Ari Aster said during a Q&A after an Egyptian Theatre screening of “Hereditary” (via Gold Derby) that he wrote a prequel to his 2018 horror hit, but doesn’t have any plans to shoot it.
“I wrote a prequel to this,” Aster said on Sunday night. “It never feels like the right time. It’s a prequel, not a sequel, so I don’t know where this goes.”
“Hereditary” was Aster’s feature directorial debut, and it put him on the map as a must-watch filmmaker in the horror genre. Starring Toni Collette, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro and Gabriel Byrne, “Hereditary” follows the Graham family, whose unassuming life begins to violently unravel after the death of the reclusive grandmother.
Since then, Aster directed “Midsommar,” “Beau Is Afraid” and “Eddington,” all released through A24.
While Aster’s movies, along with those of directors like Jordan Peele and Robert Eggers, are often labeled as “elevated horror,” this is a moniker Aster rejects. He explained during the same interview, “I hate the term elevated horror, especially because it’s sort of a box that I was put in and horror fans took umbrage.”
Aster later explained that Danny DeVito tried to finance “Hereditary,” but he couldn’t find the cash to do so. The unnamed financier Aster eventually chose, he explained, put him through “one of the darkest times of my life.”
“It was just in the hands of a financier that was, how do we say it? Worse,” Aster explained. “I’m afraid to say the name because he might show up in my life. Really a nightmare who I had signed my life away, I had signed the film away to him. He had me in the palm of his hand. It was one of the darkest times of my life, actually finishing this film and trying to protect it, keep it from just blowing up.”
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