Hereditary (film)

Hereditary is a 2018 American supernatural horror drama film written and directed by Ari Aster, in his feature film directorial debut. It stars Toni Collette, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro, and Gabriel Byrne as a family haunted by a mysterious presence after the death of their secretive grandmother. When the matriarch of the Graham family passes away, her daughter and grandchildren begin to unravel cryptic and increasingly terrifying secrets about their ancestry, trying to outrun the sinister fate they have inherited.

Hereditary premiered on January 21, 2018, in the Midnight section at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, and was theatrically released in the United States on June 8, 2018. The film received acclaim from critics, with praise for Aster’s direction and screenplay, as well as Stetson’s musical score, claustrophobic themes, and Collette’s performance. It was a commercial success, making over $80 million on a $10 million budget to become A24’s highest-grossing film worldwide.

Plot

Miniature artist Annie Graham lives in Utah with her husband Steve, their 16-year-old son Peter, and their eccentric and reserved daughter Charlie. At the funeral of her secretive mother, Ellen Leigh, Annie delivers a eulogy explaining their fraught relationship and her mother’s extremely private life. A week later, Steve is informed that Ellen’s grave has been desecrated, and Annie thinks she sees an apparition of Ellen in her workshop. At a support group for the bereaved, Annie reveals that the rest of her family suffered from mental illness that resulted in their deaths and Ellen was a significant figure in raising Charlie.

To attend a party, Peter lies that he is going to a school event, and Annie forces him to take Charlie with him. Unsupervised, Charlie eats cake containing nuts and falls into anaphylactic shock. As Peter drives her to a hospital, she leans out of the window for air; when he swerves to avoid a dead deer, she is decapitated by a telephone pole. In shock, Peter drives home and leaves Charlie’s headless corpse in the car. The family grieves following Charlie’s funeral, significantly heightening tensions between Annie and Peter and causing Annie to behave coldly towards Steve. Peter is plagued by Charlie’s presence around the house.

Annie is befriended by a support-group member, Joan. Annie tells her she used to sleepwalk and recounts an incident in which she woke up in Peter’s bedroom to find herself, Peter, and Charlie covered in paint thinner with a lit match in her hand. Joan teaches Annie to perform a séance to communicate with Charlie. Annie convinces her family to attempt the séance. Objects begin to move and break, terrifying Peter, and Charlie seemingly possesses Annie until Steve douses her with water. Annie suspects that Charlie’s spirit has become malevolent. She throws Charlie’s sketchbook into the fireplace, but her sleeve also begins to burn. She retrieves it and heads to Joan’s apartment for advice, but Joan is gone. Annie notices that Joan’s welcome mat resembles her mother’s craftwork. It is also revealed that rituals inside the apartment involve pictures of Peter.

Annie goes through her mother’s possessions and finds a photo album linking Joan to Ellen, and a book with information about a demon-king named Paimon who wishes to inhabit the body of a male host. In the attic, Annie finds Ellen’s decapitated body with occult symbols on the wall written in blood. At school, Peter slams his head against his desk, breaking his nose, and is brought home. Annie shows Steve her mother’s body and the sketchbook. She begs him to burn the sketchbook so she can sacrifice herself, but Steve, believing she has gone mad, accuses her of desecrating Ellen’s grave herself. Annie desperately throws the book into the fireplace, which instead causes Steve to burst into flames. As Annie screams in terror, Paimon takes possession of her, and she immediately falls silent and into a trance.

Outside, a coven of worshippers begins to assemble. Peter awakens to find his father’s body before a possessed Annie chases him into the attic, which is decorated with occult imagery. Despite Peter locking himself inside, he suddenly discovers Annie in the attic, levitating in the air and beheading herself with a piano wire, while naked coven members stand and watch. Terrified, Peter jumps out of the window. As he lies on the ground, a mysterious light enters his body, waking him up. He follows Annie’s levitating corpse into Charlie’s treehouse, where Charlie’s crowned, severed head rests atop a mannequin. Joan, other coven members, and the headless corpses of his mother and grandmother bow to him. Joan addresses him as Charlie and swears an oath to him, informing him that he is now Paimon, and that he has been liberated from his female host. She asks him to “bind all men to their will as they have bound theirs, now and for ever, to his.”

