"Ghost Stories" and "Hereditary"

I approach many horror films with caution, because they can affect me more than I'm comfortable with.  The good ones especially, can be disturbing enough to keep me thinking about them for days. That's not always a pleasant experience.  And so we come to two horror films I watched recently, both of them very well made and very effective. I enjoyed one and not the other.

"Ghost Stories" is a pretty rare bird to come across in 2018. It's an anthology of three supernatural tales, presented as three cases that a paranormal skeptic, Professor Goodman (Andy Nyman), is working to debunk.  It's also one of those films that functions like a magic trick or optical illusion, where the ending revelations put everything you saw before into a totally different context, and you have to go watch it again to spot all the clues leading up to it.  This is one of the better executed puzzle films I've seen, juggling different levels of reality and stories within stories, while also being a compelling examination of the central character.

Where the film falls a bit flat is at being a scary movie.  The three tales all involve paranormal sightings, one with a night watchman (Paul Whitehouse) and the ghost of a young girl, one with a teenager (Alex Lawther) who sees the Devil in the woods, and one with a financier (Martin Freeman) who encounters a poltergeist.  All are very short with barely developed characters, though this is by design. There are some mildly diverting jump scares and a good amount of moody existential dread, but nothing to really get the heart pumping. The film is far more interested in cerebral trickery than gut-wrenching thrills, and I enjoyed it for that.  I especially liked how the big reveals were set up making full use of the ambiguities of cinematic language, constantly introducing odd imagery and background elements that signal something's not quite right. The answers are a little obvious, but very satisfying.

Now "Hereditary" is all about getting under the viewer's skin, and it managed to make me so uncomfortable that I ended up not liking it much.  The less you know about the film going in the better, but let's just say the plot concerns the Graham family: mother Annie (Toni Collette), father Steve (Gabriel Byrne), older teenage son Peter (Alex Wolffe), and younger daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro).  After the death of Annie's difficult mother, a series of increasingly unsettling events occur that suggest that the family may be cursed. Over the course of two long, slow, bleak hours, we watch the four main characters disintegrate.

First time director Ari Aster does an excellent job of building excruciating tension and coming up with some really memorable nightmare imagery.  A recurring motif is dollhouse miniatures. Scenes are often shot to make the Graham house look like a dollhouse, and there's the constant sense of larger sinister forces at work, controlling the characters' lives.  Like "Ghost Stories," there are shifting frames of reality, often having to do with how Annie and Peter experience the passage of time. These contribute to larger metaphors related to family dysfunction, depression and grief.  "Hereditary" shares a good amount of DNA with the paranoid psychological horror films of the '60s and '70s, including "Rosemary's Baby" and "Don't Look Now." "Heredity," however, indulges in far more body horror. It also has a downright sadistic sense of humor.   

The film is so effective at pressing certain buttons that I paradoxically found much of it unbearable to watch.  I like several of the performances, especially those of Toni Collette and Alex Wolffe, but there's such a hopelessness to their characters, and an inexorable coldness and a meanness to their universe that I ultimately found it all very off-putting.  I usually enjoy horror films centered around families, but the Grahams are mired in so much toxicity and bitterness, it's too much to take. Viewers who are less squeamish about the copious gore, and less sensitive about the subject matter may enjoy this movie better.  I, however, found "Hereditary" too nastily bleak and nihilistic to connect with.

In short, I have no idea how the average viewer might react to these two films, but I think that my own biases are pretty clear.  "Ghost Story" appealed to my sensibilities and "Hereditary" did not. I think "Hereditary" is the better film, though, from a filmmaking perspective.  Even if I don't like it much, I can appreciate what it does well - the atmosphere of dread, the performances, the sharply effective editing, and the creepy production design.  And if it got me to recoil with this much force, it probably did something right.

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