There's been a lot of aesthetically rich horror films that have come out in the last several years. 'The Babadook' is this perfectly paced, beautiful film. 'The Witch' is a beautifully made film. 'Get Out' is so intelligently written. I feel like there's so many great things happening right now.
I know a lot of people who hate the ending of 'Rosemary's Baby' and wish that it was left ambiguous.
I graduated from the American Film Institute in 2010, where I studied as a director, and came out with a few features I really wanted to make.
Every single moment in 'Hereditary' is linked to a moment in the end for the payoff. I think it has the ability of captivating people the same way that 'Manchester By the Sea' did. It has that audience because it's so wrapped in human drama.
Filmmaking is so much about catharsis anyway. It's therapeutic.
The beauty of the horror genre is that you can smuggle in these harder stories, and the genre comes with certain demands, but mostly you need to find the catharsis in whatever story you're telling. What may be seen as a deterrent for audiences in one genre suddenly becomes a virtue in another genre.
A great horror film works as a communal experience more than almost anything else, except for maybe a comedy. That's something that I've experienced, just taking this movie around and watching it with audiences.
I enjoy turning things on the audience. I really like working in genre because people come into the films with certain expectations. They know the tropes so well that, when you turn on those, it can be shocking because there's a complacency that comes with watching those films.
I love the horror genre. I consider myself a genre filmmaker. I love genre, but I think there's a certain amount of complacency that comes with watching a genre film; people know what the devices are. They know what the tropes are. They know the conventions.
The joy of making a genre film is that you have audiences in that place, and it's a perfect place to start because all it takes is finding ways to startle them out of that complacency and encourage a different kind of engagement.
When I was 13 years old, I was obsessed with horror films. I even had, like, a binder that I filled with badly copied images from the Internet of, like, 'Pinhead and Basket Case.'
I love Cronenberg so much, especially the films he was doing in the mid to late '80s and early '90s, like 'Naked Lunch' and 'Dead Ringers'.
These are films that I really love, but I would say I'm not somebody who runs out to every horror film. I avoid most of them. I feel like a lot of them are made very cynically.
Most horror films are made very cynically, and they're usually made by studios for an audience that they know is there, no matter what they put out. And there are always exceptions - every year, it seems we have a great one coming out.
Sometimes you want pain to be acknowledged and not whitewashed - or erased by some exceptionalist point of view.
The next film I'm making is a horror film, and I'm making it with A24. It's a dark break-up movie that becomes a horror film, set in Sweden. That's all I can really say now. It's called 'Midsommar.' Everybody's been spelling it wrong. It's 'midsummer' in Swedish.
'Hereditary' is unabashedly a horror film. In a lot of ways, it's in dialogue with other horror films. But I do know that it was important for me that the film functioned first as a family drama. I know that I'm never affected by anything if I'm not invested in the people to whom the genre things are happening.
I know that I put a lot into 'Hereditary', and I'm proud of what it is. Beyond the fact that the film takes its time and asks for a certain amount of patience from the audience - and I hope it rewards that patience by the end - I know that I'm something of an aesthete. I care about aesthetics, and I love filmmaking.
I got my MFA from AFI as a director in 2010. I've had time to make the shorts that I made previous to 'Hereditary' and to kind of build these movies in my head.
With 'Hereditary', I wanted to make a film about what bothers me about life.
