Following on from my post on scary movies last week, do take the time, if you possibly can, to listen in to this lively discussion of horror movies on Radio 4’s Front Row and featuring the ever-wonderful Kim Newman. Hearing Kim talk about horror never fails to reinvigorate my enthusiasm for the genre. It’s not just that he’s incredibly knowledgeable – he’s clearly still just as passionate about the subject as when he first started writing and given the quality of many of the movies he’s had to sit through over the years, that’s no mean achievement.
The discussion focused closely on Polanski’s classic horror movie Rosemary’s Baby, which celebrated its fiftieth anniversary this week. I could scarcely believe it. I’ve seen Rosemary’s Baby about five times and it never seems to age. Krzysztof Komeda’s fabulously eerie score, playing out over sweeping footage of New York rooftops must rank with the opening of Kubrick’s The Shining as one of my favourite opening sequences ever. Much of Rosemary’s Baby takes place in confined interiors, the old-world grandeur of those brownstone apartments contributing much to the mounting sense of paranoia and entrapment that permeates the movie.
I love the film. I am also in what I suspect is now a minority position of having read the novel before I saw the movie. I first discovered Ira Levin’s suspense thrillers when I was about fourteen, picking up his relatively unknown dystopia This Perfect Day at my local library and subsequently devouring everything by him I could lay my hands on. In my memory at least he remains one of the best pure plotters in the business. Neither of the two screen adaptations of his A Kiss Before Dying matches up to the edge-of-seat thrill of that novel when I read it in the 1980s. Other films have served him better – The Boys from Brazil and The (original) Stepford Wives are both classics – but it is Rosemary’s Baby that comes closest to recapturing the gut-churning suspense of Levin’s original.
They don’t make ’em like that any more. As the Front Row discussion passed from Rosemary’s Baby to Ari Aster’s new film Hereditary, with which it has been enthusiastically compared, my hackles began to rise, the question on my lips: is it just me?
I saw Hereditary on Thursday, at a preview screening in Glasgow. I know by now that I am going to be more or less alone here, so I’m just going to say it: Hereditary is not scary. Not even a little bit. Everything you see in this movie you will already have seen in at least ten other movies. I was honestly more scared by As Above, So Below and that similarly ridiculous film about people chasing demons under a church on Dartmoor. (I was also about to say that I was more scared by The Hollow but that would probably be a lie.)
It makes me angry when respected film critics like Peter Bradshaw give films like Hereditary five stars, because they are clearly not judging them according to the rigorous standards they apply to non-genre movies. Bradshaw’s reviews of European cinema, film classics and US and UK arthouse movies are knowledgeable, entertaining and generally enlightening. But for me at least his record on horror and SF is terrible, giving a free pass to clonker after derivative clonker, waving aside poor scripting and over-used tropes as if they don’t matter in this case because it’s a horror film, and horror films are meant to have that stuff.
Other mainstream critics are just as lax, and it makes me mad.
[Light spoilers ahead] As in almost every other case of Hollywood horror over-hype, the central problem with Hereditary is with the script, or rather the complete and utter lack of one. There is nothing the brilliant Toni Collette can do about that. She works what she has with gusto – but there is fuck all for her to work with. The problem is not so much that the material used in the construction of Hereditary is derivative – it is, but so is more or less everything in horror cinema – it is in the screenwriter/director’s inability to make anything of that material. I mean, things are pretty strange here: the death of Annie’s mother at the beginning of the film marks the culmination of a long cycle of abuse and repressed emotion – yet we learn very little about Annie or Annie’s (potentially interesting) work as an artist or her mother, how Annie felt bound to her in spite of everything and the deleterious effect this has had upon her marriage to Steve. Steve? What does he even do apart from act long-suffering? (And how come every Hollywood horror family is rich enough to live in a magnificently isolated house sparkling with old wood and gorgeous antique furniture?) Steve and Annie’s youngest child, Charlie, is clearly disturbed – and that’s before stuff starts happening. She’s supposed to be thirteen, but acts about nine. There’s terror in this house, with all real feelings and natural behaviour pushed underground. What has been going on before the action begins, and why, why, why the fuck does nobody talk to each other? Even after ‘the event’ (which I’m not going to spoil), a sequence that has the potential for genuine horror and traumatic aftershock, no one says a word to anyone about anything, until Toni Collette’s dinner-time rant, that is, but by then our suspension of disbelief has been thoroughly shaken.
I would suspect that the director, if faced with these questions, would reply that he wanted to portray deep trauma, that the silence between family members is meant to suggest a complete breakdown in the ability to communicate. I suspect that the real reason has more to do with his inability to write dialogue, to imagine properly realised scenes between real human beings, as opposed to actors in a horror movie. Beyond the broadest brushstrokes, there is zero characterisation, and therefore zero reason for us to care about the outcome. (I would suggest to any aspiring screenwriters that having your characters act like zombies right from the first scene is not going to do you any favours. Unless they are zombies of course, in which case, best go with it.) The outcome is also pathetic. It’s been done to death. If I had time on my hands I might begin to make a checklist of films with variants of this particular ending – of which Rosemary’s Baby is the only valid example worth a damn BECAUSE THAT FILM WAS PROPERLY SCRIPTED, and OK, The Omen was fine, a masterpiece in fact when compared with the current iteration – but I have work to do.
I do not exaggerate when I say that every single avenue of interest in Hereditary is systematically bypassed in favour of – well, nothing, apart from people wandering around darkened interiors in typical horror film fashion (the house is wired for electricity, you fuckers, TURN ON THE LIGHTS!) waiting to be set on fire by demons.
Ari Aster can’t write. Therein lies the problem. Aside from that, I had a good week! Go see Hereditary if you have to, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. Or better still, re-watch Rosemary’s Baby instead.