“I don’t necessarily consider myself a horror filmmaker,” writer-director Ari Aster tells me hours before his debut feature Hereditary screens at the 2018 Overlook Film Festival. It’s a surprising observation: Hereditary premiered to acclaim at Sundance, immediately sparking talk of an Oscar nomination for actress Toni Collette, and critics preemptively hailed it as the scariest movie of 2018. (It arrives in theaters on June 8th.) The film is a slow-motion nightmare, recalling 1960s and ‘70s classics like Rosemary’s Baby and Don’t Look Now
as it tracks the disintegration of a family after the death of its
matriarch. It’s stylish and unnerving, the rare kind of film that
burrows into your psyche and lingers there afterward. It is
unquestionably a horror film.
And it’s the polar opposite of the measured, 31-year-old
director. Aster is quiet and thoughtful, carefully considering every
answer behind long pauses and expressing sincere gratitude that
audiences are responding to his film. He seems, for lack of a better
term, nice.
“Jesus Christ,” Collette tells me a few weeks later in Los Angeles. “You just don’t expect a film like this to come out of that guy.”
Aster says he fell in love with film at an early age, and it’s probably
no coincidence that he describes his first encounter with the medium as a
nerve-wracking, darkly hilarious sequence that wouldn’t be out of place
in one of his films. “My first experience in a movie theater was Dick Tracy,”
he says. “There was a scene with a guy with a Tommy gun and a wall of
fire behind him. I panicked, screamed, and jumped out of my seat. And I
ran six New York city blocks, running into the street and almost got hit
by a bunch of cars, and had my mom chasing after a panic-stricken
four-year-old.”
Despite that early reaction, Aster loved movies. He fell
into an early obsession with horror — “I just exhausted the horror
section of every video store I could find,” he says — before he turned
to the creative side of the process. But while many young filmmakers
cite childhood experiences of shooting Super-8 or mini-DV films in their
backyards, Aster says he had a different, more solitary formative
experience. “I didn’t know how to assemble people who would cooperate on
something like that,” he says. “And so I found myself just writing
screenplays.”
When he eventually set his sights on attending graduate
school at the American Film Institute Conservatory, he assumed he’d
pursue the screenwriting track. “Then I think it became apparent that
the life of a screenwriter would probably be a painful one for me,” he
says. “You have to relinquish control, and give the movie to somebody
else, who then realizes it to their liking. And so I think it was in
undergrad that I realized I definitely needed to be a director as well.”
In the AFI directing program, Aster began working with collaborators like Hereditary cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski and started writing and directing a series of disturbing, subversively funny short films. The Strange Thing About the Johnsons
is a melodrama about a family dealing with the specter of sexual abuse —
only in this case, it’s a grown-up son who’s abusing his father. Munchausen stars Die Hard’s
Bonnie Bedelia as a mother with an unhealthy attachment to her teenage
child, who is willing to go to extraordinary lengths to prevent him from
getting married and leaving home forever.
The films made the rounds on the festival circuit, and
looking at them now, it’s easy to see hints of Aster’s debut feature in
his earlier work. The shorts feature similar meticulously framed visuals
and a penchant for Kubrickian symmetry. Like Hereditary, they
show a fascination with family dysfunction, and an eagerness to push
audiences well beyond their comfort zones. All these elements seem like
snapshots of a filmmaker honing and refining his creative voice in real
time.
“I’d watched his shorts, and they blew me away,” Collette
says. “He really does have an original voice, and I feel like that is
what the world is lacking. Everything is so watered down and neutralized
for mass appeal, which is so crazy because what people really respond
to is the strength of an original voice.”
But despite his early obsession with horror movies, that
was the one genre Aster intentionally tried to steer away from. “I’d
been resisting writing a horror film for a long time, mostly because it
just wasn’t the genre that had been exciting me,” he confesses. “Which
is silly, because everything I do is really dark and bleak, and horror
is like the one genre where that is not only a virtue; it’s sort of
necessary.”
That’s not meant “to slag off the genre,” he stresses.
It’s clear that horror does intrigue Aster. He’s just not interested in
clichéd gorefests or stalked-teenager flicks. Talking about his
favorites, he name-checks Robert Eggers’ The Witch and the original Let the Right One In. He gushes about Hong-jin Na’s 2016 film The Wailing, and Nagisa Ôshima’s Empire of Passion.
Aster is a cineaste’s genre fan, interested in horror for the themes it
allows filmmakers to explore and the catharsis it allows viewers,
rather than the potential for jump-scares.
