Editorials
Before ‘Hereditary’ and ‘Midsommar,’ Ari Aster Directed These Six Short Films With Similar Themes
In preparation for Ari Aster’s Midsommar, here’s a look into his collection of short films that hint at the horror filmmaker he has become.
With first Hereditary and now Midsommar under his belt, Ari Aster has not just established himself as an important new filmmaker, but an exciting, fresh voice in horror. Aster currently fully embraces the horror genre in his feature films, but his shorts, while playing with many of the same themes and ideas, are much less overt examples of horror; though they’re still likely to disturb you.
Ari Aster honed his skills at the AFI Conservatory, where he’d also go on to build relationships with many of the people he’s still working with today, like cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski. Before Hereditary hit in 2018, Aster directed six short films between 2011 and 2016. Both Aster’s features and his shorts dig into the most devastating varieties of psychological and emotional horror. They excel in storytelling that’s born out of discomfort and makes you deal with stuff that you don’t want to acknowledge. It’s easy to picture how Hereditary or Midsommar could be broken down into a series of shorter films that explore the same ideas, based on the quality and subject matter that these short films tackle. There’s also a very real sense of humor that courses through all of these uncomfortable shorts, which does provide a degree of levity that’s certainly absent in Hereditary.
With Midsommar now disturbing people in theaters, here’s a primer on Aster’s short films and how they reflect the larger themes of his features.
It’s only fitting that The Strange Thing About the Johnsons is Ari Aster’s first short film (as well as his longest), as it introduces so many of the themes that pop up in Hereditary and Midsommar. It plays with the familiar territory of a typical family that’s on the verge of imploding from a major traumatic secret that they’re hiding. The Strange Thing About the Johnsons relishes the first moment where you truly realize the degree of horrors that are going on here and it’s an unexpected twist on incest and hierarchy that drags this family down to even darker places. Idyllic dinners and family portraits are juxtaposed to vicious rape scenes and emotional breakdowns. The confrontation scene that happens between father and son is absolutely chilling and a fine example in how Aster would have a true gift for creating tense, frightening situations. The way in which the camera freely floats or lingers also reflects a level of freedom that the family themselves are not capable of achieving.
The Strange Thing About The Johnsons looks at simply how hard it can be for people to just act normal. Any moment of uncertainty slowly decays into anxiety. It’s about how the quiet silences are sometimes more telling than a shouting match. The short film is an exercise in repression and endurance as we watch this family get pushed to their limits and witness the emotional damage that this secret does to all of them. The cast here shows just as many scars and as much pain as any of the performers from Aster’s features as they try to hold their “normal” family together.
Aster’s next short kicks off with the cursory information that it remains paramount that the titular Beau does not fall asleep. Even if this detail is tangential to the actual premise of the short, it quickly puts the viewer at unease. The short chronicles the simple attempts of a tense, paranoid man, as he fears over the security of his apartment and his safety. It’s a remarkably eerie, stressful six minutes and it’s one of Aster’s shorts that’s shot and plays the most like a horror film. Even if the events in the short are highly unremarkable and even often comical (the short can actually be found on Funny or Die), they’re filtered through Beau’s confusion and fear and depict how someone’s perception of events can turn any day into a horror film. There’s even a Home Alone-esque mentality in play as Beau tries to cope with the fact that someone else has the keys to his apartment and that he might be in danger.
Perhaps the biggest stylistic deviation out of Aster’s shorts, Munchausen strips the writer/director of his honest, pained verbosity and instead opts for a story that lets its imagery, expressions, and music (seriously, the score here is incredible) do the heavy lifting. Munchausen plays out like a haunted fairy tale and explores the sad, believable story of a mom’s struggle with her son’s journey off to college. Munchausen chronicles the mother’s misguided efforts to keep her son from leaving her and while the lack of dialogue, melancholy score, warm lighting, and even the cheerful cross-stitched title card paint a comforting image, there’s a devastating, broken story underneath. Munchausen begins with such vibrancy and optimism. It shows the beauty of freedom and what’s possible for young adults who have their whole lives ahead of them, which makes its progression all the more gutting. It’s like Todd Solondz or Lars Von Trier is directing a Wes Anderson movie.
Munchausen is a great example in minimalist storytelling and trusting in the power of your images. There’s some incredible editing and use of match cuts here to cover things like time lapses, too. The relationship that the mother (Bonnie Bedelia, in one of her most shocking and powerful roles) shares with her son, is almost the inverse of what’s present in Hereditary, although it’s formed through the same level of heartbreak. It’s the most brutal of Aster’s stories and focuses on the problems at home that we want to pretend don’t exist.
