Is ‘Hereditary’ really the best horror movie in years? Sure sounds like it
AS AN anxious ‘80s baby, the first bits of pop culture to terrify me came in the form of laughter — first, the Count’s demented cackles on “Sesame Street,” and, later, Vincent Price’s bwah-ha-has on “Thriller.”
But the first pop song to give me bad dreams was Taco’s “Puttin’ On the Ritz,” a campy Irving Berlin redo that turned my kid-blood cold in the summer of 1983. Without any context, I heard something malevolent in that “super-duper” refrain and concluded that Gary Cooper lived in hell.
Since then, I’ve always wondered whether music can be frightening in and of itself. Slayer’s “Reign in Blood” was scary because owning it on cassette frightened my parents (and my ability to scare them scared me). Composer Krzysztof Penderecki’s “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” was instantly frightening because it was titled “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima.” Same for “Sheer Hellish Miasma,” Kevin Drumm’s dyspeptic noise opus from 2002. As a wide-eared adult, I like frightening music, but I rarely find it scary unless something outside of the sound tells me to be afraid.
Now Colin Stetson is telling me to be afraid, and it’s working. The saxophone strongman has generated piles of impressive recordings over the past decade, many of them made with a circular breathing technique that allows him to spray continuous information from his horn. But as dense and depleting as his data jazz can feel, it’s never given me the creeps.
Not the case for “Hereditary” director Ari Aster, who reportedly wrote the script for his phenomenal new horror movie while listening to Stetson’s old solo albums. When he was finished, he called on the saxophonist to score his film.
Since opening last week, “Hereditary” has been soaking up all kinds of gushy praise, and Stetson’s music has everything to do with it. Think of how the strings in “Psycho” evoke a thrusting knife, or how those accelerating duh-nuhs from “Jaws” evoke a swimmer’s kicking feet. Stetson does similar work in “Hereditary,” producing deep drones and manic babble, artfully conjuring an unseen evil that refuses to show itself throughout so much of the film.