PopHorror Let's Get Scared
Welcome to a new series where, every week, PopHorror picks a horror movie and tries to find a risky or unexpected double feature. We write up our reasons and then take to social media to find out if our pick is a great night at the theater or a disappointing double bill. Will It Work?
Grief is an insatiable monster. It snarls and snaps with as many heads as there are ghosts and gravestones, as many claws as there are people whittled down by its effects. We name this beast and attempt to tame it, giving it stories and metaphors and songs. We give it movies.
One such movie that truly seems to encapsulate the entire shape of the ugly beast of grief is Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018 – read our review here). Its characters are tossed around by elemental forces as dark primordial sadness like volcanic vents is blasted into the world by their losses. At the heart of this volcanic grief is Tony Collette (The Sixth Sense 1999 – read our retro review here) as Annie, an artist trying to measure the scope of her sadness in dollhouses and miniatures. Little does she know that her grief builds walls and furniture around her, squeezing her into its own dollhouse to shrink her world down to nothing.
Her mother dies, leaving behind a mysterious legacy of cruelty, abuse, and an absence felt by everyone, including her husband (Gabriel Byrne: The Usual Suspects 1995), her son, Peter (Alex Wolff: Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle 2017), and her strange, young daughter, Charlie (Milly Shapiro: Splitting Up Together 2018). When her mother’s connections to the occult begin to unravel, so does Annie and her family.
This is the brilliance of Aster’s film. Hereditary feels inevitable and inescapable. The hollow score and claustrophobic cinematography ensure a feeling that the characters, and you as a viewer, are captured and incapable of looking anywhere but where they make you. Against theses stiff, rigid compositions rages Collette, a wasp in a jar, stinging and screaming and lashing out at every other bug behind the glass.
When programming a double feature against such a bleak hurricane of sadness and pain, such an unbridled flamethrower performance as Collette’s, what do you do? What can stand up to that storm? Basically, who can tangle with the visual demolition of Hereditary and stand against Toni Collette’s near-perfect performance?
You find another wasp. You find another bottle. You put on Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist (2009).
This isn’t a double feature to close out the night with. It’s certainly not a one for dates (unless you have some fairly interesting kinks). Hereditary and Antichrist are tectonic plates of sadness and scraping them together changes something in your emotional landscape, creating earthquakes that rumble the soul.
When a woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg: The Snowman 2017) and her husband (Willem Dafoe: Platoon 1986) lose their son in a tragic accident, they struggle to hold onto each other in their grief, eventually fleeing to a cabin in the woods where things, in true Von Trier fashion, do not get better.
Gainsbourg’s work in Antichrist is one of the few performances I’d put up against Collette’s. She writhes and shrieks like an animal one moment, and then smiles and laughs in the next, doing so with complete believability. Whereas Aster builds a world like a dollhouse for his characters to inhabit, Von Trier drops his grief-stricken couple into a wide, uncaring natural world, letting them flail and drown in their sorrows and the open air. Dafoe, as both husband and psychiatrist, tries to comfort his wife and ignores his own grief in fits of hubris.
Both films reduce their subjects to animals afflicted with loss, propelled by the women at their core. They both are almost unbearable to watch. However, they play off each other with their parallels and contrasts, their challenging theses on grief and its supernatural hold on us. Hereditary posits that the agonies and inadequacies of our dealings with heartbreak come from our parents and the worlds we inherit. Antichrist believes that the natural world is one of endless grief, a vast primordial ocean of constant loss in which we are islands, eroding and crumbling inches at a time against its tide.
Bring popcorn.
