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
There’s a moment toward the end of Ari Aster’s new A24 film Hereditary where Toni Collette has an epic on-screen meltdown. It happens in one long shot, and it conveys a staggering level of interior anguish. It’s reminiscent of a scene from one of 2018’s other best films to date, the moment in A Quiet Place when Emily Blunt’s character is forced to try and give birth in total silence, and the camera stays tightly on her face as she conveys her silent screams through a locked jaw and tortured eyes. Horror movies try to scare their audiences in a wide variety of ways, but the commonality in these two films is that the terror comes from a heightened emotional authenticity that doesn’t feel like acting. The emotion Blunt and Collette summon is agonizing in those moments, but those scenes also linger because they feel like they tap into frightening truths beyond the performances.
Both of these performances are in horror films, so there’s a common perception that we ought to prepare ourselves for them to be ignored come Oscar time. But is that really a fair or accurate reading of Oscar precedent?
Horror films have struggled for attention at the Oscars, but that may be changing
Horror films have historically struggled for attention at the Oscars, particularly in the acting categories. It depends a little on how exactly you parse out what does and doesn’t count as a horror film. (For instance, I wouldn’t count Sweeney Todd.) But broadly speaking, only 14 horror films have ever received acting nominations. Chronologically, they are: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931, lead actor), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945, supporting actress), The Bad Seed (1956, lead actress and two supporting actresses), Psycho (1960, supporting actress), Wait Until Dark (1967, lead actress), Rosemary’s Baby (1968, supporting actress), The Exorcist (1973, lead actress, supporting actor, and supporting actress), Carrie (1976, lead actress and supporting actress), Aliens (1986, lead actress), Misery (1990, lead actress), Silence of the Lambs (1991, lead actor and lead actress), The Sixth Sense (1999, supporting actor and supporting actress), Black Swan (2010, lead actress), and Get Out (2017, lead actor).
Two things really stand out from that list: 1) Nearly all of those films were extremely popular projects that captured the zeitgeist, and 2) of the 21 total acting nominations earned by those films, 16 of them went to women. In other words, horror movies don’t stand a great chance at the Oscars, but for a widely acclaimed film that was a big box office hit and was anchored by a great female performance, the odds are a lot better. To that point, A Quiet Place has a 95 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a Metacritic score of 82, and made more than $300 million worldwide, so it certainly checks off all of those boxes. Hereditary has comparable critic numbers, with a 93 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating and a Metacritic score of 87, though it may take several weeks to fully analyze how financially successful it is. It just became A24’s best-ever debut with a reported $13 million opening weekend, but an alarmingly low CinemaScore grade of D+ makes its box office longevity difficult to predict.
History suggests we don’t necessarily need to be pessimistic about Blunt and Collette’s Oscar chances this year. But here’s the other thing: Oscar history also might not matter at all. As we’ve increasingly learned over the last few years, the Oscars, and especially academy voters, aren’t operating by the same norms and foregone conclusions that many of us grew up with. Since 2016, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has added almost 1,500 new members to its ranks, which means approximately 19 percent of the total body has joined in the last two years. (Another new member class is expected to be announced toward the end of June 2018.)
Having a voting body change so much in such a short amount of time means that it may be hard to make any predictions based on what that body used to do. The Academy Awards are 90 years old, but we’re arguably only in Year Three of having data that’s useful for extrapolating trends or predicting the future. It’s hard to tell much from a two-year sample size, but so far, those results suggest that genre films are becoming more accepted as prestige projects. Earlier in 2018, a science-fiction / fantasy monster film (The Shape of Water) won Best Picture, while numerous pundits predicted that the award would go to a traditional horror film (Get Out).
This year’s Oscars, which will be awarded in spring 2019, may help indicate whether the contention of Get Out and The Shape of Water was circumstantial to those films and the moment they arrived in or the first rumblings of a profoundly different academy that no longer feels bound by any definition of “Oscar movie.” If Blunt or Collette (or, fingers crossed, both) end up in the field of Best Actress nominees for their career-best performances, that will go a long way toward suggesting that genre doesn’t matter as much to the new generation of academy voters. Likewise, if Blunt and Collette are both shut out, that will indicate that 2017’s inclusion of genre films among the top contenders was still just an exception that proves the rule. In either case, the Oscar voters will be poised to tell us something of substance at a time when we know precious little about the groupthink of the new academy.
