“They never had hope because they’re all like, pawns in this horrible, hopeless machine.” – Hereditary

Okay, so I was not prepared for how much Hereditary was going to fuck me up as a film.

The film itself explores, as the title suggests, something hereditary; something that is passed down. In some cases it’s mental illness, such as schizophrenia or depression. In this case, it’s a king of hell that needs a male body to reside in. So you know… regular family stuff.

The film opens with a family heading to a funeral. It is clear from the beginning that there is a lot of tension within this family. Most notably between Annie (Toni Collette) and her son, Peter (Alex Wolff), but also between Annie and her late mother, Ellen. If we’re being honest, though, no one in this family really knows how to connect with one another.

Peter is presented as a bit of a dumb, stoner kid who’s got his mind on weed, girls, and — apparently — ‘bringing his dick’ to parties. Great line. Wish I could get it out of my head.

Charlie (Milly Shapiro) — the only daughter, and youngest child of Annie and Steve (Gabriel Byrne) — is a beautifully weird enigma. She’s strange from the get-go; painfully shy, with a persistent tongue-clicking tic, and an undeniable artistic streak she seems to have inherited from her mother. She also has a nut allergy. So… fuck.

But Charlie knows things. She seems to perceive things others don’t. She knows that her mother isn’t going to be there to take care of her when she needs it most, asking Annie “Who’s going to take care of me?” She knows that it was a bird that hit the window at school, and she knows, without looking, that it has died. In fact, she is already looking at the scissors which she later uses to decapitate the dead bird, foreshadowing her own death. She draws a crown on it, predicting Peter’s fate. Maybe she even knows she’s not going to get sick from sleeping in the treehouse, which is why she responds to Steve’s concern about her catching pneumonia with “That’s okay.”

But Charlie isn’t an oracle. She’s not making predictions, she’s just hyper-intuitive. She just knows things, and it’s almost, almost not that odd. Because, in horror, girls always seem to know first.

Peter, under pressure from Annie as a way to keep him from drinking while underage, ends up taking Charlie to what looks like the worst teen house party ever (honestly, it’s like an office function). It is there that Charlie eats a cake containing walnuts and goes into anaphylactic shock. (There you go, it’s Chekhov’s Nut Allergy)

For whatever reason, Peter does not call an ambulance and decides to drive her to hospital himself. On the way, Charlie has rolled down a window to try (ineffectually) to breathe when Peter suddenly swerves to avoid a dead deer. She collides with a telephone pole at over eighty miles an hour, and is decapitated. Peter, in shock, drives home with Charlie’s headless corpse in the back seat, and that is where, just days after losing her mother, Annie finds her daughter’s body.

One of the reasons I waited so long to write this was piece was because I knew I was going to have to watch this scene again. There’s honestly no way to brace yourself. Annie’s wails, on her hands and knees on the bedroom floor are (my first thought) inhuman, but then don’t we always like to call women out for being less than human? For being animalistic? Even monstrous somehow, in their excess? She just found her daughter’s beheaded corpse: her cries are completely human, and it’s a devastating moment to watch.

Exploitation:

After the accident, Annie admits to Joan, a woman she meets at a grief group that she “gave [Charlie] to her mother”, because, when Annie had Peter, her firstborn, there was a no contact rule in place (enforced by Steve). Why was it having Charlie that made her so afraid that she had to go back to her mother after years of not speaking? Why didn’t Annie feel like she had to go to her mother with her first pregnancy? Why was having a girl so frightening that she gave up on her no-contact rule? Was it because she felt she needed some kind of support? Annie says herself that she doesn’t really feel any support from her family:

“I don’t really want to put any more stress on my family. I’m just not really sure that they could give me that support. I just feel like it’s all ruined, and then I realize that I am to blame. Or not to blame, but I am blamed.”

“What do you think you feel blamed for?” the grief group leader asks.

“I don’t know.” Annie responds.

This line stuck with me, because don’t all women feel this way at some point or another? Why should Annie feel blamed for something outside of her control? But she does. Women do.

Clearly, part of the problem lies in this family’s relationship to one another. It’s clear that Annie and Steve are not communicating very well. Annie lies and says she’s going to a movie theatre, when she’s really going to a grief group. Steve lies about the exhuming of Annie’s mother’s corpse when the cemetery calls their house. Of course, this might have been in an effort to protect her, but Ellen was not his mother. It should not be his decision and, ultimately, it should have been Annie who decided whether or not she was capable of handling that particular event, and not Steve deciding for her what she was and was not capable of handling.

