Monthly Archives: July 2018

Hereditary: How Director Ari Aster Made a Movie that Doesn’t Feel Safe

SPOILERS: The following article discusses scenes and key events from Hereditary. You have been warned...

My favourite horror films are those that flirt with the fantastic. Movies that maintain a weird ambiguity around the reality of their central events. They all eventually table a simple question: is something genuinely supernatural happening here or is a plausible, rational explanation just out of sight?

The Turn of the Screw is the classic example of this effect. It’s entirely possible to read the novella believing the ghosts are real, preying upon young Miles and Flora, and it’s equally viable to interpret them as the delusions of the young governess employed to look after them. The same incidents can be consolidated in different ways, producing two competing interpretations. While The Turn of the Screw never really resolves this effect, most horror movies do.

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