This year’s Oscars will make it clear how the new Academy feels about genre films
But one lesson that seems to endure between old and new academy alike is the concept of “they’re due for recognition.” Blunt and Collette, who are both tremendously respected and well-liked in the industry, qualify for that designation. Collette has only been nominated once before (Supporting Actress for The Sixth Sense), while Blunt has somehow never been nominated, though both actresses have earned five Golden Globe nominations, with one win apiece. It’s only June, and the year is young. In terms of the Oscar calendar, we’re still firmly planted in the pre-season. We don’t know how many great performances await us in the fall festivals.
We can’t even adhere to old wisdom about the typical weakness of the Best Actress field because women are finally seeing some level of equality in terms of top-tier roles, and last year’s Best Actress race was among the most stacked in Oscar history. (Don’t forget: great performances by Annette Bening, Jessica Chastain, Judi Dench, Jennifer Lawrence, Emma Stone, and Michelle Williams were all left out of last year’s Best Actress race because the competition was just too fierce.) But I feel confident enough in Blunt and Collette, and in their films, to make it an official prediction: come January, we’ll see at least one of these performances among the five Oscar Best Actress nominees. Lock it in.
Warning: Major spoilers for the film Hereditary follow. I’m going to talk extensively about the film’s third act, so turn back if you don’t want to know!
As it cruises into its final moments, director Ari Aster’s blistering new horror movie Hereditary seems to settle any “Is it real, or is it metaphorical?” questions about what’s really going on in the movie with, “Oh, you better believe it’s real!”
Where the first two-thirds of the film live in an uncanny space that could best be described as “In the Bedroom set in a haunted house,” the last third goes full-tilt into supernatural horror, with cultists, strange beams of energy, and Ann Dowd shouting, “I EXPEL YOU!” across a crowded highway at a boy she hopes to possess with a demon.
Related Hereditary is the terrifying arthouse horror film of the year
When the movie finally ends with Dowd’s character calmly and pleasantly explaining to the now-probably-possessed boy that he is “Paimon, one of the eight kings of Hell,” then a whole bunch of naked people calling, “Hail Paimon!” you’d be forgiven for thinking the movie had completely shredded whatever slow-building tension it had mounted throughout its first two acts. (I would violently disagree with you, but I would forgive you.)
Now, I would maintain you could still read this final act as metaphor, as one final snap from reality occurring in the head of the film’s protagonist, Annie (Toni Collette), who has clearly been on the very edge of mental stability all movie long. There’s a rich, metaphorical reading of Hereditary that treats everything that happens as a kind of empathetic tale of a mother who finally has enough and takes her own life and that of her husband (possibly sparing her son — but to a life in which he’s accidentally killed his sister and seen both of his parents die).
But let’s not treat this movie as metaphor. Let’s talk about those final scenes as if they really happen. And let’s talk about why the movie’s devil cult has less to do with our reality and more to do with the way horror movies briefly influenced our reality in the 1980s and ’90s.
Let’s talk, in other words, about the Satanic Panic.
How the Satanic Panic has influenced the indie horror movies of the 21st century
One complaint about Hereditary that I have some sympathy for (expressed best in what I saw as a subtweet of the film by Vanity Fair’s K. Austin Collins, one of my favorite film writers) is that the devil-worshipping cult pulling strings is very much a cult straight out of a movie, not the more mundane horror of a real cult, which strips people of their connections, their means, and often their lives. Movie cults are boogeymen that leap out of the shadows in the third act and reveal their dark intentions for the protagonist.
Yet I can’t entirely shake the cult in Hereditary — or the very similar cults in other indie horror movies of the 21st century, like Ti West’s 2009 House of the Devil or Robert Eggers’s 2016 release The Witch — because it feels, to me, like a throwback to the Satanic Panic, a very real, completely unfounded fear that gripped America in the 1980s and ’90s, leading to very real unjust convictions and the infamous McMartin preschool trial.
In brief, the Satanic Panic was a belief, driven by a wide variety of not particularly scrupulous sources, that the United States had become infiltrated by a large number of Satanists and other practitioners of the dark arts who were conspiring to abuse and assault the nation’s children, commit human sacrifices, and turn the country over to the dark lord.
