, or drop from the ceiling, but from images that lock on to you and linger, that look you right in the eye and dare you to look away.”
modern Horror
Of course, Hereditary is not the first existential horror of its kind. From it Comes at Night to it Follows, from the Babadook to Get Out, the past few years have seen a relative golden age for smart, high-concept horrors; films that are not only bringing in huge box office returns (last year’s it reboot, for example) but are reinvigorating the genre’s credibility. not that such a shift has been free of contention among fans – most notably critics and art-house directors attempting to distance themselves from the genre by using terms such as “elevated horror”, or as the Guardian called it last year: “post-horror”. The implication being that films like Hereditary are too good to be associated with such a low art form. But Aster doesn’t agree – well, not totally.
“I think horror has gained a bad reputation but I’m not sure that it’s ever been free of that reputation,” he says. “even in the ’50s and ’60s there were so many B-movies coming out. And so you still needed films like rosemary’s Baby or alien to – quote unquote – ‘elevate’ the genre. That reputation comes from the fact that these films can be cheap to make and there’s an audience waiting for them, so they can make a quick profit. I don’t think that says anything about the genre itself. Because you do have films like the Witch and Get Out and Let the right One in, which I think are consistent reminders that horror is a genre with immense potential – so much can be done with it.”
See Hereditary – try not to flee before the final bowel-testing ten minutes – and you’ll see exactly what he means.
Hereditary is in cinemas from 15 June.