Hereditary
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The Unsettling Glow of Daylight: DP Pawel Pogorzelski on Shooting the Folk Horror of Midsommar
In the span of just two features, writer/director Ari Aster and cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski have forged a signature style that cloaks the heightened emotions of melodrama behind the veil of the horrific. In last year’s Hereditary, the Ordinary People-esque family tragedy unfolded in a haunted house, where a matriarch’s sense of being cursed manifested itself literally. In the new film Midsommar, the crumbling relationship between two American grad students plays out against the backdrop of an isolated Swedish community whose harvest festival isn’t quite as benign as it first appears. With Midsommar out now in wide release, Pogorzelski talked to […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Jul 11, 2019 -
“I See the Film as a Fairy Tale, More than Anything Else”: Ari Aster on Trauma and the “Folk Horror” of Midsommar
Watching writer/director Ari Aster’s debut Hereditary, I yearned for the horror to come, as if it’d help wash away the pain of the domestic trauma preceding. Then it came, but it painfully didn’t offer the relief I had been thirsting for. Aster’s horror films, full of pain and confusion, are mined from the director’s own traumas. Making them might be a form of exorcism. He coins his latest film, Midsommar — about a grieving woman who travels to a nine-day long festival in Sweden with her diffident boyfriend and his grad student friends — a breakup movie, and this time, […]
by A.E. Hunt on Jul 3, 2019 -
2018 As a Year in Double Features
Every year, when looked back upon in its final days, reveals patterns. For the past four years, I’ve capped the holiday season with a list of 10 double features from the year in film here at Filmmaker. Each capsule review is, in essence, a mini-thinkpiece on a cinematic trend from the year. This past year gave us many such boomlets: the year of the horse movie, the year of the “white voice” movie, the year of the movie set entirely on digital screens. A delightful interplay emerges when you watch, or think about, films in pairs. One movie brings out […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Dec 31, 2018 -
Complicated Grief: Ari Aster on Hereditary‘s Family Nightmare
There are films that scare you, and then there are films that do something more. The former are easy to name—maybe you remember a particular jump scare or chilling scene—but the latter are more difficult to describe. These are films that dig deep into your subconscious, films that identify a weakness or fear and prey upon that with their cinematic imagination. You’ll remember scenes from these movies in detail, too, but also how old you were, and where you were, and what was going on in your life when you saw them. You’ll remember how they made you feel, and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 11, 2018 -
Hereditary, Horror and the Power of Choice
It was the closing night of the Overlook Film Festival and everyone was gathered at a mansion on the outskirts of town. I was coming out of the bathroom, spooked, because A24 had planted some Hereditary sound effects next to the toilet. Jesus. The film, which comes out today, had closed the festival earlier that night and had left everyone on edge — deliciously so. I grabbed a glass of wine, discussing the experience with a stranger who was leaning against a wall outside next to some friends. Why do we put ourselves through all this? There was a number […]
by Meredith Alloway on Jun 8, 2018
