CULT LEADER
His debut, Hereditary, shocked the world and impressed spielberg. Horror wunderkind ari aster welcomes us into the inner sanctum of His deeper, darker, intensely personal follow-up: midsommar
AARI ASTER IS trying not to lose his head. It’s a drizzly May afternoon in New York, where the man behind last year’s most disturbing, decapitation-filled horror,
Hereditary, has been frantically finishing its follow-up. Locking yourself in a dark room for weeks on end to edit a movie is an intense experience at the best of times. It’s even more intense when that movie is Midsommar: a “bleak adult fairy tale”, as the 32-year-old calls it, brimming with blood rituals, pagan cults and revelations about death and the human condition. Throw into the mix the fact that Hereditary was among 2018’s biggest critical smashes, rocketing the first-time director from film school anonymity to horror’s top table, and you’d forgive him for looking like the moviegoers as they left cinemas after his terrifying debut: stressed, dishevelled, brought to the brink of madness.
“I’m hanging on in there,” the filmmaker insists with a smile, surfacing from his edit suite to meet Empire in a Manhattan café. “It’s a little bit crazy right now but I’ll survive.” The same likely can’t be said for the tourists at the centre of his latest chilling tale. Set in a remote Swedish village, Midsommar follows Dani (Florence Pugh) and Christian (Jack Reynor), an American couple who, despite their relationship hitting a rocky patch, embark on a round-the-world holiday adventure with pals to a mysterious festival held once every 90 years. Judging from the mangled corpses, mutated faces and levitating bodies teased in its trailers, it’s probably safe to predict they regret not checking Tripadvisor first.
“Midsommar is a different beast to Hereditary, but in some ways it’s a spiritual companion,” says Aster. “Both films deal with grief. Both films are about family. Both films happen to have cults in them. I’d say what ties them together is that they’re both, at heart, dramas — operatic, existential character studies passed through a horror filter.”
Just like how Hereditary was, deep down, a kitchen-sink study of a family fractured by grief, preying on primordial fears about passing our traumas and flaws on to the ones we love, Midsommar
is a relationship drama beneath its folk-horror exterior. Or, as Aster has previously put it, an “apocalyptic break-up movie”. Forgetting Sarah Marshall by way of The Wicker Man, then? “You’re not far off,” he laughs. “It starts off as this character study, then warps into this really perverse wishfulfilment fantasy. You’ll see. The entire movie is constantly moving towards a certain… explosion.”
Speaking of things blowing up — Midsommar might be the movie that catapults Aster into a new life as one of American cinema’s most sought-after young directorial talents. The New Yorker’s first film announced him as an exciting, emerging horror philosopher with an arthouse auteur’s eye for allegory and a blockbuster crowdpleaser’s knack for giant scares (that decapitation, those naked demon-worshippers, that shot of Toni Collette lurking like a spider in the shadows of a ceiling). Edgar Wright hailed it as a “beautiful, shocking must-see”. Barry Jenkins called it “masterful”. No other movie rattled audiences last year like Hereditary, the $80 million-grossing surprise success that, hot on the heels of Get Out, The Babadook et al, seemed to epitomise a new wave of sophisticated, soulsearching horror rooted in character and emotion as much as jumps and bumps in the night. How the hell does Midsommar plan to top it? What are the secrets of Aster’s bleak new fairy tale? And who exactly is this writer-director blazing new trails for horror in Hollywood? Like all good fairy tales, it’s a story that begins once upon a time, in a land far, far away. ASTER GREW UP in New Mexico. It was a childhood as liberal as you’d expect for a kid raised by a poet mother and jazz drummer dad. Born in New York, he lived for three years in Chester, in north-west England, before relocating to the southwestern US state for his adolescence. It was here, helped by his cinephile mom, that he developed an interest in movies he describes as “transgressive and weird” — Michael Haneke’s twisted erotic thriller The Piano Teacher, Todd Solondz’s taboo-smashing Happiness, the work of Lars von Trier, and whatever else he could get his hands on. When he began years later making his own short films, he reached for similarly shocking subject matter: The Strange Thing About the Johnsons, a 2011 short
film, centred on a son with a dark, violent sexual obsession towards his own father (probably not one to stick on after Countryfile during your next visit to your parents’ house).
