Movies
Ashley Greene Conjures Up ‘The Apparition’
Hot of the heels of her success in Twilight, star Ashley Greene has been out in Berlin toplining Todd Lincoln’s The Apparition, Dark Castle’s supernatural chiller that follows a couple who are haunted by a supernatural presence that is unleashed during a college experiment. Out promoting her SXSW film Skateland, Green revealed a bit more about the plot and tone of Apparition, which is now finishing up production in Los Angeles.
“The Apparition is something I’m currently filming. We just got back from Germany this week, we were there for about two months filming at Babelsberg Studio and we start filming again in about a week in Los Angeles,” she tells Cinematical. “The film actually takes place in L.A. which is the funny thing about this business, because we went to Germany to shoot it, we came back to shoot exteriors. It’s a psychological thriller that centers around these two characters, Kelly and Ben, who are played by myself and Sebastian Stan. We play a couple who are haunted by a supernatural force and we have to figure out what this thing wants. I definitely learned a lot of things about myself while filming this…”
She continues comparing it to Poltergeist, “I was terrified, and as far as just being vulnerable and sad and hurt, and strong… it’s not a horror film; we want it to be elevated and scary along the lines of Poltergeist, so I definitely didn’t want Kelly to be one of those scared, dumb girls in a horror movie. So we all worked together, it’s been a huge collaboration in making these characters really smart.“
It’s been eight years since Ari Aster came onto the scene and helped usher in a new wave of horror with Hereditary, one of the rare horror movies from the past ten years that still seems to come up in conversation every single week. And it’s back in the conversation this week, with Ari Aster revealing at an event that he’s already written a prequel to Hereditary!
Ari Aster was on hand at the American Cinematheque for Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair last week, a Los Angeles festival that screened all of Aster’s movies to date. The website Gold Derby reports that Aster revealed the Hereditary prequel script during a Q&A at the event, and you can watch the full Q&A conversation below for confirmation on the website’s report.
“I wrote a prequel to this,” Aster told the crowd, referring to Hereditary. “It never feels like the right time to do it. It’s a prequel, not a sequel so I don’t know where this goes.”
Would a potential Hereditary prequel dig deeper into the mythology of demon king Paimon? Unfortunately, Aster provides no further details on his prequel approach at this time.
Aster said of Hereditary during the same Q&A, “I was just trying to make a really good horror movie.” I think most horror fans would agree that he more than accomplished that goal, and the past eight years have proven that Hereditary is an enduring classic of its generation.
We celebrated the fifth anniversary of Hereditary here on BD back in 2023.
Ron Breton wrote, “Hereditary offers a similar emotional resonance to this new generation of horror – my generation of horror– as movie-goers in the seventies when they first saw Exorcist. Much like Aster’s film, we see the incomprehensible evil wear the face of a young girl; the victim of a raw deal she had no say in, as it tears a family to its core. Sure, both films offer so many terrifying visuals that can make the hair stand up on anyone’s neck – but it also depicts intense relationships and emotions that are tangible. Real. Familiar.”
“In that familiarity lies the uncanny, ready to rear its ugly head and force us to confront thoughts and horrors laying dormant and clawing at our psyche,” Breton continued his 5th anniversary celebration of Hereditary. “And it doesn’t matter if it’s been five or fifty years. These horrors are always there, as we become pawns in its horrible, hopeless machine.”
Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, Ann Dowd, and Milly Shapiro star in Hereditary. In the film, “A grieving family is haunted by tragic and disturbing occurrences.”
That’s putting it mildly, eh?!
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