There are a lot of reasons to be afraid whenever a24 jumps into the horror game, as movies like Midsommar, The Lighthouse and, most notably, Hereditary, have been known to chill the soul and scare the crap out of your average viewer. But the tale we’re about to tell you is something so haunting, the ghost of $60 plus shipping and handling will cling to your wallet.
We say that because if you bought the studio’s coffee table book that holds the words and images from writer/director Ari Aster’s 2018 smash hit, the formatting absolutely kills those beautiful visual moments. Don’t take our word for it though, as you can see it for yourself below:
How, I ask you, does this sort of crime against cinematic vision pass muster and get shipped out to eager cinephiles on a mass scale? Those snaps came courtesy of keen-eyed Twitter user Ben Kling, who posted photos from the Hereditary book in question, which really is as expensive as we mentioned up top. Seriously, go to a24’s official studio store, and you’ll see not only is this experience a rather pricey one, but they don’t even hide how they treat those photographs in the product previews.
And what’s more, the same source those cursed images came from has given us some more looks into this particular heart of madness. Alex Wolff fans may want to turn away, as this is about to get severely ugly:
Perhaps the scarier aspect about this story is that Hereditary isn’t the only example of a24’s official studio store making mincemeat of gorgeous visuals. In another book that comes from that same product line, director Barry Jenkins’ Best Picture winner Moonlight got the exact same treatment. If you thought this looked horrible on Hereditary’s canvas of terror, take a look at what this formatting faux pas has done to an Academy Award-winning masterpiece:
It’s enough to make Martin Scorsese call foul on the whole thing. Though interestingly enough, Scorsese himself is adjacent to such chicanery, as he provided the forward to the home video release of the director’s cut of Midsommar, which was a 4K UHD/Blu-ray home experience, that also came with a book… and absolutely no bonus features. Where will the rampant tide of consumer warfare end?
The coffee table books that a24 puts out, while mostly being a vehicle for the script to movies like Hereditary, Moonligh, and Ex Machina, don’t have to be formatted as such. Whether or not this will change with future releases is left to be said. For now, if you’ve been thinking about buying any of these deceptively stylish looking tomes, you may want to consider how much the pictures included in the text mean to you.