Basically, along with C’est La Vie, can both be grouped together into a collection that Aster refers to as his Portrait Series. At the New York Film Festival, Aster originally described his Portrait Series as a proposed 12-part anthology that “can be seen as a panoramic portrait of Los Angeles.” The shorts in this series are unrelenting character studies that dig deep into who people are in unconventional, fourth-wall breaking ways that not only highlight Aster’s skills as a filmmaker, but also as someone who approaches his work from a character place first. This is where his horror comes from.
Basically stars Rachel Brosnahan (who kills it here) as spoiled LA socialite, Shandy Pickles, who seemingly has a perfect life full of charms, but finds it all unraveling underneath the seams. Ambitiously, Basically tries to answer the question of why people perform and what they’re looking for in a world full of pretend. There’s a very surreal, abstract quality to how Shandy’s life is presented as she cynically scattershot criticizes those around her and fails to internalize her own advice. It’s a perfect individual snapshot of the self-doubt that fuels the entertainment industry. Both Hereditary and Midsommar heavily deal with the dysfunction that bubbles under an idyllic nature and that’s absolutely Basically’s agenda. It shows that even those that have it all are still susceptible to the chaotic whims of the universe and that they may actually be supporting players in someone else’s story.
There’s such brilliant shot composition on display here as we flow through Shandy’s free-floating monologue. It’s staggering how much Basically communicates about Brosnahan’s Shandy Pickles in its 15 minutes and it’s easy to see how these intensive character exercises have evolved into the layered characters in Aster’s feature film work. Shandy puts up such a guard through the bulk of the short as she dashes through her life’s story, but when she finally shows vulnerability and how broken she is towards the end, it works. There is a real person there. Basically excels at showing the cracks in a perfect life and how once you start seeing them, you can’t stop.
The Turtle’s Head is really something else and it nails that aspect that Aster is so good at where a narrative veers hard in an unexpected direction and you realize that you’re in a very different story or playing a role contrary to what you thought. The Turtle’s Head begins as a chauvinistic detective story, complete with hyperbolized voiceover, and it really plays into the hardboiled noir genre with its use of music, cinematography, telegraphed clues, and even its typography choices. The Turtle’s Head commits, which is why it’s so effective and startling when it quickly shifts into a haunting slice of body horror. Suddenly all of the tools of power and aggression that the protagonist wields disappear, right when he realizes that his penis is beginning to irrationally shrink. The complex mystery is merely the framing device that delivers Detective Bing Shooster’s existential dread and is relegated to the background once his crisis begins. It’s again impressive to see how much Aster can accomplish with a scant runtime that’s barely over ten minutes.
The “twist” of this short may sound humorous, but Aster lingers on the image of these grotesque, shrinking genitals for much longer than is necessary, all for the explicit purpose to make you uncomfortable and force you to deal with this horror in the same way that Detective Bing Shooster must. This is the most overtly humorous of Aster’s shorts, but it’s amazing how a story can shift so greatly in tone, simply by showing what it’s talking about. That’s what gives The Turtle’s Head such great power. You don’t want to acknowledge this is reality, but Aster forces you to.
C’est La Vie is a story that’s told through the questionable perspective of a homeless drug addict. It acts as this colossal takedown on society, consumerism, and how nobody sets out to be homeless, but they end up that way after they’ve been chewed up and spit out. C’est La Vie almost feels like a VICE PSA for homelessness and drug addiction. It’s an impressive film about how far man can plummet, but the only real horror here is in the darkness of humanity. What’s beautiful here is while Chester Crummings, the homeless man, condemns humanity and society, he’s shown to be no better. He preaches while he simultaneously victimizes. He murders a family through a home invasion and then screams, “And don’t even get me started on AIDS.” The whole piece tows the line of verging into parody, but it’s a strong summation of not only the duplicitous state of America, but also the traditional family or relationship that resides within it, which Aster is so fascinated in.
C’est La Vie gets progressively darker and more intense through its brief seven minutes, almost like you’re falling into filth with this narrator. It’s the most similar in tone to Basically, the other fast-paced, densely edited entry in Aster’s Portrait Series, with both shorts comprised of the same DNA; albeit looking at people at opposite ends of the spectrum.
Finally, C’est La Vie also provides a stunning, blatant perspective on horror that’s not only relevant to this short, but Aster’s entire filmography. It’s only fitting that these are some of his final words before he transitions into horror features:
“You know what Freud says about the nature of horror?” He says that’s when the home becomes unhomelike. Unheimlich. And that’s what this whole place has become. This whole time, and fucking country, and everything else. It’s unheimlich.”
