Hereditary director Ari Aster reveals movie is inspired by real life experience

Still from Hereditary

PVR Picture's upcoming horror film Hereditary talks about certain fears that are paralyzing, insupportable - because they're founded upon real-world forebodings, on outcomes either plausible or inevitable. And who other than the director Ari Aster can explain how it is to experience the hereditary fear first hand.

Aster began envisioning Hereditary after his own family endured a string of trials over a pummeling three-year period.

"Things had gotten so relentlessly awful that the feeling prevailed that we basically must be cursed. I'm always writing from a personal place, but I also love the genre, and I'd never want to baldly dramatize any of the suffering that I or my family had gone through, so by taking the idea of a family being cursed and then literalizing that, I was able to put a lot of those feelings through a horror movie filter, where the canvas demands a high level of catharsis. And if you're making a film about life being unfair, the horror genre is a very unique playground for that. It's this sort of perverse space where life's injustices are more or less celebrated and even gloried in".

Directed by Ari Aster, it starts debutant Toni Collette, along with Alex Wolf, Milly Shapiro, Ann Dowd, and Gabriel Byrne.

Hereditary takes you on a completely different journey, when Ellen, the matriarch of the Graham family, passes away, her daughter's family begins to unravel cryptic and increasingly terrifying secrets about their ancestry. The movie is set to release on 22 June.

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