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

Review: Monster Family, City AM (02/03/18)

My review of Monster Family in City Am, 02/03/18

Guillermo del Toro on the deeper meaning in ‘The Shape of Water’

 

The film tells of a unique love story between a mute cleaning lady played by Sally Hawkins and an Amazonian-fish man played by Doug Jones 

 

Guillermo del Toro is making the biggest splash of his life with The Shape of Water. A spin on Beauty and the Beast that could only have sprung from the imagination of the man who made Spanish Civil War fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth, the film has been winning awards since taking the top prize at the Venice Film Festival last year.

Now it is the movie to beat at the Oscars in March, with 13 nominations. The bizarre love story between a mute cleaning lady (Sally Hawkins) and an Amazonian fish-man (Doug Jones) is one of Del Toro’s proudest achievements to date. He has put his next project on hold, to bang the drum for the film around the world.

“I made the big mistake of finishing Devil’s Backbone [a moving ghost story set in a Spanish orphanage] and going immediately into [vampire action-horror movie] Blade II,” he explains.

“I have the nagging notion that I should have promoted The Devil’s Backbone more, because it’s still one of my favourite movies and it’s still a movie that not many people know. And I don’t want it to happen again.”

Read the full feature here: https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/film/guillermo-del-toro-on-the-deeper-meaning-in-the-shape-of-water-1.699621

Interview: Steven Spielberg: The Post

I interviewed Hollywood legend Steven Spielberg about his new film, The Post. Read the interview here:

Steven Spielberg: the isolated Jewish boy who just wanted to be liked

Jewish Chronicle-18 Jan 2018

Next year he'll celebrate 50 years as a Hollywood hotshot, this year he has two films out. Steven Spielberg tells Stephen Applebaum how it all started as a way of defusing antisemitism.

 https://www.thejc.com/culture/film/steven-spielberg-interview-1.456855