Thursday Rethink: Halloween Horror: Who’s Afraid of Ari Aster's Elevated Horror?

In his review of Midsommar from summer 2019, Aren softly criticizes Ari Aster’s direction, arguing that the film is a flawed work in the “elevated horror” subgenre. Citing It Follows (2014) and The Witch (2015) as more successful examples of elevated horror, Aren argues that Midsommar is hampered by Aster’s overwrought, self-conscious artistry and his apparent aversion to the common yet energizing imperfections of the horror genre. The result, according to Aren, is that Aster’s stories feel inevitable and stilted in their effect.

I appreciate that Aren’s review attempts to thread the polarized responses to Ari Aster, who has been both lauded as a new horror master and as a pretentious, artsy fraud. IMDb reviews, admittedly an unreliable metric for assessing average-viewer responses, are, in the case of Aster’s two features—Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019)—actually useful for their encapsulation of the extreme responses to Aster. Aren’s moderate praise seems in the minority. While I lean towards a high estimation of Aster’s films, I think Aren’s heavily qualified praise and many of the major criticisms are instructive.

Ari Aster is up to something with his two features—that much is certain. Not only are Hereditary and Midsommar unified by stylistic approaches—the long takes, the careful framing—but they also share common thematic interests. The unity of his two films enhances the view that Aster is a new horror auteur, someone akin to M. Night Shyamalan in his early years of fame. 

But what is Aster up to? What are Hereditary and Midsommar saying? This is where the critical discussion gets murky, or, to refine my metaphor, uncertain due to competing claims of certainty. Aster has clearly put a lot of thought into his horror movies, and there are lots of different claims about the underlying message of his films, from a variety of angles. For example, one critic argues that Midsommar is a celebration of the different facets of womanhood, while another sees Aster’s works as lamenting the missing paternalism in modern secular culture. 

In response, I want to highlight three dominant aspects of both Hereditary and Midsommar which I believe reinforce the view that Aster is a major artist in the horror genre.

Intertwined Themes, Not Allegory

First, I don’t think his films should be read allegorically. What I mean to say is that I don’t think they are works about something other than what they overtly reveal themselves to be. There isn’t a hidden message that needs to be uncovered, and there certainly isn’t a one-to-one implicit meaning behind the main elements of each film. They are not strict allegory.

It’s a critical fallback to say that films use elements as metaphors, and the supernatural elements in horror movies are often pegged as metaphors for something else. This can be true, but I think it’s often used as a crutch for not fully unravelling the thematic content of a work. That said, the monster can represent something else or mean something more. It Follows is a good example. Many read that film as being about the consequences of sex, whether infectious, traumatic, or otherwise, or, as Aren argues, the awareness of death and mortality that coming-of-age and maturation (especially sexual) can elicit.

The fact that both Hereditary and Midsommer were promoted and discussed as elevated horror also seems to have contributed to the need for some to allegorize the happenings in each film. Jordan Peele’s recent success with social-criticism horror, such as his elaborate if failed allegory, Us (2019), perhaps adds to the assumptions about allegory in the discourse on horror right now. And Aster himself, in interviews such as this one with Vox, describes Hereditary as using horror to talk about suffering, trauma, and family.

The title, Hereditary, indicates that the movie’s theme is heredity, the passing of something on to the next generation. However, I don’t think the movie is simply using the demons as a metaphor for people’s inherited legacies, be they emotional, genetic, or otherwise. The demon, Paimon, becomes emphatically literal over the course of the film, as the ending sequence, with its sustained interest in the demon cult’s rituals, makes clear. This is not to say that Hereditary is not about heredity and inheritance and how patterns of abuse and trauma can perpetuate themselves across generations. It is. It’s also about how people sometimes use their children or grandchildren to achieve their own desired goals, above and beyond the well-being of the child. 

My point is that Aster’s works are not “either/or” kinds of texts. They are “both/and” movies. The demonic reality depicted in Hereditary reinforces the threads of connection across generational lines. To put it another way, I’m suggesting not only that the movie’s demon plot reveals truths about traumatic inheritance, but also that its handling of family trauma speculates about the demonic influence at work in everyday life. What secrets lurk within families, across generations?

