How freaky is Hereditary, the “scariest film since The Exorcist?” Imagine if Rosemary’s Baby had a baby with baby Gage from Pet Sematary and it climbed to the top of Jacob’s Ladder and fell down with a grotesque splat.
Prepare yourself for a discombobulating study of grief that goes beyond the conventional seven stages to take in another hundred-thousand or so, ranging between psychiatric meltdown, demonic possession, sporadic pyromania and roaring-crying.
Seriously, if Toni Collette doesn’t get an Oscar nomination for her standout performance then horror fans should – in the spirit of the medium – advance on the Academy with torches ablaze and pitchforks at the ready.
Haters will tell you that Hereditary, the fantastically adept feature debut from Ari Aster, is “not really a horror film”. As with Get Out and the criminally-underrated It Comes at Night, this is woke or art-horror.
In its early stages, it has more in common with an Ingmar Bergman joint than it does with anything by George Romero. So much angst. Just about the only moment of levity comes thanks to a cheekily incongruous choice of music for the end credits.
This is a horror because it’s genuinely horrifying.
It’s a film characterised by actual carnage and, pleasingly for genre fans, it’s rooted firmly in several very fine horror traditions. We won’t spoil things by naming them all – for once, literally anything constitutes a major plot spoiler in this twisty, surprising enterprise – but it begins in Don’t Look Now territory before going somewhere crazier still.
The story is wrapped up with a middle-aged woman’s inability to process the recent death of her plainly witchy mother. (Her funeral address is embarrassingly short on tributes.)
Annie Graham (Toni Collette), an artist who fashions tiny interiors in the style of dolls houses, as inspired by her own dysfunctional family, lives in a gloomy rural pile with her tolerant doctor husband (Gabriel Byrne) and two, differently troubled children.
Charlie (Milly Shapiro), her cranky 13-year-old, sugar-addicted, creepy doll-making daughter, has become increasingly introverted following granny’s passing.
Peter (Alex Wolff), her older, teenage son, is sinking into conventional high-school distractions: too much weed; a slightly creepy fixation on a female classmate. We have barely absorbed the scenario before Aster dramatically raises the emotional stakes.
There are probably only two conventional jump scares in the entire picture, but the filmmakers stoke unease by positioning warnings, omens and puzzles in every corner of the frame.
Shapes zip by in the peripherals. A flitting glare could be an apparition or a trick of the fading light. The avant-garde saxophonist Colin Stetson provides an ingenious, sneaking score – here it throbs; there it squeals – that does as much to point up potential menace as does Pawel Pogorzelski’s probing camera, with shots that echo the voyeurism required by Annie’s miniature recreations of her own life.
Long before the plot takes an explicit dive into the supernatural an atmosphere of non-specific dread has been established.
Returning to our Bergman argument, none of this is quite so unsettling as the naked, nerve-wracking extremes of Annie’s emotional journey. Collette has a lot of heavy lifting to do here and, in less capable hands, the heightened despair might have drifted into hysterics. But there is no sense that she is approaching the material with anything less than the upmost sincerity and authority.
The surrounding cast is equally strong. Stuck with the least showy role, Byrne confirms his ability – see also his fine turn in the recent Louder than Bombs – to convey integrity in the eye of the hurricane.
Wolff fights convincingly with a nest of warring hormones. Like the excellent, Millicent Simmonds in A Quiet Place, Milly Shapiro makes a sympathetic oddball of the youngest, most vulnerable character.
Ann Dowd, who should have won everything on the planet for her role in Compliance (2012), can’t be overlooked again, surely?
Enthusiasts will argue forever about the creative ambiguities scattered throughout the film’s barnstorming ending. They will have almost as much fun teasing out the influences that have worked upon Aster.
But the young American writer-director has made a film that goes to a few places that no horror has previously ventured. And he does so elegantly.
Occult themes are delicately woven alongside the possibility of mental illness. The decision to shift protagonist in the later stage is as brave as it is persuasive.
At times it feels as much like a hostage situation as a mainstream horror film. You half-long to walk out of the cinema just to escape the dread. But – too late – Stockholm Syndrome has set in. Make no sudden moves.
