Interview: Ari Aster, Writer-Director Of Hereditary

The Comfort of Horror (films)

Ari Aster, writer-director of Hereditary

Ari Aster’s debut feature, Hereditary, has been hailed as a future horror classic. Stephen Applebaum meets a self-proclaimed neurotic hypochondriac



Ari Aster’s film Hereditary arrives in the UK this week on a wave of critical adulation, the scale of which few film-makers will ever experience. What makes it so astonishing is that Aster, 31, is just beginning his career.

When Hereditary bowed in the Midnight section of the Sundance Film Festival in January, its distressing mix of intense family drama and gruesome supernatural horror left critics feeling disturbed and shaken. It was “this generation’s The Exorcist”, proclaimed one (a little hyperbolically, to be fair), and the most frightening films in years, chimed many.

Tellingly, the buzz hadn’t died down by June 8, the day Hereditary opened in the United States, when it was still rated 98% fresh on film review site Rotten Tomatoes and 86% positive (“Universal acclaim”) on Metacritic.

Read the full interview here: https://www.thejc.com/culture/interviews/hereditary-ari-aster-sundance-film-festival-milly-shapiro-alex-wolff-toni-collette-1.465530

Interview: John 'Derf' Backderf, Author Of My Friend Dahmer

'There was always a darkness about him': My Friend Dahmer author John Backderf on growing up with a serial killer

John 'Derf' Backderf  (Alain Seux)

Most of us have wondered what happened to certain kids from our school days, but few can have had their worlds rocked quite like the comic book artist John Backderf, when he found out what his erstwhile friend Jeffrey Dahmer had been up to.  

After they’d graduated from high school, Dahmer vanished. “I can’t say my friends and I were terribly concerned about it, but we did comment on it, from time to time,” says Backderf, aka Derf, on the phone from New York. “We knew his parents lived in town and yet we never saw him anywhere.” 

When Dahmer was arrested in 1991, he discovered why: Dahmer had already embarked on a murderous journey that would brutally extinguish 17 lives and make him one of America’s most notorious and depraved serial killers.

Click here for the full story https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/my-friend-dahmer-john-backderf-film-jeffrey-comic-book-interview-serial-killer-a8375866.html