Midsommar is similarly often read as a metaphor, in this case for the deterioration of a relationship. Aster himself suggests in an interview that it’s about break-ups, trauma, and tribalism. Dani’s boyfriend, Christian, does not provide Dani with the emotional support that she needs in the aftermath of her sister’s murder-suicide that also claimed her parents. But this is not a layer of meaning that the pagan sacrifice plot is meant to allusively and indirectly reveal. Rather, it’s part of the core content of the film, alongside the pagan plot. The film is about their relationship deteriorating and the communal bonds of the pagans that draw Dani in. I’m suggesting that we should read the pagan plot literally, not simply as a metaphor for or a setting to explore their break-up. The film asks, does this sort of close-knit culture provide something that Christian, and Western modernity, cannot?

This might mean that Aster’s films are not so rich since they don’t invite the ambiguity that, for example, Rosemary’s Baby projects for much of the film (inviting us to ask, is the wife just going crazy?). However, it is the connection between the two, between domestic and interpersonal terror and metaphysical evil (which Aster borrows from movies such as Rosemary’s Baby) that is especially horrifying in his two works. 

The Corruption of Social Bonds and the Binding Threads of Evil

Aster’s movies assert that evil is real and that its dominion extends beyond the typical spheres many horror movies maintain: evil is both present in humanity, in the normal relationships of parent and child and between romantic partners, and in a literal supernatural sense. 

Hereditary progresses from the secret and unclear legacies of a difficult parent, to more open revelations of resentment between household members, to a possible embrace of spiritualist communion with the dead, to, finally, a demonic cult sacrificing a boy so that his body can be made the vessel of the demon-king Paimon. Some people see this progression as a “twist,” others as a “folly”: I found it brilliantly effective and lingeringly disturbing. In Hereditary, the demonic threads all the generational interactions, suggesting that the resentments within a family, between a parent and child, or between siblings, may be the seeds of worse evil—and that they are not of a separate kind.

While many horror films link human evil with supernatural, the self-serious approach of both Hereditary and Midsommar does distinguish Aster from many today. But it also recalls The Exorcist, which is arguably the first prestige-horror film. (The Exorcist was nominated for Best Picture and takes demonic possession as a serious topic. That film also links the social and marital decay of the early 1970s with the opening up of the family to the demon, which almost feeds off their human, domestic evil.) Aster’s interest in accruing prestige through horror is not ordinary for filmmakers in the genre. With all the talk about Toni Collette giving her best performance in Hereditary, prestige seems to be a definite aspect of Aster’s production and reception. 

As it explores human failings, Hereditary invites its own misreading, especially with the shocking early death of the daughter. Until that point we expect that we are watching a movie about a socially awkward, physically disabled girl. Instead, her brother, until that point an unassuming lazy stoner, receives our eventual alignment and final pity. Even the mother, whose grief the film takes pains to explore, transforms into the vicious mother she had. 

Midsommar is less clear about the presence of otherworldly evil, but at the very least it suggests that our understanding of what is possible and our human points of view are limited. The film emphasizes enhanced or altered views of the natural world that seem to operate beyond the normal (think of the mushrooms the characters consume upon arriving at the village). The natural world is endowed with a seemingly supernatural power, which instead may be a recovery of an earlier view of nature.

In spite of what some might argue, I would say that Midsommar invites us to judge the moral and cultural relativism that is superficially posited in the film. It invites us to both investigate the bounds of what is acceptable in the two cultures (the dialogue contrasts modern nursing homes with socially-enforced ritual suicide, for instance), but it also invites us to judge them. We can try to “keep an open mind,” as Christian says after seeing the two elders leap to their death in the ritual suicide. But when the hammers come out to pound their heads to mush in an act of euthanasia, and the camera doesn’t look away, I think the cult’s ways are being called into question. 

We may think that Dani rightly choses to join the cult in the end, but the sheer degree of viciousness displayed makes it hard to justify the full gamut and brutality of the pagan religion. We probably come away with negative views of both social options being set forth in Midsommar. Likewise, early in the film, the gliding, slow reveal of the domestic horror of a daughter killing herself and her parents with carbon monoxide is revealed in such a way that we cannot look away. The camera moves inexorably in towards her face. Both worlds are exposed as containing great evil.

The Emptiness of Western Modernity

This last point raises the spectre of how Aster’s films consistently make comparisons between modern, secular North American culture and competing worldviews: the demonic cult in Hereditary, with its emphasis on paranormal or supernatural reality, and the pagan cult in Midsommar, with its emphasis on communal bonds and a naturally cyclical view of life. 