A discombobulating, nerve-shredding masterpiece.
Opens: June 14th
[This story contains spoilers for Hereditary]
You can follow the story of Ari Aster’s Hereditary down many different paths, but they all lead to one meticulously crafted destination.
You can read Hereditary as a painful family drama about a family that is completely torn apart after its teenage son Peter (Alex Wolff) accidentally kills his sister Charlie (Milly Shapiro) and traumatizes his mother Annie (Toni Collette). Or, you can view Hereditary as a straight-up horror film about a family that has been doomed by their occultist grandma years before the film's events. Either way, the shocking finale is inevitable, if hard to be explained. The rebirth of the king of Hell might feel out of left field for some audience members, but it's the only ending that makes sense.
The best way to understand of the film’s last few minutes and its shift from family tragedy to occultist horror flick is to look at Hereditary as Peter’s story. The film is bookended with images of Peter in miniatures; in the first shot,thecamera slowly moves into a miniature that then becomes his bedroom. That image is then echoed in the very last shot with the image of a miniature of the treehouse, now carrying the spirit of the demon Paimon.
The movie begins by framing Peter as someone who is to be manipulated, just like his mother’s miniatures, and Asterteases the Graham family’s demise early on. As Peter spaces out in English class, the discussion turns to characters in a Sophocles tragedy ignoring the signs about their lack of free-will. A student then lays bare the game of Hereditary as a whole: the Grahams themselves are “pawns in this horrible, helpless machine.” It’s as obvious a tell as the man who grins at Charlie during her grandmother’s funeral, or the detail in Annie’s eulogy that her mother had “private rituals.” But as spectators to Peter’s downfall, we too ignore the signs and move on.
As the film moves on, Peter's mother Annie orders him to take Charlie to a party, where her severe peanut allergy acts up, forcing her brother to race her to the hospital. She's killed in route when she sticks her head out of the car window in a desperate attempt to breath shortly before Peter swerves to avoid a dead animal in the road and veers so close to a pole that it connects with Charlie's head and decapitates her.
On the emotional surface, Peter’s accidental killing of Charlie has him dealing with a trauma that he cannot comprehend, expressed painfully when he goes to bed and leaves his sister’s headless corpse to be found by his mother the next morning. Peter is not shown talking about this with friends or any professionals, leading the audience to suspect that his pain is worsening by a lack of proper release. Later on, when Peter’s body starts to contort inside his class room, it’s an act of self-destruction just as much as it is possession. He’s been worn down by the ghostly tongue clucks of his sister, the fear of his mother trying to kill him, and the freaky seance his mother did at the dinner table. Wolff’s full-force performance vividly portrays him as a teenager with a whimpering child’s sense of being scared, helpless to numerous horrifying things beyond his comprehension.
Hereditary is in large part the tale of a young man’s spirit becoming so vulnerable that a king of Hell is able to take over his body. Aster has described the film as showing a ritual from the perspective of the sacrificial lamb. Annie’s brief scouring through her mother’s book of rituals in the third act highlights the fact that Paimon requires not only a male body, but one with the most vulnerable spirit. Paimon needed Peter to become his host as Charlie had been carrying around the spirit for too long, likely since she was a baby when her grandmother helped with the possession. As Charlie notes, her grandmother had hoped she would be born a boy.
Aster is a director who is focused on detail and narrative purpose, and his usage of the occult is no different. The demon Paimon is not an original creation, and occultist members in the audience might even be spoiled watching Hereditary once they see Annie unknowingly wear a necklace with Paimon’s sign on it, thinking it’s just a keepsake from her mother. In real-world texts, Paimon is believed to be a king of Hell who governs 200 legions of spirits, according to the Lesser Key of Solomon, a 1700s collection of spells that S.L. MacGregor Mathers and Aleister Crowley translated and published in 1904. Paimon, said to be obedient to Lucifer, appears with a crown on his head, with trumpets sounding (an effect that is honored by Colin Stetson’s score in the last scene).
The finale of Hereditary has proven polarizing moviegoers, who gave it a D+ CinemaScore. Perhaps because some in the audience felt it didn't deliver enough horror until the end, or perhaps they felt its ending was out of left field. But Hereditary’s big finale, as it ramps up its spookiness with a few genre elements, does not feel out of character for a movie that explores many different ideas of evil all at once. And instead of its contemporaries that use big occultist scenes as a type of nervous climax, Aster treats Peter’s acceptance of Paimon as a rare moment of comfort. Peter no longer fears his mother, he has stopped crying, and now he has a new family and home. In the upside-down world of Hereditary, it’s almost a happy ending.
How a first-time filmmaker turned the story of a grieving family into this generation's 'The Exorcist'
Standing in the corner of A24's office, amid the bustle of the film distribution company's normal workday chaos, is a pale young man sipping a smoothie. Tucked away from the various publicity folks and vice presidents and other indie-movie mover-and-shaker types talking frantically into their phones, he stands out. Maybe it's the slightly tattered baseball cap, a little bit of wispy brown hair sticking out; maybe it's the brightly colored madras shirt he's wearing in a workplace full of business-casual attire; maybe it's the fact that he's talking very low, and eerily seems to be standing very, very still. As you slow-zoom walk up to him through the crowd, he turns and smiles an incredibly childlike, shy grin. "Hi, I'm Ari," he says, extending his hand. You'd have assumed this soft-spoken 31-year-old was an employee's younger brother or possibly an intern who happens to love pastels. He doesn't strike you as someone who's just made what many people are calling the scariest movie in a decade.
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But that's the type of praise that writer-director Ari Aster and his first feature, Hereditary, have been earning on the festival circuit since its midnight-slot premiere at Sundance last January, and with good reason. The story of an artist (Toni Collette) grieving over the death of her mother, this macabre tale drops tiny breadcrumbs of creepiness – a bird mysteriously flying into a window here, an odd clucking noise there – as it winds its way toward a second, more devastating tragedy. From there, it's hinted that bigger, more insidious forces are at work as the mourning woman, her teenage son (Alex Wolff) and the rest of the family begin to come apart at the seams. The less you know about the last act, the better, as Hereditary is a film that pays to go in as cold as possible. But for all of the slow-burn pacing and moody atmospherics that characterize the first two-thirds, you leave feeling that all of those pull-quote compliments are not hot air or undue hype. This is the real deal.
Mention this to Aster and he will blush and thank you, before admitting that he's having a bit of trouble reconciling what he's made with what's become of the genre he grew up loving. "I never talked about the film as 'horror' when we were getting it made," he admits. "That's not because I didn't consider it a horror film – it's definitely that. I just wanted everybody to be on the same page as me, so I avoided these terms that I think have become very loaded.
"There's a feeling that studios just pump out this slew of horror movies now in a very cynical way," he continues, "because there's this built-in audience and they know that hardcore fans will see them regardless. I didn't want to make one of those. I wanted to make something similar to the ones that traumatized me as a kid. I said, 'Think of this as a tragedy that curdles into a nightmare.'"
Over the phone, his actor and fellow scary-movie "connoisseur" Wolff agrees with the filmmaker's description. Then he adds his own spin: "I always said that it’s either a family drama that smokes crack or one that goes to hell. I can't decide which."
Indeed, in the either/or age of endless jump-scare franchise entries and what some folks are calling "elevated horror" – a phrase that makes most self-respecting fans want to jump headfirst into the sea – Hereditary stands out by colonizing the fertile ground that rests between those two absolutes. Its deliberate way of letting events unfold with minimal exposition and marinating everything in an overall sense of dread brings to mind arthouse films (Aster is as likely to namecheck luminaries like Nic Roeg, Peter Greenaway and Swedish absurdist Roy Andersson as he is, say, Cronenberg, when asked about the movie's influences). Still, eerie tracking shots or not, it isn't strictly art-horror. The movie features a séance, a figure scurrying along walls and someone maniacally sawing off their own head, all scenes grotesque, gonzo and tense enough to hold their own against your best-in-show Blumhouse productions – but it's not an old-school splatter flick or a Conjuring knock-off, either.
