Hereditary
Hereditary is a 2018 American supernatural horror film written and directed by Ari Aster in his feature directorial debut. Starring Toni Collette, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro, Ann Dowd, and Gabriel Byrne, the film follows a grieving family tormented by sinister occurrences after the death of their secretive grandmother.
Plot
Miniature artist Annie Graham lives with her psychiatrist husband Steve and their two children, 16-year-old son Peter and 13-year-old daughter Charlie. The family attends the funeral of Annie's secretive mother, Ellen, at which Annie is surprised at the number of mourners in attendance. She attends a bereavement support group, revealing her troubled childhood and that she and her mother had a fraught relationship until Charlie was born when Ellen became a significant figure in raising her. Meanwhile, Steve receives a phone call telling him that unknown perpetrators desecrated Ellen's gravesite, but does not reveal this to Annie.
Peter is invited to a party, and Annie insists that Charlie accompany him. At the party, Peter leaves Charlie unattended and suggests she eat some of the cake that's being handed out, but neither realizes it contains walnuts. After eating the cake, her severe nut allergy is triggered, sending her into anaphylactic shock. As Peter drives Charlie to the hospital, she leans out of the window for air; when Peter swerves to avoid a dead deer lying in the road, she is accidentally decapitated by a telephone pole. In shock, Peter drives home and leaves Charlie's headless body in the back seat of his parents' car, which Annie discovers, to her horror, the following morning.
The family is fractured following Charlie's funeral: Peter becomes reclusive and wracked with guilt over his sister's death, Annie becomes bitter and resentful toward Peter for his involvement in the accident, and Steve tries to mediate peace between them. Annie befriends a support group member named Joan, who teaches Annie to perform a séance to communicate with Charlie's ghost. Later that night, Annie convinces her family to attempt the séance. Objects begin to move and smash, and Peter is terrified when Annie is possessed and speaks in Charlie's voice until Steve throws water on her. As Peter begins to be haunted by supernatural forces, Annie suspects Charlie's spirit has become vengeful and demonic. When she sees images manifesting in Charlie's sketchbook threatening Peter, she throws the book into the fireplace. However, her clothing goes up in flames at the same time as the book does. Her clothes only stop burning when she pulls the book away from the flames.
Annie goes through her mother's old belongings and finds a photo album that shows Ellen as "Queen Leigh," the leader of a cult, and Joan as one of her acolytes. Another book describes the demon king Paimon, who wishes to inhabit the body of a male host. The summoner of Paimon will receive wealth and rewards. In the attic, Annie finds Ellen's rotting headless corpse and occult runes drawn in blood.
While Peter is outside his school, Joan appears and attempts to expel his spirit from his body for the demon king. In class, Peter is taken over by an unseen force and slams his head against his desk, breaking his nose. Annie informs Steve of her ties to Charlie's sketchbook and begs him to burn it, as she cannot bring herself to take her own life. When he refuses, believing Annie has gone insane, she snatches the book from him and flings it into the fire, only for Steve to burst into flames instead. Annie watches in horror, but her expression grows blank as she is taken over by the same force that possessed Peter earlier.
As naked cult members begin gathering both inside and around the house, Peter wakes after dark and finds his father's charred corpse, then quickly notices one of the cult members in a nearby doorway. A now-possessed Annie then chases him through the house. He attempts to hide in the attic; Annie follows him and then beheads herself with a piece of piano wire. A horrified Peter jumps from the attic window, but subsequently falls to his death. A glowing orb enters and reanimates his body. Now displaying Charlie's mannerisms, he follows Annie's floating headless corpse into Charlie's treehouse, where Joan and other members of the cult—as well as the headless corpses of Peter's mother and grandmother—are worshipping a mannequin with Charlie's crowned, severed head placed on it. Joan removes the crown and places it on Peter's head, addressing him as Charlie. She then proclaims that Charlie is Paimon, the cult having "corrected his female body" and given him his preferred male host. The cult then hails Peter as King Paimon.
Development
The demon king Paimon originates from numerous grimoires, including the Lesser Key of Solomon and Johann Weyer's Pseudomonarchia Daemonum.
Aster's work on short horror films, most notably The Strange Thing About the Johnsons, attracted the attention of A24, who greenlit Hereditary as his first feature film. Aster conceived it as primarily a family drama consisting of two distinct halves. Filming took place in Utah in 2017, with most indoor scenes shot on custom built sets on a soundstage to give the film a dollhouse aesthetic.
Production
The film began shooting in February 2017 in Utah. The exteriors of the Graham family house and the tree house were shot in Summit County, Utah, and the cemetery scene was filmed at Larkin Sunset Gardens in Sandy, Utah. The school scenes were shot at West High School and Utah State Fairpark, but all other interiors (including both versions of the treehouse) were built from scratch on a soundstage. Since each of the rooms was built on a stage, walls could be removed to shoot scenes at a much greater distance than a practical location would allow, creating the dollhouse aesthetic of the film.
In 2022, producer Lars Knudsen claimed that Aster and an unnamed financier disagreed on the final cut of the picture. In a subsequent interview, Knudsen named Kevin Frakes as the financier who'd quarrelled with Aster.
Release and reception
Hereditary premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 21, 2018. It was released in the United States by A24 on June 8, 2018.
Hereditary grossed $44.1 million in the United States and Canada, and $38.8 million in other countries, for a total worldwide gross of $82.8 million, against a production budget of $10 million.
The A.V. Club gave the film an A−, stating: "Hereditary belongs to a proud genre lineage, a legacy that stretches back to the towering touchstones of American horror, unholy prestige-zeitgeist classics like The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby.