They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
- Philip Larkin, This Be The Verse
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, over and over: Some of the best horror out there is horror that encompasses both the natural and the supernatural, that juxtaposes real-life horrors with fictional ones. I think this is because things are often scariest when we feel some personal connection to them, some empathy with the characters on the screen, and if the people are relatable and their struggles are relatable, then when really horrifying things start happening, it just tightens the screw that much tighter.
(As an aside, during my hiatus from this thing, I’ve been reading a lot more horror, and if you like this sort of thing and haven’t read A Head Full Of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay, go fix that problem right now because it’s a pitch-perfect example of exactly this).
It’s not for everybody - a lot of horror films are really meant more as entertainment than anything else. The protagonists are sketched in, their fates largely predetermined and largely embraced by the audience. Cheap shocks, glib violence, and people who don’t matter make for horror films that are basically entertainment the way that roller coasters are entertainment. Or maybe public hangings.
I mean, I can look down my nose all I want, it’s still profitable. My opinion isn’t going to stop it, even if I do think it’s laughable that terms like “elevated horror” and “post-horror” are being bandied about to describe what is generally just really well-executed horror that doesn’t insult its audience’s intelligence and pays attention to style and cinematic craft. Like, that’s not a separate genre, that’s just what it’s like when it’s good. And often, part of what makes it so is the attention paid to the humanity of its characters, its insistence on treating them as three-dimensional people.
Case in point: Hereditary.
We open on an obituary, and a family getting ready to go to a funeral. This is the story of Annie Graham, an accomplished artist who creates painstakingly detailed diorama installations of scenes from her life. She is also a wife and mother to two children: Her son Peter, and her younger daughter, Charlie. As it transpires, Annie’s mother has just passed away after a long illness - declining health, dementia, home care - and today is the day of her funeral. Annie gives a eulogy, in which she enumerates the many ways in which she was estranged from her mother, the effect her mother had on her relationship with her own children, and it’s immediately clear that this is not a happy family.
This is a family with a lot of secrets.
The backbone of the film is a story of intergenerational trauma - Annie’s childhood was punctuated by tragedy after tragedy, a long legacy of mental illness, a father and brother who both died too soon by their own hands, a manipulative, distant, disapproving mother for whom she was forced to care when dementia set in, a woman with “private rituals, private friends” who cultivated a relationship with Annie’s daughter that pushed Annie out. Annie’s passed this onto her own children - Peter’s distance from his mother gradually reveals itself as a profound sense of betrayal and abandonment, Charlie is deeply odd, awkward, looks…wizened, almost, as if she is growing old without actually growing up, as if she is withering. She seems profoundly upset by her grandmother’s passing and rejects her mother’s attempts at comfort because she wants grandma back. Their father is ineffectual to the point of becoming almost part of the wallpaper.
Annie’s entire sense of family was poisoned from the start, and the effects on her own family are palpable. They’re already damaged when we meet them - affection and communication are stunted, repressed, made clear through small, economic gestures that a lot goes unsaid, undiscussed, unaddressed, even before the ball really gets rolling, and so this is a film as much about familial disintegration as anything else. But it’s about so much more - the death of Annie’s mother is really just the beginning, and it’s hard to talk about it without giving away important points that lend the film much of its power, but it all starts small - all the new faces at the funeral, the unhappy details of Annie’s childhood, the way one mourner surreptitiously wipes some kind of oil across the deceased’s lips as she passes the casket, Charlie’s obsession with creating dolls out of found objects…
…the phone call from the cemetery, indicating that Annie’s mother has been removed from her grave.
This attention to narrative detail is completely echoed in an attention to cinematic detail. This is probably the most beautifully, meticulously composed horror film I’ve ever seen. The first shot after the obituary card is a slow zoom into a room in a carefully designed miniature house, which upends into something else in a way that is deeply disorienting. It’s a statement of purpose. Its artificiality really works for it - it’s stylized in the best sense of the word, setting a consistent tone and mood of unease. The color palette reminds me of films from the 70s and 80s, which gives it strong The Shining and Rosemary’s Baby vibes. It feels dramatic, both in the sweep of its gestures and in the sense of being carefully staged and arranged, which isn’t the same as feeling contrived. It feels like we are watching something terrible happen to people who had lives before we stepped in, but at a slight remove, as if they are on display. (The juxtaposition between miniatures and the events of the film is very effective.)
This artificiality, this staginess, is contrasted with performances that are as emotionally raw as you’re going to find. These are very vulnerable people in a lot of pain - not necessarily physical pain, but the pain of buried resentment and distrust and abandonment. Annie’s mother has poisoned the way this family relates to each other, and that doesn’t go away when she dies. It lingers, her shadow cast long and cold over their lives. Events subsequent to the funeral bring a lot of very ugly stuff to the surface, driving everyone away into their own separate corners, and so when things get worse in ways nobody would ever expect, when they need each other the most, they utterly fail each other. Their raw grief and suffering are as horrifying as anything supernatural, and when the supernatural comes, when it creeps in from around the edges of the film, where it always was (if you only knew where to look), it takes what is already a deeply uncomfortable character study in how we process unimaginable loss and pushes it to a nightmare pitch, where we cannot process unimaginable danger. If it were just the one thing, it’d be an award-season drama. If it were just the other, it’d be another run-of-the-mill mid-tier filler in Netflix’s horror section. But in being so convincingly both, and so comprehensively of a piece in its story, its acting, and its cinematic craft, it becomes an example of the genre at its best.
IMDB entry
Available on Amazon
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