Hereditary:The Ghosts of the Living.

When I first saw Ari Asters debut I was blown away by its profound meditation of grief, but the horror aspect escaped me. The story was a bit too nebulous for me to fully grasp, the sign posts he gave with revelations as to what and who was doing what arrived at the door of my understanding with more mysteries. On that front it seemed to me a movie that existed almost totally beyond understanding to anyone but Aster, I couldn’t even see certain dots to connect them. This was more a function of the way I process information in film where to be honest though I don’t necessarily have to be spoon-fed and philosophically am adamantly against it, the more nebulous and impenetrable works of directors like Malick, Lynch, and even one of my faves Nicolas Winding-Refn fly right over my head like a Boeing jet. So I sought the knowledge of those who did seem to understand, and especially listened to Aster himself. It took until now for me to decide to actually revisit with my new understanding and I got to tell ya, this revisit of Hereditary was much like the experience of sitting on the quarter edge of a chair for hours. Always aware of the edge, never able to get comfortable, finding yourself day dreaming about that moment when maybe the person(s) occupying the chair will get up allowing you to finally sigh in relief. That moment never arrives in Hereditary, and the discomfort is mostly due to the unrepentant relatability to both the grief and the location of the terror in writer/director Ari Aster’s terrifying debut. Although his film resides in the supernatural, thats not where it buries its stakes, or builds its foundations. Ultimately Hereditary is what I would call a living ghost story. All its main characters are already figuratively dead. They walk around unable to communicate beyond longing looks and stares. They repeat and refrain incongruous sentences that speak to some greater meaning behind them, or scribble on notebook pages what they feel. And it’s not at all unlike many families in this new era of technological disassociation, distraction, and economic unsureity. This film is about the decomposition of the nuclear family, under duress from the constant assault from outside forces that we can't see and can barely detect including those from within our homes . The secrets, the lies, the disconnect, the patriarchy. And it’s not the only film exploring this.

The Conjuring, The Witch, Sinister, The Babadook, – all explored similar themes in albeit in their own unique ways- about the passing down of familial horrors and trauma, grief, panic, sin, murder, through a conductor of some sort, dolls, homes, farm animals, necklaces. There is always a passageway for evil in these films. Some door opened by curiosity, innocence/naivety, or vanity, in the case of Hereditary it’s avoidance as a coping mechanism. But, where those movies provide catharsis, closure (if only until the next movie) and safety from the damnation of these experiences and emotions, Aster’s provides no such release. In this way it shares cinematic bloodlines with films like Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby”, Andrzej Żuławski’s “Possession”, and Phillip Kaufman’s paranoid invasion fantasy “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”. All of these films in some way explored the corruption of bonds and bodies by insidious forces from within and without. For the Graham family and especially it’s central character Annie (Toni Collette in a raw, slowly unhinged, barn burner of a performance) it’s communication from within the very American tradition of tying sacrificial suffering to success. By the time we arrive at possibly the most traumatic event of the film – a scene that is grounded in familial terror rather than the supernatural, – we know there’s a history uncovered. The hardships of parenthood, marriage, the masked truth about many of our so called sacred bonds, blood thicker than water and the like, and the made up importance of a patriarchal male lineage. You not only have the implicit and explicit idea that this family struggles with secrets, (The eulogy Annie gives at her mother's funeral) or patriarchal attitudes as it concerns both lineage, and treatment ( The father son relationship, and the grandmother’s “wish”) but there is an unsaid economic concern, (the work place calls) and the desire to attain status and riches (Paimon and his gifts here can easily stand in for capitalism) we can feel the stressors, and we are faced with a grim reality; Hereditary is a dark fairy tale about deconstructing the fairy tales around family. It is as unrepentant about what it might conjure in us, as the forces who work from just outside the parameters of the story are about their roles in an entire family’s harm , and it is eerie, unnerving, upsetting, and difficult to watch for that reason