When Annie discovers that the door to her mother’s room (normally closed) has been left open, it is Steve, again, for some reason, and not Annie, who takes control and locks the door. “Sorry,” she laughingly says “I know it’s irrational.” She’s monitoring herself in her own home, over her own mother’s space. Her own mother’s personal things.

Why anyone should feel that they have to defend their so-called ‘irrationality’ to her spouse is ludicrous, but women have to keep themselves in check so that they never sound ‘crazy’. God forbid we sound irrational, because then all credibility flies out the window. Women are taught to tamp down their intuitive impulses. Women have been tried as witches for a multitude of non-reasons, women are always the ones who see ghosts. When Annie thinks she sees her dead mother in her workshop, she tells Steve about it, but doesn’t delve any deeper, passing it off as a silly fantasy. The question remains, though: why should Annie feel like she has to defend herself against her spouse, why should she feel like it’s irrational to lock the door to her mother’s room, her mother’s things, against the rest of her family?

This is one of many moments in this film where a man decides that a woman with a family history of mental illness is not capable of doing something. He exploits what he supposes to be her ‘inclination to insanity’ by making decisions he has no right to make. By assuming her family history makes her somehow more fragile he allows himself to have more control in places where, really, he shouldn’t. He should be operating as a partner, but he does not.

Steve is logical, level-headed, and, for the most part, unemotional and he seems to expect everyone around him to behave in this manner as well. You get the sense that if someone were to deviate from the accepted norm, even a little, that it wouldn’t be tolerated. In some ways, Steve creates the most tension, because he does not accept anything that strays too far into the realm of the over-emotional, or the strange. Charlie hides the contents of her shoebox from him at the beginning of the film and, from what we are shown, Annie and Peter hide their emotions from him on a regular basis. Steve can tell Peter that he loves him, but Peter does not respond. It’s like they’re all kept in check by his cool logic. His family’s displays of grief or any of the emotions surrounding it make him uncomfortable, like they should not be aired unless they are in private. When Steve grieves, he is always alone. He supports Annie’s art, but is only supportive when she is working steadily, and not when it is art for art’s sake. He is not supportive when she uses her art to work through her trauma, or her grief.

“Jesus Christ, Annie. You’re not planning on letting him see that, are you?” he asks, about the diorama Annie has created of ‘the accident’ where Charlie was killed. “How do you think he’s going to feel when he sees that?” This exchange blows up into a fight. Annie can’t even explain that she’s working through her own feelings, she has to be as cold and clinical as he is in her thinking: “It’s a neutral view of the accident,” she tells him. A neutral view of her grief.

At the impossibly tense and explosive dinner table scene, Steve stops what might have ended up as a productive exchange. Even though the discussion between Peter and Annie is initially presented as anger, anger is not a “bad” emotion. It is natural and human, and is often the result of an underlying, deeper hurt. Had they been allowed to continue their argument, their airing of grievances and blame, it might have resulted in the anger breaking, and the guilt to be more bearable, because it was carried together. It could possibly have even created understanding and forgiveness. In brief, Annie and Peter are the cusp of something that has the potential to finally pull all that venom out, but Steve stops it, and it continues to poison all of them.

Afterwards, when Annie feels unsupported by both Peter and Steve, she leaves, and Steve manages to give Peter a cursory hand pat. Thanks, Dad!

And what if Annie had had the support she needed from her family? What if Steve was able to give her that support, instead of distancing himself from what he views as her excessive and inappropriate feelings? Would she feel less ‘blamed,’ then? Would she have been able to deflect the blame falling on her shoulders somewhere healthier than onto the shoulders of her son? Because Peter is still just a kid, a teenager who certainly should not be expected to shoulder the blame any more than Annie should.

Instead, she’s apparently just supposed to bounce back from her mother’s death, and her daughter’s, both of which happen in the span of a few weeks. Steve, for all his logic, seems to forget that grief is not clear or regimented. It does not have a structured timeline, nor should it. Annie’s way of grieving — her art, her anger — makes Steve uncomfortable and, therefore, he wants her to stop doing it.

The only warmth she receives is from another woman: from Joan. No wonder Annie turns to her so completely. Of course she’s going to turn to her if there is no support anywhere else in her life. There’s only so much one person can take before they can’t take any more.