The idea was ridiculous on its face, but it had deep, deep roots in the US, stretching all the way back to the Salem witch trials, and we’ve never quite been able to shake variations on it. What is the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, if not the Satanic Panic dressed up in 2010s clothing?
What was vaguely remarkable about the Satanic Panic was how it felt as if it had arrived in our reality straight from a horror movie. When you look at some of the “true accounts” of devil cults on the evangelical Christian circuit in the ’80s, many of them sound less like anything that could really happen and much more like the third acts of movies like Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen.
Much like the way reports of alien sightings in the wake of Close Encounters of the Third Kind became more likely to depict gray-skinned beings with big black eyes, the devil-worshipper movies of the ’60s and ’70s solidified within the American subconscious a very specific idea of what was going on behind closed doors in seemingly harmless suburbia. (Surprise: It involved bathing in goat’s blood and trying to get demons to possess children.)
This is, of course, how horror often works — in a feedback loop with reality. Our real-life horrors (in this case, a millennia-old belief in a dark being constantly trying to turn humanity against its better natures) get translated into horror tales, which get translated into real-life scares, which later become other horror tales.
My colleague Aja Romano, for instance, showed just how The Exorcist drove real-life scares around Ouija boards, which were later translated into horror movies about Ouija boards. Fear begets fear begets fear. It’s one of the things human beings are good at.
And so it is with the Satanic Panic. The directors of these recent indie horror movies are of the perfect age to have been cognizant of either the initial wave of Satanic Panic reports or a smaller wave of them in the ’90s, to say nothing of a small wave of dark horror tales of Satan’s misdeeds that arrived in the ’80s and ’90s (such as the 1987 horror film The Gate or the 1995 X-Files episode “Die Hand Die Verletzt”). And when you hear these dark and gruesome stories, it’s only natural to wonder, hey, what if they really happened?
House of the Devil does the best job of zeroing in on a fairly straightforward depiction of the Satanic Panic, while The Witch turns the idea of rejecting God in favor of Satan into a weirdly twisted act of feminism. But Hereditary goes one better than both of them by making this cult of devil worshippers simultaneously incredibly terrifying and strangely hilarious.
The entire third act of the film walks a razor’s edge between terror and ridiculousness. Perhaps I like it so much because it reminds me of all those years I spent reading “true” stories of Satanists in my evangelical Christian childhood home. You laugh, if only because you want so desperately for none of what you’re seeing to be happening.
But it is happening, right? Hereditary and its indie horror cousins capture brilliantly the way that Americans have always found ways to fill our dark corridors with satanic beings and low-level demons. “Paimon” is a real thing from the odder corners of Christian mythology, and if we take the Satanic Panic at face value, then somebody out there is trying to resurrect him right now.
They aren’t, of course. Or at least I hope they aren’t. I’m sympathetic to the idea that a movie like this devalues the very real horrors of cults. But a movie like this can also help us stare at a particular strain of American darkness and find a way to laugh at it, before running away screaming.
There is something deeply evil about Hereditary. As a film, it has its intellectual downfalls–relying, at times, on genre cliches, and sometimes presenting jump scares in place of earned justifications–but as a visceral experience, A24’s latest indie horror is singularly torturous. The last hour of the movie, a hellish onslaught of the senses, had audience members in the comfy suburban Queens AMC multiplex where I saw the film screaming in shock, with some folks rushing out of the emergency exit in a trail of popcorn and panic, yelling “fuck this!” as the door slammed behind them.
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This downright demonic experience had me–a lover of horror and all things demented–covered in a cold sweat, worried that I might have a panic attack. After toiling all night with terrible dreams about clicking noises and naked old pagans, I woke up the next morning wondering if I could, in good faith, recommend this film to my friends and loved ones– it’s affecting, but is it okay to encourage an experience that is likely to rustle up some actual pain?
If you’ve had any experience with death, grief, mental illness, or disturbed family members, this film will no doubt resonate with you. While familiarity in art is usually a good thing, in the case of Hereditary, it is deeply, deeply painful. So it’s not a question of quality when recommending Hereditary to a friend—it feels more like a question of morality.
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Perhaps this sense of ethical confusion swirling around the film explains the rising divide between critics and audiences. The movie received high praise from most publications (this one included) and elicited a near-perfect 92% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Meanwhile, it received an abysmal D+ on Cinemascore and a 59% Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes—two polling methods that seek to gather the opinions of casual moviegoers, not critics.