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 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 boss, who calls to offer support after the tragedy she has been experiencing.

Kathleen Chalfant makes an uncredited appearance as Ellen Taper Leigh, Annie’s mother. Aster refers to her as “the sweetest person in the world”.

Production

Development

Writer-director Ari Aster embarked on a career in the film industry while a student at the American Film Institute; he scripted and directed two provocative short 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 script reflects a real-life incident from 2004 in Marietta, Georgia, in which John Kemper Hutcherson accidentally decapitated his childhood friend and passenger, Frankie Brohm, on a telephone pole, after the latter had leaned his head from the vehicle to relieve the symptoms of his inebriation. Hutcherson then drove home with Brohm’s headless corpse in the car and fell asleep, until a passerby, walking with his toddler, noticed Brohm’s body still in the truck the next morning and notified authorities.

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 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.”

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. It was released in the United Kingdom by Entertainment Film Distributorson June 15, 2018.

Reception

Box office

Hereditary grossed $44.1 million in the United States and Canada, and $36.2 million in other countries, for a total worldwide gross of $80.2 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. 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. By July 29, 2018 the film had grossed $80 million worldwide, passing Lady Bird ($78.5 million) to become A24’s highest-grossing film worldwide.

Critical response

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 89% based on 368 reviews, and an average rating of 8.28/10. The website’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 critics, indicating “universal acclaim”.

Writing for Rolling Stone, Peter Travers gave the film 3.5 out of 4 stars 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 stars 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, Mother! and It Comes at Night, all of which were critically acclaimed but failed to impress mainstream moviegoers.

Accolades

Year	Organizations	Category	Nominee(s)	Result
2019	AACTA International Awards	Best Actress – International	Toni Collette	Nominated
	Alliance of Women Film Journalists	Bravest Performance	Toni Collette	Nominated
2018	Boston Society of Film Critics	Best New Filmmaker	Ari Aster	Runner-up
	Chicago Film Critics Association Awards	Best Actress	Toni Collette	Won
		Best Film	Hereditary	Nominated
		Most Promising Filmmaker	Ari Aster	Won
2019	Critics’ Choice Movie Awards	Best Actress	Toni Collette	Nominated
		Best Sci-Fi/Horror Movie	Hereditary	Nominated
2018	Detroit Film Critics Society Awards	Best Actress	Toni Collette	Won
2019	Fangoria Chainsaw Awards	Best Wide Release	Hereditary	Won
		Best Director	Ari Aster	Won
		Best Actress	Toni Collette	Won
		Best Supporting Actor	Alex Wolff	Won
		Best Supporting Actress	Milly Shapiro	Nominated
		Best Screenplay	Ari Aster	Won
		Best Score	Colin Stetson	Nominated
		Best Kill	“Charlie Meets Telephone Pole”	Won
2018	Golden Trailer Awards	Best Horror	Hereditary	Nominated
		Most Original Trailer	Hereditary	Nominated
	Gotham Awards	Best Actress	Toni Collette	Won
		Breakthrough Director	Ari Aster	Nominated
		Audience Award	Hereditary	Nominated
2019	Independent Spirit Awards	Best Female Lead	Toni Collette	Nominated
		Best First Feature	Ari Aster, Kevin Frakes, Lars Knudsen and Buddy Patrick	Nominated
2018	Los Angeles Film Critics Association	Best Actress	Toni Collette	Runner-up
	Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival	Narcisse Award for Best Feature Film	Hereditary	Nominated
	St. Louis Gateway Film Critics Association	Best Actress	Toni Collette	Won
	Washington D.C. Area Film Critics Association Awards	Best Actress	Toni Collette	Nominated
		Best Youth Performance	Milly Shapiro	Nominated