Editor’s note: This chat with director Ari Aster was originally written by author Daniel Barna and published on Playboy.com in 2019.
Earlier this year, a theater full of Australian families got an unwelcome surprise when the trailer for A24’s new horror movie Hereditary played before a screening of the PG-rated animated movie Peter Rabbit. Stunned parents shielded their children from the screen and shouted at the projectionist to stop, while others stormed out of the theaters to get help, as if the whole building were burning to the ground.That the blunder inspired such a frenzied reaction from those in attendance should come as no surprise. Since premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Hereditary has become something of a sensation, having been called everything from “deeply unsettling” to “the most traumatically terrifying horror movie in ages.” Having seen the film—which tracks a family’s harrowing descent into madness after the passing of its mysterious matriarch—I can confirm that watching Hereditary is a deeply upsetting experience. When I emerged from the theater, palms drenched in sweat, I surveyed the faces of my fellow journalists, many of whom looked genuinely traumatized, like they had just left the kill floor of a slaughterhouse. One colleague looked at the rest of us and said simply, “I want to go home and kill myself.”
That said, you should definitely go and see Hereditary, hitting theaters Friday, June 8. Following in the footsteps of recent slow-burn movies that will scare the shit out of you—The Witch and The Babadook come to mind—Hereditary is a worthy addition to the new wave of horror films that have taken Hollywood by storm.
The film is the brainchild of Ari Aster, a first-time director and AFI film-school grad who somehow managed to convince living legends Toni Collette and Gabriel Byrne to star as the husband-and-wife duo at the film’s center. When I spoke to Aster, he was quick to point out that, while he definitely borrowed elements from the horror genre, his real intention was to make a family tragedy that slowly unfurls into a waking nightmare. Mission accomplished.
Playboy: Where were you career-wise when you set out to write Hereditary?
Ari Aster: I had written several other feature scripts that I was trying to get going while I was making shorts and just keeping busy as a filmmaker—although not getting paid for it—and after a couple of projects had fallen through, I decided to write a horror movie.
Playboy: Why did you zero in on horror specifically?
Ari Aster: I had written some genre films mostly, but they were too big and were less obviously marketable, so I wrote a horror movie because I figured it would be easier to finance. It began cynically in that way, but once I decided to write a horror film, the question became, what kind of horror film do I want to make? I’m not someone who runs to see every horror film that comes out. I feel a lot of them are made very cynically. Of course, there are lots of exceptions, but I wanted to make something that ran a little deeper and that ultimately was about the things that scared me.
“There is no remedy to death—there is no remedy to fear of abandonment because it could always happen.”
Playboy: And what did you find?
Ari Aster: I investigated what those things were, and then I endeavored to then make something that I wasn’t calling a horror film. I knew that I was going to pay attention to all those demands and that I wanted to make a great horror film, but I decided early on that I wanted to make a family tragedy that works into a nightmare. I think the movie is more indebted to melodrama than it is to horror.
Playboy: Hereditary is being called is this year’s horror breakout, following in the footsteps of boutique horror movies like The Babadook or It Follows. Is that something you set out to do?
Ari Aster: I was aware of those movies because I was watching all of them, and I was loving so many of them, from The Witch to It Follows to The Babadook, and even the renaissance that’s been happening in South Korea, not just with horror but with genre movies in general. But I don’t think the intention was ever to engage in a dialogue with those films, despite the fact that I love them. If anything, I was thinking about films that I had grown up with that had an impact on me.
Playboy: Like?
Ari Aster: The ones that really horrified me as a kid were [Brian] De Palma’s Carrie, or Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover—which isn’t technically a horror film, but it’s an absolute nightmare, and it really bothered me on a very visceral level. So my film is having a dialogue with those films, it’s having a dialogue with Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. I love [Roman] Polanski, and I can’t think of a better film in any genre than Rosemary’s Baby. When you’re very young, and you’re watching horror films, they really singe themselves into your consciousness—they really get to you.
Playboy: The film is deeply upsetting. After my screening, I heard people say they wanted to go home and kill themselves. Is that the reaction you’re after?
Ari Aster: If anything, I’ve been surprised by how widely embraced it’s been so far because the goal was always to make an alienating film that really upset people on a deep level. If I’m having a dialogue with any contemporary horror films, it’s not the ones that I like, it’s the ones that I don’t. I think there’s this trend that’s been around since there’s been horror films. Even in the ’50s, you had B-movies that were considered beneath. There is this tendency to want to make disposable entertainment, to make good B-movies that are very easy to shake off. They’re roller coasters, where you meet a quota of jump scares, you get your screams in and people are allowed to go home. But for me, the horror films that have stuck with me—that have always really made an impact—are the more existential ones. They’re really dealing in an unbroken way with much deeper, primal fears and fears that don’t really have a remedy. There is no remedy to death—there is no remedy to fear of abandonment because it could always happen.
Playboy: How were you able to get so inside the grieving process? Was there anything personal that you were drawing on?
Ari Aster: If I drew on it personally, it’s because I have a family, so my fears surrounding my family are the same as anybody else’s. My family and I have been through things together, and I would say that the film is drawing from feelings more than it is actual experiences that I’ve been through. Nobody in this film is a surrogate for anybody in my own family, but I’m very close to my family.
Playboy: So your relationship with your parents is nothing like the child-parent relationship in this film?
Ari Aster: My parents are artists who have been very supportive of what I’m doing. We live for our connection to people. They’re not only transient because we’re only here for so long, but they’re also very delicate, and we have to take care of them, and sometimes horrible things happen in life that are extreme, and there aren’t necessarily right or wrong ways to deal with them. Nobody’s perfect, and sometimes disaster doesn’t bring out the best in everybody. There’s definitely a tradition in American drama, especially ones about a family going through a crisis, where it’ll be hairy, but in the end it’s going to bring the family closer, and that’s just not always how it goes.
Playboy: When casting Toni, did you use her performance as a mother coming undone in The Sixth Sense as a reference?
Ari Aster: She was always at the top of the list of people that we were talking about. But to be honest, I was thinking more about her performance Muriel’s Wedding. I think she’s always been a very reliable actress, and I was thinking about her because we all knew that she was great, but I felt that I had not seen her chew apart the scenery that this movie was demanding. I think that The Sixth Sense is an excellent film, but I also think that it has a much more optimistic and benevolent edge by the end. I think there is light at the end of the tunnel in that film, whereas at the end of this tunnel, there is endless pitch blackness.
Playboy: What were your thoughts on that whole Peter Rabbit scandal?
Ari Aster: I was definitely amused, and I think it’s only good for the movie. I’m happy to hear that we’re expanding our demographic.