It’s not a question of quality when recommending Hereditary to a friend—it feels more like a question of morality.
With such praise from the cinema community in the face of these poor audience ratings, it's fair to wonder if there's a massive disconnect between the small group of intellectually minded film critics who recommend movies and the vast population of casual moviegoers who actually fill the seats for these films.
It’s no argument that in spite of its torments, the film is exceptionally well executed. A stunning piece of visual poetry that proudly distinguishes itself from the formally mediocre hodgepodge of blockbusters today, there are dazzling, breakout performances from formidable newcomers, Milly Shapiro and Alex Wolff, and a masterful performance from Toni Collette, who deserves an Oscar and a back massage for the unprecedented, excruciating anguish she committed to the screen.
Hereditary is moving, with shocking images and conceptually deafening sequences that flow through you—or perhaps I should say, flow within you, possessing your mind and scraping away at your soul throughout the movie’s oppressive 127-minute duration. The ravishing cinematography and meticulously choreographed editing will scorch your eyes. When this modest suburban family begins to self-immolate, you’ll go down in flames with them.
A24
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But it’s fair to say that, especially in today’s terrifying sociopolitical climate, perhaps casual moviegoers don’t want watch people burned alive when they go to the movie theater. The past decade has seen the gradual transmogrification from grimdark post-9/11 genre sadsacks like The Dark Knight and Watchmen to happy-go-lucky escapist films like the Marvel Cinematic Universe (which even veers into the darkness every now and then). The transition from the dreadfully pessimistic Batman V Superman to the cartoonishly zany Justice League should be enough to show that audiences have been getting sick of sinister stories and want to have some careless fun at the movies again.
Hereditary is quite the opposite of fun. It seeks only to burden the audience, setting us up to hurt from the very start. The film is tragedy upon tragedy, weighing a mountain of stress and grief-ridden supernatural woe onto viewers. At the top of that mountain, where there would normally be some sort of hopeful moral or light in the darkness, Hereditary offers a lifeless, bug-ridden head of dread and ambiguity. Exactly where this movie falters is where more successful indie horror films have succeeded. Better audience-reviewed examples, like The Babadook, while similarly dreadful, offered some small victories for the tortured characters, leaving viewers with a bit of hope on their way out of the theater.
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This phenomenon of poorly rated indie horrors is nothing new, though. Cinemascore, which functions as a sort of exit poll that occurs at randomly selected theaters across America, has been dealing with the mystery of failing letter grade horrors for a while now. Many of the F-rated movies in Cinemascores are horror movies; according to Vulture's Kevin Lincoln, movies that don’t exactly live up to the expectations of the genre seem to be first on the chopping block for audiences filling out exit polls:
What these movies have in common is that they take on the cloak of a genre and then refuse to give the audience what they expect from that genre, a feat that Mother! — which was marketed largely as a horror movie — perpetrates gleefully. If CinemaScore’s list of Fs has a major lesson, it’s that audiences do not like to be fooled in this way. (Trey Edward Shults’s It Comes at Night and Robert Eggers’s The Witch are recent examples of this phenomenon as well; both received very positive reviews and then D and C- CinemaScores, respectively, when they turned out to defy the horror genre’s parameters.)
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Perhaps this explains the poor audience reception of Hereditary, a movie that, while at times bending to the genre cliches to give us jump scares and spooky creaks in the night, boldly shows a side of horror that is more truthful and immersed in the psychological, rather than the material or the creature-oriented.
Films do need not teach lessons, provide hope, or even deliver joy to its viewers. But a movie must at least live up to what it sets out to do and leave the audience with a little something in return. Hereditary sets out to show us the defiance of a mother who will stop at nothing to put an end to her genealogy’s chain of mental illness. But in the finale, there are no victories—evil simply prevails.
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That speaks to both Hereditary's brilliance, and its weakness—and that dichotomy is what may make it a true classic, ranking it among the other hellish legends of filmmaking that put audiences through emotional turmoil. That it could contain the power to pave interdimensional highways and send spirits through the barrel of the projector lens is awe-inspiring, and it distinguishes itself simply because it goes beyond the acceptable. It’s damn near perfect in showing, truthfully, the depths of suffering in the human soul. That’s an astonishing accomplishment, but it’s also agonizing, so it’s not surprising that casual moviegoers would run away from it for dear life. I know I sure did.
