Hereditary (2018) - What's Scary in 2018?

When a movie is fairly universally regarded as terrifying, I become fixated on it. My fascination with horror as a genre has really hardened me to the notion of "scary", but Hereditary was getting rave reviews and being called scary by all the people whose opinions result in critically acclaimed horror. I had to put on my cynical boots - a lot of these people also loved The VVitch, which I found very hit and miss, and the movie comes from the same producers. Still, my yearning to get to the bottom of what people consider to be a properly scary movie in the current day found an acceptable target. 

With Hereditary, it's easy to see why people were so enraptured. It's a thrilling experience. For a relatively new filmmaker on the mainstream scene, Ari Aster has created a very tightly directed and composed movie. It follows a family after the death of Toni Collette's character's mother, through varying places of grief and understanding of the complexities that run in their genetic line. I knew absolutely nothing about the plot before going in, and I do think that the marketing for the movie was fairly effective - it leaves the plot as a surprise and the characters in constant question.

At it's core, and as all of the breakdown pieces you read will tell you, Hereditary is about the things we receive from our lineage and what happens when we try to control things that have been set in stone. There is plenty of discussion of this in terms of mental illness, and I do wish this played further into the movie's final pay off, but I understand that it can't all be explicit in the text. At the same time, we're visiting some really heart wrenching sequences about the cycle of abuse and the ways in which we try to present specific images of ourselves to other people. Even when it gets a little bit twisted up in its own metaphors - I maintain that if the ending hadn't been so needlessly complicated and short, there wouldn't have been call for the overly expository final shot - it is still done beautifully, and with intention.

I appreciate this age of intention in horror movies. A lot of the massive successes of the past few years feel deeply tied to the intention in their storytelling - instantly, I think of movies like It Follows, which for all of my problems with it (and mainly with the fanbase of overly nostalgic guys who will cling to anything that uses their 80s signifiers to build dedication in spite of any problematic content) was a movie wherein every shot was saturated with purpose. I think people seek it out to contrast the way the 24 hour news cycle, social media dominated, micronarrative focused world feels so harsh and erratic. This steadiness and clear thought feels sinister, as if a movie filled with unsettling imagery needed that. 

From a different perspective, I am always more drawn to movies with well written female roles, particularly in the traditionally masculine genre of horror where women largely exist to be used for sex or brutally murdered or act as figures of purity. While I'm not so keen on the gendered implications to the decapitation trend in this movie - a far more literal interpretation of Headless Women of Hollywood - it is not so much the method of death I take issue with but rather the contrast of brutality in male and female murder. It didn't impede on my enjoyment of the film, which was far more impacted by the insistence on being ultra last minute impactful, but is reflective of a larger trend in the fetishisation of female death in horror movies. There are two particular shots that felt important, and it can be chalked up to just how deeply female this movie is (a positive!), but the male deaths seen are so contrastingly simple. We are given two characters to really root for, and both of them give phenomenal performances - Toni Collette is truly at her best here - and there is fantastic characterisation there, so my complaints are really just comments. 

For all of the little problems I had with this movie, and the deep uncertainty I felt after I watched it, a day later I have come down firmly on the side of enjoying it. I feel like it was a similar cinematic experience to a movie like The Killing of a Sacred Deer, but more grounded in reality. Did I think it was scary? Not particularly, but I don't think scariness is the criteria by which we should judge horror movies. I hesitate to even class this as horror - without the final act twists, it is firmly a thriller - and most of the time, it is just a sad, dark film. Haunting, but not horrifying. But scary is a different thing in different contexts, and right now the idea of being unable to control the hand we are dealt is a terrifying concept. I think that is why this is hitting such a chord right now.

Rating: 8/10 - I would have possibly liked this even more had the ending felt more cohesive and the plot remained grounded the whole way through, but I understand why it was done in the way it was. Maybe without the two glasses of wine, I would have rated it differently? But I'm excited to return to Hereditary later, and to see what Ari Aster does next (provided we don't find out he's deeply problematic), and to keep putting Toni Collette in horror movies. 

Of course, to follow up that good new release, I've already committed to some terrible horror garbage to compensate.