Interview with Gemma Files on the Elements of Occultism present in Ari Aster's Filmography

Gemma: Well, I trained as a journalist—graduated from Ryerson University in 1990 with a Bachelor of Applied Arts in Magazine Journalism. Two years later I sent three film reviews and a couple of pitches in to the managing editor at eye Weekly, a new Toronto paper, where I became first a stringer, then a film reviewer. I wrote film criticism for eye and other venues for the next nine or so years, branching out near the end into teaching screenwriting, TV series development and film history at two Toronto film schools. At the same time, I began writing and placing short horror fiction, winning an International Horror Guild award for my story “The Emperor's Old Bones” in 1999. In 2001 I began to teach full-time, but stopped shortly after my son was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, at which point I became his full-time caregiver. In 2010 I published my first novel, A Book of Tongues, and in 2015 I won a Shirley Jackson Award for Experimental Film, which also won a 2016 Sunburst Award for Best Novel. I still write about film here and there, mainly for my own amusement. 

Gemma: Hereditary opens right after the death of miniaturist Annie Graham (Toni Collette)'s mother, a secretive and difficult figure whose eccentricity/mental illness appears to have been passed on to both her daughter and her grandchildren (slacker Peter, 16, and obsessive aspiring artist Charlie, 13). Annie is particularly disturbed to discover her mother's funeral being attended by many people she's never met before, and later tells a grief counselling group she attends that she held her mother responsible for her brother's suicide. Annie's husband Steve, a psychiatrist, tries hard to support his wife, but is increasingly exhausted by what he sees as her default state of paranoid hysteria. This only increases when Charlie is decapitated in a terrible accident, leaving Annie inconsolable and Peter guilt-ridden over what he sees as his part in his sister's death.

Plunged into mourning, Annie finds solace in a developing friendship with Joan, a woman she meets at her grief counselling group. She tells Joan that Peter doesn't trust her because once when she was sleepwalking she woke up having covered both the kids and herself in paint thinner, holding a lit match in her hand. Joan teaches Annie a spell apparently meant to give her the ability to contact Charlie's ghost, but when she tests it out at home Annie only manages to make Peter even more scared of her, while Steve becomes convinced she's having a nervous breakdown. As the family's already-unstable dynamics collapse, a series of increasingly mysterious and terrifying events leads Annie to the conclusion that her mother was part of a cult who worshipped the demon Paimon, and intended to help him incarnate himself on earth through inhabiting a human body...first that of Charlie, rejected as a host because she was female, then that of Peter. 

Gemma: The type of magic that Annie's mother Ellen and her cult practice is called goety (Paimon is named in the grimoire The Lesser Key of Solomon, in a section called “Ars Goetia” [arts of goety]), which involves directly invoking specific demons to do “the will of the operator” in return for certain favours.  It's a sub-set of the type of magic known as haute magie (“high magic”), which can be used for either negative or positive purposes—a scientific sort of magic, rather than either the black or white sort. Practitioners of this kind of magic are just as likely to invoke angels, elementals or genius locii (small gods of place/animistic spirits) as they are to invoke demons, using spells that draw on faith and depend on a balance of powers but are also very distinct and complex, almost like algorithms. A good example of a movie built around haute magie would be Liam Gavin's A Dark Song (2016), in which the biggest threat to the main character turns out to be her own dishonesty about why she wants to complete a particular working. A magician of this sort needs to be almost unemotional about their practice, seeking knowledge for its own sake rather than using magic for personal reward—Dr John Dee is their role model, not Aleister Crowley. But of course, Ellen's cult isn't interested in anything that detached: They want money, protection, power and “good familiars.” If they were calling on Lucifer rather than Paimon, they'd be straight-up Satanists.

Now, as I recall from various interviews, Ari Aster was really only interested in Paimon as a sort of occult MacGuffin, something he could use to put pressure on Annie with, creating the sort of panphobic worldview he admired in 1970s conspiracy thrillers like The Parallax View or Marathon Man (for fascists, substitute Paimonites). So Hereditary definitely owes a lot more to movies like Rosemary's Baby than it does to A Dark Song, or even to Hammer's The Devil Rides Out (1968 [the same year I was born], based on a novel by Crowley associate Dennis Wheatley). But the lingo is still there, and I think it's worth exploring. 