A love of boundary-pushing cinema wasn’t the only thing he inherited from his mother during these formative years. When Aster’s grandmother became gravely ill, his mother, a talented writer and visual artist, used poetry as a medium to work through her feelings and fears. “The way my mom approached her work had a very serious influence on me,” says Aster, who developed a similar instinct for picking up a pen in times of turmoil. “Almost all of the screenplays I’ve written have been written in times of total crisis.”
Midsommar was no different. “I was going through a very painful break-up at the time. It was very fresh. Not even a month had passed. I really wanted to write something about it as a form of therapy.” Aster had written Hereditary but hadn’t yet filmed it. A Swedish film company named B-reel, however, had read the script. Impressed, they reached out with a loose idea — a folk horror set in Sweden, about Americans lured into a pagan cult. “Which at first wasn’t especially intriguing to me, except for the fact that the people bringing it to me were very sweet, very smart, and wanted to give me a lot of freedom,” recalls Aster. “Then I found a way of using it as a way of telling a personal story.” He surrounded himself with Scandinavian fairy tales and folklore, as well as more unconventional inspirations: a 19th-century study of mythology and religion titled The Golden Bough, Albert Brooks’ 1981 comedy Modern Romance and, strangest of all, the books of Dr. Seuss. ‘Horton Hears A Human Sacrifice’, anyone?
Midsommar, Aster promises, is a film packed with desecrated bodies, unnerving nudity, people drinking mind-altering potions and other distressing horrors unfolding in a field. If that sounds a lot like your last Glastonbury, rest assured Midsommar
has a few extra shocks up its sleeve. Even those who’ve watched The Wicker Man,
Robin Hardy’s 1973 genre-defining folk horror, won’t see its twists coming, Aster warns. “It’s a fantastic film with fantastic performances, but I basically let go of
The Wicker Man as an influence the minute I decided to make this,” he says. “I tried to avoid it as much as I could. I think what the movie tries to do is point to The Wicker Man and set up expectations native to that film, then take a left-turn from there and go somewhere surprising.” He won’t be drawn on what those surprises are, but he will say this: “If I have a philosophy, it’s that ideas frighten me. Not jolts or jump-scares. Jolts are great — I try to deliver a few in Midsommar. But that’s not what lingers in the mind. They’re not what you carry home with you, what festers in your brain afterwards.” ASTER DOESN’T LOOK like the kind of person responsible for sending cinemagoers into anxious spirals. “People expect me to be like a member of [German industrial metal band] Rammstein,” he laughs. “They’re sometimes surprised to find me not really like that at all.” It’s easy to understand why. Aster’s films are troubling explorations of mourning, the macabre and man’s darkest psychological recesses. Aster, meanwhile, is endlessly smiley and painfully polite. He describes himself as a “nebbishy Jew” prone to hypochondria and OCD, and is endearingly geeky about the technical side of his craft (the excitement with which he talks about camera lenses, most people reserve for Beyoncé). He speaks in the soft, soothing semi-whispers of a late-night radio host, and appears genuinely untaken in by the hype surrounding him. It takes a full minute of needling to get him to name
a director who reached out to congratulate him on Hereditary’s success. “Okay… well… Spielberg liked it,” he eventually blushes. “Which was a real pinch-me moment. But bleurgh! I feel grossed-out for name-dropping. My self-loathing is spiking right now.” (Martin Scorsese also liked it but “had some thoughts on the ending”).
Maybe the reason Aster managed to avoid being swept up in all the acclaim is that he wasn’t around for any of it. “Hereditary was released 8 June 2018, and I was in Hungary [doubling for Sweden] on 9 June to begin pre-production on Midsommar,” he explains. “I was too busy with an impossible situation to really get caught up in its success. We had two months to build an entire village in a field, to build ten houses, some of which were three stories tall. We had to tend to this giant field, which had grass taller than I am. We were building things as we were shooting. Nothing was ready. It was crazy, a sprint unlike anything I’d experienced.” He describes the shoot as “brutal… just outrageously accelerated and painful and hard.” Always looking to subvert genre tropes, Aster had designed Midsommar as a horror movie set not in darkness, but daylight. There aren’t many horror films where actors are advised to raid the shelves of Superdrug for factor 50 suncream pre-shoot. Turns out that’s for good reason.
