7 Movies that is likely to be giving you nightmares very soon

7 Movies that is likely to be giving you nightmares very soon

1. ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968)

As a young man, Aster was obsessed with horror. Between the ages of 12 and 16 he exhausted the horror section of his local video store. The film he left until last would become the on that would most shape him. “I always passed over Rosemary’s Baby because the tittle didn’t interest me,” Aster says. “I finnaly watched it when I was 16 and it floored me. I still don’t know if there’s any film whose direction is more impressive to me… That was probably the biggest stylistic inl uence on me (for Hereditary].” The story of Hereditary has little in common with Polanski's classic about a woman pregnant with the spawn of Satan, but they share a sense of horror in the domestic. “The way I pitched Hereditary was as a family tragedy that curdles into a nightmare — The Ice Storm meets Rosemary’s Baby.” Both films find terror in the ordinary, following a family through relatively mundane lives that are suddenly disrupted by something supernatural and violent

2. DON’T LOOK NOW (1973) 

For a portrait of how grief warps the mind, Aster looked to Nicolas Roeg’s surreal horror about a couple haunted by the death of their daughter. “In a lot of ways I see Hereditary as a spiritual cousin to Don’t Look Now,” says Aster. “Roeg was a cinematographer before he was a director and you’d expect someone like that to be very precious about his images, but he’s not. He was more of an editor than anything else. What he does with juxtaposition and elliptical editing made a very deep impression on me as a kid. I don’t feel like I’m doing that [type of editing] in Hereditary, but his tone was something I was thinking about.”

3. CARRIE (1976) 

Of all the horror movies Aster has watched, none scared him more than Brian De Palma’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about a telekinetic teenage outcast. “I saw it when I was 11 and for around three years after that I could not walk around a dark house without [mentally] projecting its images onto the walls,” he says. Aster remembered that lasting fear when considering how he wanted people to feel after watching Hereditary. “It was a mission to me to make a i lm that would haunt the audience later. I didn’t want to make a rollercoaster ride that would scare you and then let you off the hook. I wanted to make something that would get more disturbing as it went on and left you in a more or less hopeless place.” Mission accomplished. 

4. DAS UNHEIMLICHE (1919) 

You can’t chart a familial psychological breakdown without a little Sigmund Freud. One essay by the psychoanalyst was vital to forming Aster’s whole outlook as a director. “I read Freud’s essay The Uncanny a long time ago and it had a very signii cant effect on me,” he says. “I’m probably going to misrepresent what he says very badly, but it came down to something along the lines of ‘the uncanny takes place when the home becomes increasingly un-homelike’.” It’s the feeling of the strangely familiar; known, but not quite right. “I wanted to make a i lm where the home becomes increasingly unhomelike to the point that it is eventually unrecognisable.” The unsafe-home theme recurs throughout Aster’s short i lms, most of which you’ll i nd online. In his i rst, 2011’s The Strange Thing About The Johnsons, he tells a very, very, very darkly comic story about a young man molesting his own father. “I don’t know why that dark side of humanity is so interesting to me,” he says, though he puts part of it down to growing up in an openminded, artsy family (his mother is a visual artist and poet; his dad is a jazz drummer). “My mom i nds The Johnsons very funny! I think I’ve been able to make the i lms I do because I have never had that voice in the back of my head chastising me.”

5. JAPANESE HORROR 

There are parts of Hereditary that the i lm doesn’t even try to explain. There’s no need. Part of the intent was that the i lm had a ‘magical’ quality, which Aster saw as a common theme in some of his favourite Japanese ghost movies. “I looked at Ugetsu (1953); Onibaba (1964); Empire Of Passion (1978); Kwaidan (1964),” he says. “They take on the quality of a very toxic dream. There’s something very ethereal about them.”

6. 45 YEARS (2015) 

Probably the most surprising inl uence on Aster’s debut is Andrew Haigh’s drama 45 Years. It is not by any dei nition a horror movie. It concerns a couple, Kate and Geoff (Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay), who are about to celebrate their 45th wedding anniversary. Nevertheless, it was the i rst i lm that Aster showed to his creative crew, to give them an idea of the mood he wanted for his i lm. That is largely down to one thing the i lms share: a single moment that changes a family forever. In the case of 45 Years, it’s a letter about an old love of Geoff’s. In Hereditary it is… something else. “That’s maybe the best i lm I’ve seen in the last i ve years,” says Aster, who calls it “a very untraditional ghost story”. In particular he was struck by the ending and the way silence can imply so much about a relationship, something he uses a lot in Hereditary. “The i nal moment of 45 Years is the best i nal moment of any movie.”

7. SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN (1952) 

Aster is keen to make clear that he is not exclusively a horror guy. Since graduating from i lm school in 2010, he has written nine screenplays, only one of them horror. “They were all over the map,” he says. “One was an ensemble comedy-noir thing. Another was a nightmare comedy I really want to make.” The reason for making his i rst i lm a horror was, initially, economic. “I decided horror would be easier to get i nanced, and that proved true,” says Aster. “[The Hereditary script] seemed to connect with people. The reaction was pretty night and day from other projects I was going out with. We were able to elicit interest pretty quickly.” In keeping with his broad tastes as a screenwriter, Aster insists his cinematic inl uences aren’t all dark and disturbing. “I love watching sweet, fun, happy movies,” he says before listing quite a few movies that are not. “I love early Albert Brooks, like Real Life, which actually isn’t that happy. I love Mike Leigh in general. I love West Side Story.” That’s a tragedy with jazz hands. “I’m trying to think of an unequivocally happy i lm. Singin’ In The Rain?” He can have that one. One hundred per cent cheerful. 

sources:

Empire Australia, June 2018

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