And though Aster's film fits in nicely with the current wave of independent movies about things that go bump in your psyche (The Witch, The Babadook), you'd probably have to go back to something like The Exorcist or The Shining – movies that took their time to both scare and unnerve you; that earned their way toward going full-tilt batshit – to find something to tonally compare it to. While the filmmaker is loathe to rank his debut anywhere near pea-soup-spitting distance of those landmarks, he does mention that both of those movies "get you invested in their characters. They could almost work as straight dramas without the horror elements – but when you make those elements part of the fabric, they don't skimp on the horror at all. Like those movies, Hereditary very purposefully starts as something else entirely, a sort of ensemble movie about this family that's slightly off.
"And then it goes insane," Aster says, after a beat. "It's designed to collapse under its own weight. But I liked the idea of planting, say, 200 hints that suggest where this thing might go, and having the audience only pick up on, say, 40 of them. I liked the idea of giving people a puzzle where so many of the pieces are purposefully missing. And I liked the idea of seeing something over-the-top and horrific happening solely through the eyes of a sacrificial lamb."
Hereditary's roots go back to its creator's days scouring his local video store's horror section and his time as a student at the American Film Institute, where his formally meticulous short films immediately started earning him accolades. (And some controversy, in the case of The Strange Thing About the Johnsons – his 2011 work that also takes filial dynamics into genuinely fucked-up territory.) It was Aster's own family, however, that sparked the idea of diving into the ties that bind when trauma strikes; in one of the film's earliest post-screening Q&As, he mentioned that the movie was not autobiographical but that it was extremely personal. Ask him to clarify that answer and he's reluctant to go into specifics, though he'll admit that there is a lot of his own blood, sweat and fears in the frame.
"Yeah, and I can't ..." he says, before stopping. "I can just say that there were, you know, there were a few years during which my family and I went through a very hard time together, and the prevailing feeling became, like, 'We're cursed.' When bad things are happening in quick succession, you can come to feel like you're cursed. This had been going through my head: What if there was a family that felt like they were doomed but in reality, yes, they actually are. I'd been thinking about exploring that idea and about doing something genre-based as two separate things, before it occurred to me that, if I really wanted to get something transgressive made, it might make sense to combine them both."
Once Aster's script started making the rounds, it found its way into Toni Collette's hands – at the exact moment when the Australian actor decided she needed something light. "Listen, Method acting is such bullshit wankery," she says, speaking over the phone. "But I'd done a part a few years back where my character died" – she declines to mention which role specifically – "and I suddenly found myself having a hard time letting go of it. I've always been a 'I don't take my work home with me' kind of person, but I've found that it's an accumulative thing. Those types of roles, stuff builds up. So I told my agent, 'Nothing heavy for a while, nothing but comedies, please.'
"Then I get this call," Collette adds, going into a sheepish voice. "'I knoooow what you said, but you may want to consider reading this.' I think, 'I say not to send me anything heavy ... and I get The Ice Storm as a horror film!' And then the more I read, the more I realized that I have to do it. It was calling to me, which, when you consider what happens in the movie ..." She trails off, then laughs. "I had no choice. It's both terrifying and a beautiful meditation on grief. And this ended up being one of the toughest things I've ever done. It was intense – in a perversely satisfying kind of way, mind you. But intense."
Ari Aster and Pawel Pogorzelski
After Collette said she was in, Aster began slowly filling in the rest of the roles. Gabriel Byrne signed on to play the family's patriarch; through his casting agent, the filmmaker found Milly Shapiro, a young Broadway actor who'd won a special Tony for her turn in Matilda, and enlisted her as Collette's daughter, who has a penchant for making toys out of debris and dead things. The Leftovers' Ann Dowd was on board as a woman from a local grief support group who enters into the family's orbit. And for the part of Peter, the family's resident petulant stoner teen, the filmmaker nabbed former Nickelodeon star Alex Wolff (The Naked Brothers Band).