“It posed a lot of challenges,” says Aster. “These were extremely hot, punishing conditions. Everyone got sunburnt, and we were chasing the sun all day. We shot all day outside for, like, three days on Hereditary and those were the worst days. Because the days are shorter, you can’t begin shooting ’til the sun is up, then before you know it you’re entering twilight and it’s over. It’s a nightmare for continuity. We had to contend with that stress on a whole new level with Midsommar.” Then there was the small matter of insects. “There was a huge wasp problem, attacking everyone every lunchtime. And for one scene, we were using a pig’s head. By noon on the first day, the pig’s head was filled with ants and the eyes were dense with maggots. It was grim,” he’s able to laugh now.
His cast, led by Fighting With My Family star Florence Pugh, soldiered on. “She has this scary confidence, self-assurance and poise,” Aster beams of his lead actress. “Really, I got the sense that there’s nothing she can’t do” — evading hordes of flying stinging beasts included. The insects could be overcome. A bigger challenge was the pressure of following up the film terrorising audiences back home to rave reviews as they toiled in the Hungarian countryside. “With Hereditary, there was nothing to lose. There were no expectations except the ones in my head,” Aster says, gazing deep into his cup of coffee. “If I ever felt like a shot wasn’t as good as I could have made it, that was devastating to me. I’m [instantly] depressed. I can only lift myself up by nailing the next scene. It’s a real rollercoaster for me… The biggest problem was carrying myself around all day.” IT WAS A problem worth hurdling. Aster is elated with Midsommar, and excited for the world to endure its heavy, oppressive air of tension. “I like to soak in dread. The films I love most in the genre — Don’t Look Now, Rosemary’s Baby, Alien, the Japanese horror films of the ’50s and ’60s — those really are films that create and sustain dense and impenetrable atmospheres. There’s a mood that just permeates the whole thing. I think I’m more concerned with attending to that than to meeting the demands of the genre in clichéd ways, like jump-scares,” he says.
It’s another film involving a cult, after the Paimon-loving (and apparently
clothes-hating) conspirators in
Hereditary. “Cults are essentially makeshift families,” muses Aster. “There’s a tribalism involved with them I find really interesting.” How about the other elements in Midsommar reprised from Hereditary, its themes of family and bereavement? Just fruitful areas of exploration for dramatists, or might he be pulling from personal experience? “Hmmmm.” Aster sighs, taking a moment, choosing how much to share. “There have been a lot of events in my life and in the life of my family. I can’t really talk about them. Hereditary and
Midsommar aren’t a product of some generalised anxiety disorder. A lot of things have happened to me. There are things that I’m constantly wrestling with, that feel urgent to me. If I’m not drawing on something that’s painful to me or causing me anxiety — something that’s really weighing on me — I’m really bored by the material. I feel disingenuous. It needs to be something personal.”
It won’t always be this way for Aster. While he might be deep in the edit of
Midsommar right now, he’s already starting to look ahead to a brighter, lighter project that sees him step beyond grief, cults and chaos. “I love musicals, and would love to write one,” he says, surprisingly. “I love Westerns, too. I love slapstick comedy and romantic comedies.” He’s “received a lot of intriguing offers” for big-budget franchise films, an avenue he’s not against exploring. “I really like working on a large scale — the bigger the canvas the better. I’d love to make real spectacle movies. In that sense, I’m very intrigued by the idea of working with certain properties. But I’d always want to be the writer. If I was working from someone else’s screenplay I’d want to get in there, make it my own.”
First, though, there’s the small matter of Midsommar: Aster’s bleak fairy tale, and the nerve-shredding next chapter in the director’s own fairy-tale quest to conquer Hollywood. “I certainly hope it hits a nerve the way Hereditary did,” he says, before breaking into a grin. “Maybe it won’t. Maybe it’ll be a total disaster that fails miserably and I’ll have all these fans coming for my head.” An interesting choice of words: this is a man, after all, who knows a thing or two about severed skulls. Something tells us he’ll be keeping his screwed on.