Gemma: “Overrated” is a somewhat of a useless word, I've always thought, when analyzing anything to do with a movie outside of its most immediate impact. I mean, within the history of A24 (the company who produced it), Hereditary reigns unchallenged as its box-office champion, having garnered $80 million in theatrical release on a budget of $10 million. Is it better than similar movies that came before it? People who saw it first will probably think so. What I personally love about Hereditary—even though it's a very head-driven and somewhat off-putting film in terms of its theatricality, its use of chiaroscuro and deep focus wide-shots that force you to squint to hunt out all the details, some of which only come into focus on a second or even third viewing—is its use of emotion, allowing Peter the full range of paralytic guilt and terror, Annie an entire spectrum of transformative rage and grief. 

Aster makes us care deeply for these flawed, somewhat awful people, then destroys them utterly; he turns Steve into a cooked corpse, Annie into a monster, Peter into a wiped-clean husk inhabited by something completely beyond human understanding...petty and creepy, a tongue-clucking do-over god surrounded by headless carrion abasing itself in front of his first version's totem-pole, not to mention a coven of naked worshippers who don't understand that they're nothing but dolls in a miniature to this thing they've called up, just an entirely disposable means to an end. It's vicious, that ending, but it feels somehow right in a way that most sting-in-the-tail horror movie reversal just don't, because Aster's been building it from scene one, frame one. Which is why Hereditary rewards re-watching in a way that a lot of similar films simply don't; it's something to admire as much as to enjoy, a lesson in filmmaking, a genuine work of (dark) art. 

You know, it's funny—I enjoyed Midsommar a lot when I first saw it, and I own a copy that I've watched at least twice, and I was entertained both times. It's beautifully put together, especially in terms of mis-en-scene and production design, and the acting is similarly awards-worthy (Florence Pugh's, in particular). But on reconsideration, I don't feel it's as strong as Hereditary, and I'm not entirely sure why. It rings to me somewhat as though Aster wasn't completely sure what he wanted to say with it—the overall themes are muddier than Hereditary's, possibly because folk horror can easily get caught up in Lovecraftian Othering if you don't make sure to turn it into a sidelong critique of your own culture. Sauna and Left Bank work beautifully because they were made by Finnish and Belgian directors, rather than American ones; The Grudge works best when it runs Ju-On through the filter of its American main characters' disassociation from Japanese culture, a strategy I feel at least slightly supported by the fact that they kept original director Takashi Shimizu around for the remake. And then there's The Ring as opposed to Ringu, where “frolic in brine/goblins be thine” and the Izu Peninsula are reframed per a very New England sensibility; Samara becomes some sort of inexplicable Stephen Kingish mad science experiment, while her home is now located on a coastal island with a lighthouse Robert Eggers would absolutely adore. Aster had to make up the Harga, or felt he did, and much as I enjoy the result, you can definitely see the seams. The best part about it is his deadpan refusal to tell us whether or not we should feel happy about where things end up—it's a bit like Unforgiven, in that way. (“Deserve's got nothin' to do with it, kid.”) 

Do you mean movies that show characters using various methods of divination? I don't really understand the question.

Intriguing details, hm? Well, it's very much my pandemic collection, even though everything in it was written before Covid-19 started to spread. When I was putting it together, I realized that the stories really encapsulated both the anxiety I started to feel when Trump was elected and my struggle to find a place to put all that fear, all that doubt, that feeling that everything I'd thought was safe and settled wasn't, and never had been. It starts off with a body horror apocalypse, and ends with a fairy-tale inversion. In between lie thirteen stories, one of which apparently gave someone who recently interviewed me a panic attack. Try to figure out which one that was.

Gemma: Definitely. 

Gemma: Maybe not. Nothing personal!