Midsommar is now playing in theaters.
Editorials
Larry Cohen’s ‘It’s Alive’ Still Towers Over a 2009 Remake That Maybe Should’ve Stayed Unborn
When I write about remakes, I often bring up the word “justification.” What’s the impetus for the remake’s existence? Reinventing icons for a new generation, or benefiting from a few decades’ worth of special effects advancements? Often, there’s a reason that you can acknowledge and say, “Alright, I see what you’re going for.” That holds in Josef Rusnak’s It’s Alive, which tries to reinvent Larry Cohen’s mutant baby B-movie of the same name in what I consider the worst possible way.
I didn’t say it had to be a GOOD reason.
I’ll start with Cohen’s own reaction to Rusnak’s 2009 update: “It’s a terrible picture. It’s just beyond awful … I would advise anybody who likes my film to cross the street and avoid seeing the new enchilada.” A blunt take, but I agree. Rusnak justifies his remake by diverting drastically from Cohen’s exploitation-y flick about a newborn monster killinPreview (opens in a new tab)g Los Angeles residents, but it’s such a bafflingly weak reimagining. Cohen remains faithful to tenets of creature features while tugging at our hearts with commentaries about parents caught between morality and adoration, whereas Rusnak asks, “What if we punished a mother for trying to have an abortion?”
As Cohen says, cross the damn street.
The Approach
It’s Alive (2009) is one of those women-focused horror projects that make you scoff, derogatorily, “This was written and directed by dudes, wasn’t it?” Cohen’s original screenplay isn’t airtight, yet it does well to respect Sharon Farrell‘s “shaken mother of a monster,” Lenore Davis. Paul Sopocy and James Portolese, on the other hand, pen a screenplay that reductively focuses on Lenore protecting her bitey offspring, with a bent-out-of-shape abortion subplot thrown in. That’s not to say Cohen’s Lenore doesn’t display the same protective maternal instincts, but Rusnak plays in a sandbox of lame-duck tropes, dooming Lenore for the supposed sin of a mother’s love.
Teenage party-girl turned actress Bijou Phillips stars as Lenore Harker, a New Mexico college student who quits to live with her architect boyfriend, Frank (James Murray), and raise their incoming baby. She’s ditching pizza nights and girl talk with bestie Marnie (Ty Glaser), moving into the Albuquerque woods, where Frank has a secluded homestead with brother Chris (Raphaël Coleman), who is wheelchair dependent. Lenore goes in for a pregnancy checkup, where she learns her unborn child has doubled in size, requiring a cesarean section birth. So the surgical team opens her up and extracts “Daniel,” only to be murdered by the newborn, found resting on Lenore’s stomach, taking a post-slaughter rest.
The immediate deviation is how Daniel is found nuzzling Lenore in the hospital, and doesn’t look “freakish” at first glance. Daniel comes home with Lenore and Frank, setting up the happy lil’ family dynamic. It’s no longer a conspiratorial hunt-and-hide scenario; the “home sweet hell” take on Cohen’s original. Which, frustratingly, dissolves the core suspense that Cohen achieves. For Daniel to kill, victims have to come knocking on Lenore’s door, which becomes a repetitive cycle of visitors and hidden bodies that remove any excitement and surprises.
Does It Work?
Rusnak earns points for trying something new. Remakes have historically been less willing to put unique spins on existing stories (see: Cabin Fever). But there’s also a question of retaining the essence of the source material. Why remake a movie if you’re going to spin so far from the original that you don’t even need to use the title? It’s the Child’s Play of it all. If you wanted to make a killer AI toy movie, why use the Child’s Play legacy to do so (outside of market familiarity)?
It’s Alive doesn’t fully abandon Cohen’s ideas, but it does feel thinner than expected. There have been plenty of killer baby movies since It’s Alive—Cohen hardly has the concept trademarked. What’s fun about Cohen’s It’s Alive is how Frank chases his mutant kin around Los Angeles, eventually into the sewer system, culminating in the Los Angeles (drained) river. Rusnak directs what’s essentially a one-location thriller that minimizes the scope to meet not only its lower budget, but lesser ambitions. Where Cohen pushes farther, Rusnak pulls back, losing the idiosyncratic quirks of Cohen’s superior It’s Alive.