The spectres of this movie are alive, but they are not well and neither are we, much like the family in Hereditary we are all each one of us finding our own various ways into numbing, fighting, and defending ourselves to various attacks on various fronts many of whom live at the edge of shadows. Apparitions of our traumas haunting and moving us towards some inevitability of change whether it be evolutions or death. In an outstanding video essay for PBS, host Mike Rugnetta outlines what the popularity of any given movie monster tell us about the current epoch. Invaders from outer space and McCarthyism, nuclear Japan and Godzilla, serial killers and slasher films, and of course ..Zombies. in that context it's interesting to frame films like “The Babadook”, “Stoker”, the “Pet Semetery” remake, “Doctor Sleep”, and the “The Night House” not just as mediations of personal grief or a dubious desire to “elevate” horror, but rather an unconscious response to a collective expression of a society exhausted and crushed by the social and economic anxieties produced from dealing with a barrage of micro-aggresions and debilitating attacks from the most legitimized institutions. It could be said that alot of what we are experiencing right now is the death of our most beloved and commonly held beliefs about civilization and the various consequences and outbursts of grief that stem from the tensions at the source of one portion of the populus's need to move onto new realities and the others desire hold on to our most decrepit and hideous institutions and constructs even while they actively harm us.

In an age where we are confronting the generational effects of handed down racism, homophobia, and misogyny, while exploring the “chosen family” as an alternative to blood ties and the economic traumas that have produced a new kind of family dynamic, it’s not a stretch to see these films as conscious or unconscious expressions of societal tension and concern. Insurging evil as insurmountable because of it's resources and stealthiness is a difficult pill to swallow because of the necessity in our lives for hope, but on film it can serve the purpose of pointing out rots and virulences underneath the most beigm and accepted idealogies and conceptions. In fact I think Hereditary’s most impressive contribution besides being one of the most realistic portrayals of grief in very recent history is to criticize blind allegiance to those ties, and to alert us to the fact that what we don’t confront today and the yesterday we refuse to come to terms with will eventually meet us on its terms. Time and time again the family at the center of Hereditary have a chance to deal with and face the deep seated issues that plague and haunt them, and time and time again they bail out for safer ground. The central dinner scene that might have been cathartic, but stops short of any true healing, and is cut short by the ardent appeals to a return to comfortable avoidance. Having to face this tension ourselves second hand we relive our own first hand experiences. The supernatural element adding fantastical shock value to existential dread. A dread viscerally illuminated in the dastardly nature inherent in the scheme of it's Rosemary's Baby-like cult. In an interview at Tiff Ari Aster discussed his intention to make the movie or have the audience feel the terror and horror of a group who is not really in the movie but is smiling the entire time as they watch all these horrific events happen to its as he calls it “sacrificial lambs”. He succeeds mightily and that becomes even more evident in subsequent viewings where the surreptitious craft of the Paimon cult (Her mother and Ann Dowd's characters are particularly vicious in a revisit ) becomes clear as now knowing that all these events have been into action by her own mother and her compatriots. That she willingly sacrificed a husband, son, her granddaughter, grandson, and ultimately even her own daughter for Paimon’s “Rewards” is a vicious statement about our society in general. The final monologue by Ann Dowd's character nails it home. “We've corrected your first female body and give you now this healthy male host. We reject the trinity and pray devoutly to you, Great Paimon. Give us your knowledge of all secret things, bring us honor, wealth, and good familiars. Bind all men to our will as we have bound ourselves for now and ever to yours. Hail, Paimon!” The last word you hear is Hail which could easily stand in for Hell.

Hereditary through performance, written word, and tone created by an accompanying masterwork of sound design and eerie lighting portrays the absolute horror of exactly what happens when foreboding light shines into the darkness of the propeitors and landlords of our suffering and our own trauma and meets with our own inability to confront it, creating as unique a horror experience as I’ve seen on film, continuing yet another age of great horror filmmaking, by exploring the horror in everyday life.