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Watch ‘Hereditary,’ Then Watch These Movies

We recommend the movies that influenced Ari Aster as well as the filmmaker’s early works.
Hereditary
By  · Published on June 11th, 2018

The Strange Thing About the Johnsons (2011), Munchausen (2013) and More Early Ari Aster Short Films

The Strange Thing About The Johnsons

Hereditary is Aster’s first feature, but he’s been around as a writer and director for a number of years. Beginning with this half-hour thesis film made at the American Film Institute, he has helmed six shorts in the lead up to getting his big break. And these are all noteworthy efforts and every one of them is available to watch online — a rarity with filmmakers’ early works. Watching them in succession gives us a look into the evolution of Aster as an artist so far, though two of the earliest films still seem exemplary of his focus.

The Strange Thing About the Johnsons and Munchausen are the two most written about, at least in relation to Hereditary, because they deal with dysfunctional families. The former is about incest between a man and his son and the man’s guilt about the whole thing. It’s disturbing but not as dark as Aster’s latest. It’s intentionally a bit campy. Even lighter is Munchausen, a bright silent film starring Die Hard‘s Bonnie Bedelia as a mother poisoning her son (Liam Aiken) to keep him from leaving her and going to college. Both ultimately involve grieving families. But nothing supernatural. Watch them both below (and see Aster’s old Unitronic ad, also with a dysfunctional family, here).

From there, you can watch the rest of Aster’s filmography online for free, mostly through Normal Content’s page on Vimeo, and see more of what he’s made of and get a sense of where he came from and where he’s going (according to Normal Content’s website, he’s also working on a dark sci-fi comedy). There’s the very surreal 2011 short Beau, then 2013’s Basically, which is a first-person lifestyle-of-the-rich-and-miserable showcase for Rachel Brosnahan that probably served as a good audition for her to get The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (see our review of the short from before she rose in fame here). Watch them both below.

Basically was the first of a trilogy for Aster, called the Portrait series, which continued with 2014’s retracting-penis story The Turtle’s Head starring Office Space‘s Richard Riehle (also in Munchausen) and another first-person narrative, this one from 2016 and about a ranting Los Angeles homeless man, titled C’est La Vie. Aster’s warped sense of humor, clever approaches to violence, and Brechtian staging come through strongly in the later shorts, and they’re probably more akin to what we can look forward to in tone now that he’s gotten his breakthrough-purposed horror movie out of the way.

Watch The Turtle’s Head below and C’est La Vie here. And if you like the former, check out the very early fake commercial short TDF Really Works, dealing with “dick farts,” further down.

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Christopher Campbell began writing film criticism and covering film festivals for a zine called Read, back when a zine could actually get you Sundance press credentials. He's now a Senior Editor at FSR and the founding editor of our sister site Nonfics. He also regularly contributes to Fandango and Rotten Tomatoes and is the President of the Critics Choice Association's Documentary Branch.