The road to Halloween is paved with good films. Wherein we countdown to the spirited season with a hundred doses of horror. 27 days to go.
* Spoiler Alert *
Halloween is a holiday with a cinematic tradition. Burrowing to the basement after handing out candy (or ingesting a frighteningly large amount of it) to watch a film that unsettles and disturbs is a rite of passage. Personally, I have standing dates every October with The Exorcist, Dracula, Beetlejuice, Frankenstein, and many more.
As of last year, a new addition has been made to my perennial Halloween pantheon. An out-of-left-field feature debut that felt like a stunning return to the iconic horror films of the 1970s, Ari Aster’s Hereditary impressed critics and movie-goers alike and has carved its place in my October calendar.
Hereditary is often name-checked as a key contributor to the modern horror renaissance. That’s not to say that horror was ever “gone”. On the contrary. To be specific, in recent years, forces outside of the genre sphere that had previously ignored horror films are now paying attention.
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The first flicker of this movement came in 2013 with the positive critical reception of James Wan’s The Conjuring and Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014). Following these films, Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015) stirred critics and festival audiences with its brooding and bare folktale. The movement came to a boil with the release of Hereditary.
Interestingly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, each of these films takes an unvarnished look at the private lives of relationships and families. The Babadook explores grief and burn-out through the eyes of a widow with a young son. The Witch shows the deterioration of a family after the loss of an infant. Similarly, Hereditary displays the emotional carnage of intergenerational trauma. Think Rosemary’s Baby, The Amityville Horror, or The Omen with an undeniable familial drama at its core.
Hereditary follows a middle-to-upper class family as they mourn the loss of their matriarch. After the funeral, the family is plagued by a growing sense of unrest. The death of their mysterious matriarch has left many deep-seated, emotional wounds open and aching. Each family member processes their grief individually, until an unforeseen tragedy strikes and rips the thin veil with which they’ve been shrouding their pains.
Tightly constructed and paced, director Ari Aster described Hereditary as a “tale of conspiracy from the point of view of those being conspired against”. He is a master of restraint when it comes to exposition. His deft use of red herrings and manipulation of tension muffles our comprehension of the clues he leaves.
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The family matriarch, Ellen Leigh (not credited) was a life-long cult leader, unbeknownst to her family. Her life’s work was to summon Paimon, a powerful demon. Leigh attempted to raise Paimon into the body of her own son, who later committed suicide due to the psychological torture he was subjected to. With her son erased from existence, Leigh cast her eyes on her daughter, Annie (Toni Colette in a tour-de-force performance).
Though Annie and her mother were estranged when she gave birth to her first child, Peter (Alex Wolff), they reconciled in time for Leigh to work on Annie’s second child, Charlie (Milly Shapiro). Unfortunately, the world never got to meet Charlie. Leigh successfully summoned Paimon into Charlie’s body before she was born. There’s a hitch: Paimon wishes to occupy a male host. So, Leigh and her cult then dedicated themselves to transferring Paimon’s soul to Peter’s body.
They succeed in releasing Paimon from his female-bodied shackles in one of the most heart-stopping scenes in film memory. Aster takes a leaf out of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) by slaughtering a key character within 35 minutes. At that exact moment, our expectations are derailed.
Personal note: when I watched Hereditary on Halloween last year, it was at this exact scene that the lights in the room began flickering – dimming, brightening, turning on and off. This is the precise moment Hereditary solidified itself as an annual October Must-Watch.
Primed for the final stage of their plan, the cult hones in on the remaining family members. Knowing that Annie is struggling to swim through her grief, a cult member befriends her and manipulates her into moving their mission forward. Through occult witchcraft, they terrorize Peter into vulnerability and exhaustion.
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Aster draws out lived-in, organic performances from his cast which makes the film all the more compelling. Paranormal forces aside, the swallowed rage and passive-aggressive exchanges create a ‘death by a thousand cuts’ scenario in the household. A fight at the dinner table creates as much tension as the séance.
Aster wrings out a bass-like, constant throbbing of dread throughout the film. He leads us to question whether the family is being haunted by ghostly apparitions or by an inherited history of mental illness – only to quickly shift the view-finder and reveal the root of the oppressive forces. When Aster lays all bare, we realize that the truth has been coursing toward the climax. Through the writing on the walls of the family house, the quiet sounds of movement, the placement of symbols, the miniatures – the devil at hand has been in front of us all along.
Therein the true horror of Hereditary lies. Indeed, it is in the very title of the film. The film grapples with the uncomfortable idea that, no matter what choices we make, our path is out of our hands; our life’s outcome controlled and sealed. In a more earthly way, we can’t choose our ancestry. We’re bound to whatever DNA and upbringing we’re given. Aster takes the notion of a pre-determined life to a fatal level.
Hereditary conjures a deep, flesh-red nightmare where mundane reality and the paranormal are in lock-step, giving the film a groundedness that amplifies the silencing shock of its finale.