There’s nothing wrong with a good chamber piece, but the psychological torments Sopocy and Portolese opt for are soft as fresh-out-the-bag marshmallows. So much of the film hinges on Lenore’s cover-up tactics when she realizes her wee one is a maneater, which becomes one-note in the process. Frank wanders around, ignoring red flags, and Chris is removed from the picture for a small bit to keep the massacre going. In both films, Lenore has trouble turning against her child—but Cohen is much more thoughtful about Lenore’s state through it all. Rusnak’s direction is short-sighted, rudimentary, and flat, as it has nothing interesting to say about the fears of parenthood that drive Phillips’ Lenore to nurture the vengeful child she once wanted to terminate.
The Result
In It’s Alive (1974), Cohen makes a point of referencing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as John P. Ryan’s Frank recalls having the epiphany that Dr. Frankenstein is the villain, not his creation. It’s what drives Cohen’s screenplay, as we learn how the doctors tried to kill the original baby, since its deformities made it look like a melon-headed, fang-toothed freakshow. There’s none of that in Rusnak’s remake, which diminishes the creature’s origins and motives to anger. It’s an uninteresting modification because the point of Cohen’s picture is to question what makes a monster, and how its creators process their hand in the chaos. Rusnak’s not interested in such explorations, except when the screenplay shoehorns what foolishly appears as an anti-abortion undertone when we learn about Lenore’s sketchy internet baby-be-gone pills.
Even worse, the technical merits of Rusnak’s It’s Alive are unfortunate. Credit to the original’s cast, because Ryan and Farrell bring dramatic acting chops that accentuate their film’s tragedy; a legitimate heartbreaker. None of Rusnak’s cast are hitting on such a high caliber of talent, especially since there’s nothing meaty about Sopocy and Portolese’s character designs. It’s very Horror 101: ignore the obvious, act gobsmacked when the obvious happens, and bring it home. Phillips has been better in films like Bully and Hostel: Part II (maybe even The Wizard of Gore), while Murray is your average 2000s straight-to-video throwaway boyfriend. The rest of the supporting cast, sadly, barely even register.
There’s a charm to Cohen’s monster SFX, whipped up by Rick Baker—but also an opportunity. Cohen decided to use this three-mirror-blur vision, seeing through the baby’s eyes to show the beast as little as possible. If Rusnak wanted to make a stronger impact, he could have gone all-in on Daniel’s appearance to say, “Hey, at least we developed a rad creature!” But, alas, Rusnak might show even less of Daniel. When he does appear in the basement, or leap out of a trash can in the film’s climactic finale, it’s CG augmentation that distorts a puppet reportedly crafted by SFX superstar Tony Gardner. Cohen accomplishes infinitely more by putting his then-girlfriend Elaine Parkyn in a full-head monster mask, a pair of pointed gloves, and a partial body suit that benefit from optical tricks—because practical always wins.
The Lesson
It’s not hard to wonder why Millennium Films lost faith in Rusnak’s It’s Alive and opted for no theatrical release. In a time when horror remakes were all the rage, Millennium buried It’s Alive so deep that it’s not even watchable or rentable on streaming (ain’t even worth Tubi). No hyperbole, this remake stinks with the stinkiest of ’em. It’s slight on innovation, filled with awful genre generics, and is a slap in the face to what Cohen accomplished. There’s something so fresh about a killer baby flick that focuses on the suit-and-tie-wearing father, who is forced to challenge the stern, macho gender roles of the 70s, and something so disappointing about a 2000s horror movie that falls right back into outdated mindsets.
So what did we learn?
- Yes, for the hundredth time, some of those 2000s horror remakes are as bad as the haters made them all out to be.
- Ex-David Lee Roth, Ozzy Osbourne, and Alice Cooper bassist Todd Jensen plays Lenore’s doctor for some reason (which I wouldn’t have known without the internet).
- You can appreciate a remake for trying something different, but you can also detest a remake for how poorly it does something different.
- Why does Daniel look like a baby shark (doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo)?
Watching both It’s Alive flicks back-to-back gave me whiplash. When John P. Ryan (as Frank) confronts his cowering, terrified child-monster in the bowels of Los Angeles, I nearly shed a tear. That whole scene really, as Ryan realizes he’s become the Dr. Frankenstein of sorts, and his miserable, deformed boy craves his father’s affection in a time of need. Then you have Rusnak’s film, which brutally kills the pro-abortion character, insinuates Lenore is being punished for trying to abort Daniel early in the pregnancy, and deserves to die with her demon spawn engulfed by the worst CG flames this side of Birdemic: Shock and Terror. I just … kudos to Cohen for richly developing a sci-fi curio with a tremendous sense of emotional understanding, and nothing but thumbs down for Rusnak’s remake, which comes off as plenty boneheaded and hella halfhearted in the process.
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