Hereditary: Grief Wearing a Haunted House

Sun, 10 Sep 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Ari Aster has said that he thinks of Hereditary as a tragedy that happens to have a horror film wrapped around it, and the description is exact enough that you could use it as a warning label. People walked into cinemas in June 2018 expecting a possession picture and got, for roughly ninety minutes, one of the bleakest domestic dramas of the decade — a mother and a family disassembling under a grief so total it has nowhere to go but the supernatural. The demon arrives eventually. By then you have long since stopped needing it.

Possession (1981): Zulawski's Divorce as Apocalypse

Fri, 21 Nov 2014 09:00:00 +0000

There is a kind of film you cannot recommend without a warning and cannot forget once you have seen it, and Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession (1981) is the reigning example. For decades it was hard to see at all, banned in Britain during the video-nasty panic, circulated on grey-market tapes cut to ribbons, mythologised by the people who had endured it. Time and a proper restoration have done it justice, and the film that emerges is not the exploitation curio its reputation suggested. It is one of the most harrowing accounts of a marriage ending ever committed to film, and it happens to contain a monster.

Possession - vo.rs

Hereditary: Grief Wearing a Haunted House

Possession (1981): Zulawski's Divorce as Apocalypse