Ari Aster seeks inspiration from real life for 'Hereditary'

Filmmaker Ari Aster took inspiration from his own experience to make horror film "Hereditary".

Aster began envisioning "Hereditary" after his own family endured a string of trials over a 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," Aster said in a statement to IANS.

He added: "I'd never want to baldly dramatise any of the suffering that I or my family had gone through, so by taking the idea of a family being cursed and then literalising 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."

The film tells the harrowing story of a family tragedy that veers into the realm of the supernatural -- the Graham family starts to unravel following the death of their reclusive grandmother.

Even after she is gone, the matriarch still casts a dark shadow over the family, especially her teenage granddaughter, Charlie, whom she always had an unusual fascination with. PVR Pictures is bringing the film to India, and will release on June 22.

"Hereditary" stars Toni Collette along with Alex Wolf, Milly Shapiro, Ann Dowd and Gabriel Byrne.

--IANS

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