"Yeah, this was the hardest thing I've ever done," the 19-year-old admits, echoing Collette's comment. "I don't even mean work-wise; this is probably the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. There was a physical and emotional toll, and the only thing I could possibly compare it to … I was a boxer for a long time, and after a bout, there's some exhilaration, some adrenaline and you almost felt addicted to it. Then you realize that your mouth is bleeding and your hands hurt and you really need to ice your limbs ASAP."
By everybody's account, the shoot in Utah was an endurance test ("I sort of put my actors through hell," Aster admits) with Collette and Wolff in particular putting in a lot of long days in the intricate, built-from-scratch house set, all filled with emotional heavy lifting. One scene involving an explosive outburst at a dinner table was scheduled, she says, for the middle of the shoot "because some people were nervous about doing it, or thought it might need special attention ... but for me, the whole fucking film was like that! There was no easy period here. It was crazy from the minute we started." Wolff – who, according to the filmmaker, stayed in Peter's less-than-stable headspace for most of the shoot – recounts filming a scene of thrashing around in a classroom and repeatedly banging his head on a desk only to realize, once he got back to his trailer, that blood was gushing down his leg.
"My arm was all bruised up as well," he says. "I barely remember any of it – one of those 'Jesus fucking Christ, what did I do!?' moments. The classroom stuff was all day, too, so I kept listening to [composer] Colin Stetson's score and watching a lot of twisted documentaries, horrible real-life footage on YouTube, a lot of messed-up stuff to stay in that zone." Such as? "Mostly the Teletubbies movie," Wolff replies, deadpan. "And Rugrats Go to Paris? Have you seen that shit? It's disturbing."
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Disturbing, in fact, is the one word that keeps being incanted in regards to Hereditary – when its cast and crew discuss what they've made, when Aster describes what's sprung from his subconscious, when both regular festivalgoers and genre hounds started a you-have-to-see-this whisper campaign after early screenings, when curious moviegoers (even the ones who didn't care for it) flocked to see it on opening weekend, when pop-culture pundits who are too scared to see it get freaked out by just reading its Wikipedia page. Ask anyone about the most upsetting moment in the movie, and they may mention a truly stomach-turning set piece involving a car, or maybe a more traditional horror-film image of someone rapidly banging their head against a locked attic door (the fact that the person is crawling on the ceiling while doing it certainly adds to the terror).
Or it may be something as simple as Collette blurting out that she never really wanted her son, then quickly putting her hand to her mouth, as if trying to cram the statement back in – a gesture of parental anxiety that reads as its own miniature domestic nightmare within a nightmare. "You know, a lot of people have been mentioning The Sixth Sense when they talk about this movie," Collette says, referring to the 1999 film she starred in, "and the one thing that Night [Shyamalan] and Ari are both brilliant at are casting wider nets out when making these kinds of movies. They can do ... what's the phrase? Jump scares? They can give you those. But they are both interesting in layering all that with something psychologically complex and layered. I always find that a scarier movie is so much scarier on a deeper level when it's genuinely rooted in reality."
"Family is a touchy subject," Wolff says later, "and I don't think that most movies, much less horror movies, take the time to let you grow to understand and get to know a family, one that maybe looks just like yours – and then destroy their collective grip on sanity, piece by piece, on camera. I think this movie is, in a lot of ways, really fucking mean. You know, these characters, they're just ordinary people. And then shit goes very, very awry."
"It's easy for me to write a horror movie about real stuff because my mind is always going there anyway," Aster notes, laughing. (Although he says he isn't trying to become this generation's John Carpenter, he's already in preproduction on his next project, which will be another horror film – and according to Collette, who heard the basic rundown from him during their downtime on the set, "it might be scarier than this and blew my fucking mind.") "So I wanted to meld that with the more outrageous stuff and then have it come together, and ... the movie is not one that lets you off the hook. What happens to these people is deeply unfair and horrible. It doesn't just play with horror movie tropes, it also plays with the notion of hope. I wanted the film to feel evil that way." The man in the madras shirt smiles that shy smile once again. And suddenly, that grin seems a hell of a lot more sinister then it did earlier.
