Top to bottom:Toni
Collette as Annie
in Ari Aster’s 2018
breakout horror,
Hereditary; Family
and bereavement
are themes of both
Aster movies.horror films where actors are advised to
raid the shelves of Priceline for factor 50
suncream pre-shoot. Turns out that’s
for good reason.
“It posed a lot of challenges,”
says Aster. “These were extremely hot,
punishing conditions. Everyone got
sunburnt, and we were chasing the sun
all day. We shot all day outside for, like,
three days on Hereditary and those were
the worst days. Because the days are
shorter, you can’t begin shooting ’til
the sun is up, then before you know it
you’re entering twilight and it’s over. It’s
a nightmare for continuity. We had to
contend with that stress on a whole
new level with Midsommar.” Then there
was the small matter of insects. “There
was a huge wasp problem, attacking
everyone every lunchtime. And for one
scene, we were using a pig’s head. By
noon on the first day, the pig’s head
was filled with ants and the eyes were
dense with maggots. It was grim,” he’s
able to laugh now.
His cast, led by Fighting With My
Family star Florence Pugh, soldiered
on. “She has this scary confidence,
self-assurance and poise,” Aster beams
of his lead actress. “Really, I got the sense
that there’s nothing she can’t do” —
evading hordes of flying stinging beasts
included. The insects could be overcome.
A bigger challenge was the pressure
of following up the film terrorising
audiences back home to rave reviews as
they toiled in the Hungarian countryside.
“With Hereditary, there was nothing to
lose. There were no expectations except
the ones in my head,” Aster says, gazing
deep into his cup of coffee. “If I ever
felt like a shot wasn’t as good as I could
have made it, that was devastating to
me. I’m [instantly] depressed. I can only
lift myself up by nailing the next scene.
It’s a real rollercoaster for me... The
biggest problem was carrying myself
around all day.”IT WAS A problem worth hurdling.
Aster is elated with Midsommar, and
excited for the world to endure its heavy,
oppressive air of tension. “I like to soak
in dread. The films I love most in the
genre — Don’t Look Now, Rosemary’s
Baby, Alien, the Japanese horror films
of the ’50s and ’60s — those really are
films that create and sustain dense and
impenetrable atmospheres. There’s
a mood that just permeates the whole
thing. I think I’m more concerned with
attending to that than to meeting the
demands of the genre in clichéd ways, like
jump-scares,” he says.
It’s another film involving a cult,
after the Paimon-loving (and apparentlyexplains. “I was too busy with an
impossible situation to really get caught
up in its success. We had two months to
build an entire village in a field, to build
10 houses, some of which were three
stories tall. We had to tend to this giant
field, which had grass taller than I am.
We were building things as we were
shooting. Nothing was ready. It was
crazy, a sprint unlike anything I’d
experienced.” He describes the shoot as
“brutal... just outrageously accelerated
and painful and hard.” Always looking to
subvert genre tropes, Aster had designed
Midsommar as a horror movie set not in
darkness, but daylight. There aren’t manya director who reached out to
congratulate him on Hereditary’s
success. “Okay... well... Spielberg liked
it,” he eventually blushes. “Which was a
real pinch-me moment. But bleurgh! I feel
grossed-out for name-dropping. My
self-loathing is spiking right now.”
(Martin Scorsese also liked it but “had
some thoughts on the ending”).
Maybe the reason Aster managed
to avoid being swept up in all the acclaim
is that he wasn’t around for any of
it. “Hereditary was released 8 June
2018, and I was in Hungary [doubling
for Sweden] on 9 June to begin
pre-production on Midsommar,” he