#my gripes w/ how he portrays mental illness are mostly secondary to everything else

[crypdoezoology]

Not to keep going on this whole ari aster thing but. Clearly he's a very talented film maker in some ways but hereditary and midsommar both remind me of, like, the saw movies in that they rely on things that are upsetting or unpleasant to watch—its never scary or even really tense so much as its just really sad or gross, which is not what I personally look for in a horror movie.

Also yeah ari aster really does just seem to think that people with visible disabilities and mental illnesses are scary which is not great, tho that is a problem with horror in general

i can’t stress enough that i’m not anti-gore, i love gore in horror movies! it can be so fun and neat to look at. honestly the gore is probably the best part of his movies IMO 🤷 but the gore never hits the right way because i’m so pissed off about everything else that happening, and it’s always framed in the wrong way.  for example when the mom saws her head off in hereditary.  she’s basically the main character and the actress was working her ass off in that role, all the main emotional turmoil is happening around her (that being said i do hate this character, and i think it was the wrong choice to have so much of the focus on her) there was so much build up around her, but THEN when she dies it’s just a few seconds of a brutal and disgusting image and then bam gone. there’s no showing the final moments before her demise or why or how she came to meet this end. there’s not understanding of WHY we’re seeing what we’re seeing other than for some fucking reason the plot demands her head comes off. her death could have been used to explain some of the cult’s plan, or to give more context to the plot, or just to flesh out the character a little more by showing how she felt before dying, but none of that was taken advantage of. her death ultimately to me, only feels disrespectful, both to the character and honestly the actress a little.  now contrast that w/ a probably equally disgusting and gory scene from the movie The Nest where one of the main characters watches her father turn into a revolting cockroach beast. this transformation was foreshadowed by the previous scene of another set of characters watching a cat transform into a cockroach beast as well, they had no way to communicate to their friend that this might happen after her father died, which gives us some dramatic irony tension because now WE know it might happen, and when we see the father approaching his daughter for a second you think well maybe he survived, and then the transformation begins. and it MAKES SENSE. it was built up extremely well, the previous tension matches the gore of the scene (which was beautifully constructed w/ practical effects to go right for all the right disgusting looks) the transformation sequence ALSO sets a new level for how high the stakes are for this movie! people aren’t just facing a painful death, they’re facing a painful sort of reanimation, progressing the species of cockroach to new highs the world is truly at right of ending and now we truly understand that. 

at least in saw the gore is the point, it’s relies on gore to make you as uncomfortable as possible and that’s the main horror center of the film. ari aster movies are based around interpersonal horror and social horror but he doesn’t seem to know who to make that shit pay off to he slaps some gore in there to cover up the failings of the plot and dialogue.  at least that’s how it comes off 🤷