“You have two camps,” he says. “One is horror films that
are essentially roller-coaster rides, that are there to just give people
a series of jolts, and then let them go home and get on with their
life. Then there are others that are maybe more existential in nature
and are really trying to play with very serious fears and engaging with
them on a serious level. Those are the ones that I’m interested in
watching, and those are the films I’m interested in making.”
His attempt at writing that kind of existential horror film resulted in Hereditary, with A24 Films — the company behind movies like Ex Machina and Room
— jumping on board once the Hollywood wheels started to turn. According
to Collette, it was his grounded approach to the genre that made the
script stand out in the first place. “He just really understood the
dynamics in the family, has such an understanding of what it is to be
human, what it is to experience loss,” she says. “When I read it
initially, it kind of felt like The Ice Storm.”
The finished
film has more than its share of terrifying sequences, but the decaying
relationship between Collette’s Annie Graham, her husband (Gabriel
Byrne), and their two children (Alex Wolff and Milly Shapiro) serves as
the movie’s framework — and arguably, it’s most disturbing element. “I
wanted to make a serious film about grief and trauma that worked as a
vivid family drama,” Aster explains. “I wanted to make a drama that
curdled into a nightmare, in the same way that life can end up feeling
like a nightmare when disaster strikes.”
Hereditary feels so relentless at times, so
eager to explore the dark places that most movies wouldn’t dare venture
into, that it’s easy to wonder if Aster is exorcising some personal
demons. Is there a reason why such an affable filmmaker was able to conjure up such a distressing cinematic ride?
“This was a very therapeutic film to write and to make,”
he acknowledges. “The feelings behind the film were highly personal.” He
seems reluctant to say more than that, emphasizing that “the film
itself is all invention,” while also admitting that part of the genre’s
power is its ability to offer audiences — and storytellers — the
opportunity to grapple with unresolved anxieties. “The genre, it demands
catharsis, and so you have to find the catharsis,” he says. “Even if
that means taking these horrible ideas to their logical conclusion, and
going full-on apocalyptic. That can be so much more therapeutic than
thousands of hours on a therapist’s couch.”
If making Hereditary offered one moment of
catharsis for Aster, the next came when the film premiered at Sundance,
not far from the Park City, Utah locations where he had shot. “It was
amazing,” he says. “The first feeling was one of relief.” It’s easy to
get lost in the minutiae when making a film, he explains, and he has a
tendency to obsess over the things that don’t turn out exactly how they
were intended. Watching a film with an actual audience is the best way
to break out of that mindset. “I’d almost forgotten that I had made a
horror movie,” he says. “For so long, I was just trying to make the best
movie I could. It was a reminder that I had made a horror movie, and it
was gratifying to see that it was working as one, at least on that
audience.”
Still, the near-constant accolades that the film has
racked up since its festival debut bring their own pressure. A few weeks
before the film’s release, I spoke to Aster again, and he sounded a
note of caution. “I’m excited, but I’m a little nervous, too. I feel
like the hype has been really gratifying, but I wonder if any movie can
stand up to it, to the kind of hyperbole that’s been thrown around. So
I’m hoping people come to it without too much bias and can see it for
what it is.”
It’s a reasonable concern. Hype for Hereditary has certainly been high — Time Out New York’s Joshua Rothkopf called the film “a new generation’s The Exorcist”
— but worrying that a movie isn’t going to be horrifying enough to meet
expectations is a long way from trying to avoid making horror movies
altogether. If anything, Aster seems to have embraced the genre
recognition his debut feature has thrust upon him — for the time being,
at least. A24 recently announced that it will be working with the filmmaker on his sophomore feature, another horror film tentatively titled Midsommer.
“I can’t say too much about it, but I can say that it’s similar to Hereditary
in that it begins as one thing, and then it becomes a horror film,”
Aster says. “This film is a contribution to the Scandinavian folk-horror
space, and we’re gonna be shooting it in Hungary in August.”
But once that film is finished, he thinks it will be time
for something different. “It’ll probably be my last horror movie for a
while,” he says. “I love the genre, and I can definitely see myself
returning to it, but I would like to play in another sandbox after that
one.”
Audiences shouldn’t expect Ari Aster to turn around and
start making upbeat, family-friendly romps, though. “I have 10
screenplays I hope to direct, and they’re all rooted in different
genres,” he says. “I don’t really have a mission as a filmmaker, but if
anything ties them all together, I’d say that they’re all on the darker
side.”
You’d never expect it from such a nice guy.
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