Ari Aster’s “Hereditary” will leave you shattered — in a similar way the film’s star Alex Wolff’s body was battered after a specific scene in the horror film.
The scene in question is the one in which Wolff’s character Peter slams his face into a desk in the middle of a high school class.
“I said to Ari when that scene was coming up, ‘I will do it on a real desk, just tell me.’ And he said, ‘I love you and thank you but that is definitely not allowed, definitely an illegal thing to do so we’re not going to do that…’ break my own face,” Wolff recalled during an interview with TheWrap. “So, he said, ‘We’re going to get a soft cushion desk,’ and I was, like, ‘OK, cool, we’ll do that, that sounds better,’ and then I get there, and I don’t know what I expected, but I expected maybe a foam desk or something and, really, it was not that.”
In other words: It wasn’t terribly soft when he slammed his face into it.
“It had a foam top but it was hard on the bottom and there were only two of them, and I had to nail it perfectly,” he added. “I had to have the blood shoot out perfectly out of my nose and jump back and do that whole thing. I remember after, I was just panting, my voice is gone, blood is dripping down everywhere, and blood is gushing down my knee — real blood gushing down my knee because I slammed it against a chair. I couldn’t move my arm, my complete ankle was swollen — it looked like a balloon.”
“Hereditary” follows a family whose secrets begin to unravel when Peter’s grandmother passes away. The movie is truly traumatizing and has been dubbed the “scariest film in decades.” It premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.
Wolff describes the movie which stars Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Milly Shapiro and Ann Dowd, as a “truly disturbing movie on a kind of visceral level.”
“This movie seeps in your bones — even if you are not scared, you’ll be disturbed or upset by it,” said Wolff. “I hope it makes people miserable.”
Watch the interview above. “Hereditary” hits theaters on Friday.