Hereditary (film)

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 a demonic entity after the death of their secretive grandmother.

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.

Hereditary premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 21, 2018, and was theatrically released in the United States on June 8, 2018. The film received positive reviews and made over $82 million, becoming A24's highest-grossing film at the time, until the release of Everything Everywhere All at Once in 2022.

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 coven, 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, decapitated body and occultist 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 coven 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 coven 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. Peter jumps from the attic window, dying upon impact with the ground. 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 coven—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 coven having "corrected his female body" and given him his preferred male host. The coven then hails Peter as King Paimon.

Cast

 * Toni Collette as Annie Graham, a miniatures artist
 * Gabriel Byrne as Steve Graham, a psychiatrist and Annie's husband
 * Alex Wolff as Peter Graham, Annie and Steve's 16-year-old son
 * Milly Shapiro as Charlie Graham, Annie and Steve's 13-year-old daughter
 * Ann Dowd as Joan, a support group member who befriends Annie
 * Mallory Bechtel as Bridget, Peter's schoolmate and love interest

Ari Aster has an uncredited voice cameo as Annie's art dealer, who calls to offer support after the tragedy she has been experiencing. Kathleen Chalfant makes an uncredited appearance as Ellen Leigh, Annie's deceased mother. Aster refers to her as "the sweetest person in the world".

Development
Writer-director Ari Aster embarked on a career in the film industry while a student at the American Film Institute; he wrote and directed two provocative short horror films, The Strange Thing About the Johnsons and Munchausen, bringing him under the scope of A24. Aster originally pitched Hereditary as a family tragedy, careful not to call it a horror film outright. A fan of domestic dramas, Aster incorporated themes of the genre into his script, envisioning a film rooted in family dynamics, trauma, and grief; Carrie and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover were works Aster specified as influences on Hereditary. He interpreted the film as two halves which are "completely inextricable from each other": "It begins as a family tragedy and then continues down that path, but gradually curdles into a full-bore nightmare."

The demon king Paimon originates from numerous grimoires, including The Lesser Key of Solomon, Johann Weyer's Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, Collin de Plancy's Dictionnaire Infernal, the Livre des Esperitz, the Liber Officiorum Spirituum, and The Book of Abramelin. According to The Lesser Key of Solomon, Paimon is a king of hell who commands 200 legions of spirits or angels. Paimon is obedient to Lucifer, and manifests with a crown on his head, heralded by a "host of spirits, like men with trumpets and well sounding cymbals, and all other sorts of musical instruments".

Casting
Toni Collette was one of the first actresses Aster sought for the role of Annie Graham, a miniaturist and the matriarch of the Graham family. Though Collette was reluctant to work on a horror film, the script's grounded approach to the genre convinced her to commit to the project: "He [Aster] just really understood the dynamics in the family, has such an understanding of what it is to be human, what it is to experience loss".

Gabriel Byrne agreed to play the family's patriarch Steve; Alex Wolff, who previously collaborated with Byrne in the HBO program In Treatment, was cast as the Grahams' son Peter. Cast in her cinema debut, 14-year-old Broadway theatre actress Milly Shapiro, winner of a Tony Honor for her performance in Matilda the Musical, earned the role of the daughter Charlie. After watching Shapiro's audition, Aster was immediately relieved "'cause I knew the chances were slim that I would find somebody who would be right", having left Charlie's personality more ambiguous than other characters in the script. Ann Dowd portrays grieving mother Joan, who convinces Annie of her ability to contact the dead.

Filming
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 sound stage. 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.

Aster said that during filming, "Alex Wolff told me not to say the name of William Shakespeare's Scottish play out loud because of some superstitious theater legend. I smugly announced the name, and then one of our lights burst during the shooting of the following scene."

Final cut battle
In 2022, producer Lars Knudsen claimed that Ari 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.

Music
The soundtrack was produced by Colin Stetson and Rob Kleiner. Nick Allen of The Hollywood Reporter noted that the score incorporates trumpets during the film's climax, in reference to the mythology of Paimon being heralded by the sounds of trumpets.

Release
Hereditary premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 21, 2018. The trailer for the film was released on January 30, 2018. On Anzac Day in 2018, the trailer for Hereditary played before the PG-rated family film Peter Rabbit in a cinema in Innaloo, Western Australia. According to a report in The Sydney Morning Herald, the Hereditary preview was accidentally shown to family audiences and created a small panic in the theater. The theater was apparently full of families including "at least 40 children".

The film was released in the United States by A24 on June 8, 2018, and released in the United Kingdom by Entertainment Film Distributors on June 15, 2018.

Box office
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.

In the United States and Canada, Hereditary was released alongside Ocean's 8 and Hotel Artemis, and was originally projected to gross $5–9 million in its opening weekend, similar to the debuts of previous A24 horror films The Witch ($8.8 million in 2016) and It Comes at Night ($6 million in 2017). It was also the widest-ever release for an A24 film with 2,964 theaters, besting the 2,553 of It Comes at Night. After making $5.2 million on its first day, including $1.3 million from Thursday night previews, weekend estimates were increased to $12 million. It went on to debut to $13.6 million, finishing fourth at the box office, behind Ocean's 8, Solo: A Star Wars Story, and Deadpool 2, and marking the best-ever opening for an A24 title until Civil War surpassed it in 2024. In its second weekend the film dropped just 49.5% to $6.9 million (compared to the 60–70% fall many horror films see in their sophomore frame), finishing sixth. On July 29, 2018, the film became A24's highest-grossing film worldwide at $80 million, beating Lady Bird ($78.5 million); it held the record until June 2022 when it was surpassed by Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Critical response
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 90% based on 385 reviews, and an average rating of 8.3/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Hereditary uses its classic setup as the framework for a harrowing, uncommonly unsettling horror film whose cold touch lingers long beyond the closing credits." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 87 out of 100, based on 49 reviews.

Writing for Rolling Stone, Peter Travers gave the film three and a half out of four and called it the scariest movie of 2018, saying "it's Collette, giving the performance of her career, who takes us inside Annie's breakdown in flesh and spirit and shatters what's left of our nerves. Her tour de force bristles with provocations that for sure will keep you up nights. But first, you'll scream your bloody head off." For The A.V. Club, A.A. Dowd gave the film an A−, stating that, "In its seriousness and hair-raising craftsmanship, 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. Remarkably, it's a first feature, the auspicious debut of writer-director Ari Aster, whose acclaimed, disturbing short films were all leading, like a tunnel into the underworld, to this bleak vision." Common Sense Media gave the film four out of five and advised that it was suitable for viewers aged 17 or older.

Audience reception
Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "D+" on an A+ to F scale. Some publications noted the critics-to-audience discrepancy, comparing it to Drive, The Witch, and It Comes at Night, all of which had positive critical reviews, but failed to impress mainstream moviegoers.