In the past, I have argued that the horror landmark, The Wicker Man (1973), sets up an ambiguous contrast between the pagan and the Christian, open to interpretation either way. Both are seen as flawed, both as sympathetic, depending on our reading and our prior assumptions. I would argue that both of Aster’s films, but especially Midsommar, operate in a similar fashion. Midsommar’s debt to The Wicker Man is obvious. But the comparison is no longer Western Christianity vs. pagan: it’s secular modernity vs. pagan.

These are both movies about cults, one worshipping demons, the other naturalistic and pagan. The difference from The Wicker Man’s presentation of Christianity is that I don’t see much of a Christian or traditionally religious alternative to the cults on offer in Aster’s films. But that does not make the films an endorsement of the cults. Rather, there is grim bleakness to their vision of the current age. 

There’s something akin to the works of French writer Michel Houellebecq in these films, in their vision of an impotent, decadent, decaying Western culture whose vacuums of value demand that something stronger—a more powerful narrative and one that responds to and answers human needs for connection and affirmation—step in to fill the gaps.

The modern family is powerless against the machinations of the cult in Hereditary partly because they can never muster courage to take stock of what is going on. They never talk openly about the problems, except in heated exchanges. The heroes never work together, never form a unit to fight back, and so the film exaggerates the fleeing victim trope of the slasher movie, cutting each family member off to be destroyed alone. Hereditary is a domestic drama, so the cultural conflict takes place within competing family units: the mother’s secret family, and the daughter’s natural one.

In Midsommar, as Aren and Josh Larsen have pointed out, Dani’s needs are never answered by the men in her life, in particular her boyfriend, who seems incapable of offering any real support. The cult eventually steps in to fill that void, which, as so many have noted, is visually depicted in the open howling of Dani’s sorrow. But the very reason for Dani’s distress is also the consequence of a society and culture so devoid of meaning that too many of the young choose to opt out of it. In response to Dani’s culture of decadence and death comes a worldview that embraces death as a part of the natural cycle, as something entwined with life. Her sorrow is subsumed into a deeper meaning, and she can be made whole. But at what cost to others and to her own soul?

The Creation of Cultural Horror

I recognize that Aster’s films avoid many of the B-movie qualities of horror even as they replicate certain tropes. Their slow, inevitable, doom-filled pace doesn’t operate the same way as many horror movies, and can seem unsurprising and slow to deliver. Their artful attention to strange details may seem a waste of time. I think they invite viewing and thinking about their complex thematics, which link the lack of virtue and meaning with the overpowering of a stronger, if harsher, communal bond.

H. P. Lovecraft is known for his cosmic horror, in which, more than the monsters, the ultimate horror is the realization that humanity is an insignificant speck in a larger, ultimately unknowable universe. 

The ultimate horror in both of Aster’s films might be termed “cultural horror.” There’s an ethnographic eye for detail in both films that invites revulsion towards both the cultures depicted in each. But there’s also a patient and ceaselessly viewing interest in these things, whether the operations of spiritualism, the demon’s pendants, or the slow and deliberately worded, accurate prayer to Paimon at the end of Hereditary. In Midsommar, the world of the grad students, with their shabby apartments that cling to vestiges of art and intellectualism, and their avoidance of interpersonal responsibility combined with a consuming focus on “the work,” seems highly believable, as does the attention to the operations of the pagan cult, from the paintings on the walls of the wooden houses to the attention to dress and food.

And then there’s the inevitability. Aster’s films lack both lean, narratively orchestrated tension and reliance on jump scares. Instead, they generate slow-building waves of doom. But isn’t that the point? We can’t completely turn away from the culture we inhabit, since it’s the stream around us. We cannot escape the bonds of heredity. As with the stone reliefs telling of ancient horrible stories in Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, the pagan rituals, and all their terrors, are plainly told in the colourful drawings inside the wooden buildings. The horror is in plain sight, there to read on the walls if we can muster it.  

The true horror of Aster’s films is that they seem to leave the viewer with a choice between a decadent, ineffectual culture and an actively ruthless one.

Hereditary (2018, USA)

Written and directed by Ari Aster; starring Toni Collette, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro, Ann Dowd, Gabriel Byrne.

Midsommar (2019, USA)

Written and directed by Ari Aster; starring Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, William Jackson Harper, Vilhelm Blomgren, Ellora Torchia, Archie Madekwe, Will Poulter.

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