Steve shows us that men — even when they think they have good intentions — try to push women into acting a certain way. Women should be quiet, calm, level-headed, and serene at all times. Men try to contain the inherent parts of femininity — its extremes, its excesses — because what is feminine still scares the shit out of them.

As is typical in horror films, Steve plays the usual “horror-heroine’s love-interest role” (trademark pending), which is to say he doesn’t believe a goddamn thing she says.

The scene where Annie pleads with him first to go up into the attic where someone has left the desecrated body of her mother, and then, has to plead with him again, in increasing desperation, to throw Charlie’s book into the fireplace, is a deeply troubling one. No one should have to resort to that kind of desperate pleading with the person who they should be able to trust and rely on, but women in horror films are put in this position all. the. fucking. time. Men — the men who are supposed to be their partners; who have prided themselves on their reliability, and on being the providers for their families since time immemorial — never believe them. Sure, they’ll be reliable and supportive… as long as the family members with vaginas don’t start talking about any spooky stuff. Cool cool cool.

Anyways, he goes up in smoke.

Women in horror films are not special, though. They are not different from regular, real live women. Women have always had a connection to their emotions, to their physical bodies, and to the earth. Women have, historically, used these natural inclinations for midwifery, for medicine, and for things that slip into the realm of the paranormal. Like séances for example. Or witchcraft. And it seems like whatever occult stuff Joan’s group is doing, actually is working. Annie doesn’t hit the blue paint to knock it over, it falls. On its own. Right onto Joan’s phone number, the person that leads her into the séances in the first place, after that little flyer in the mail doesn’t work. They’re persistent, Annie’s grieving, and it works.

Joan’s group targets Annie not just because she is Ellen’s daughter (her mother being an important member of the group) but because she is grieving. Like many similar groups, they target people who are lost. Annie’s mother, Ellen, could have become involved with this group willingly: because she was looking for a male body to host one of the kings of hell, or she could have become involved because she was vulnerable, because she was mentally ill (according to the long list of symptoms Annie covers at the beginning of the film). We don’t know what the reason is, but I think it’s highly possible that she was just as exploited as Annie becomes.

And while Hereditary turns the conventional horror film on its head: the occult is real, it’s the mental illness that is the metaphor — it doesn’t make the message any less important: vulnerable people are exploited.

I want to point out that Annie (and perhaps her mother) are not vulnerable because they are mentally ill — mental illness is not a flaw in their character. They are vulnerable because they lack support and understanding within their families and within society. It has, not so recently, been coming to light that many aspects of today’s society perpetuate and worsen mental illness, and it is society that allows the mentally ill to be vulnerable within it. It is not the fault of those who are mentally ill themselves. Not only does society’s understanding of mental illness need to change, but society itself must.

Erasure:

Initially presented as a somewhat typical teenage boy, Peter is not altogether that distinguishable from the other boys in his class who all only seem capable of a handful of smart-ass remarks while the teacher lectures on Sophocles’ The Women of Trachis (THE FORESHADOWING). Only the girls answer the teacher’s questions, presenting knowledge, again, as something which only women possess. Peter, meanwhile, stares at his classmate’s ass the whole time.

But it quickly becomes apparent that there is a whole other side to Peter, one that is initially hidden from the audience, because Peter also wants to hide it from himself. It’s something ‘softer’ in him. Something that differentiates him from his male classmates, his stoner buddies. Something… feminine.

After Charlie’s death, and his mother’s turning to the occult for some relief from her grief, Peter becomes more and more distraught. He is afflicted with anxiety attacks (anxiety being a mental illness which disproportionately affects women), he cries when he’s frightened, he’s the one who wants to talk about Charlie’s death at the dinner table. All of Peter’s attributes which might (societally), present themselves as feminine are turned down and brushed aside by the people around him. His stoner friend, to his credit, does hold Peter’s hand to comfort him (Peter has to ask him), but is not capable of providing the kind of emotional support Peter needs, as evidenced by Peter’s solitude throughout the remainder of the film. His friends quickly wash their hands of him. Like with Annie, like with all women in horror, he becomes too much for them to handle.

Peter is a unique character in horror because he is, often, “hysterical.” A term we rarely ever use for men, but love to pin onto women, and the audience’s reaction to him is very interesting: He is not necessarily an easy character to like, but why? He’s not a bad person, but it’s just so easy to pass him off as annoying, isn’t it? In fact, many people do. Just check the message boards.

Because men aren’t supposed to have feelings right? Jesus Christ.

Peter does, though. He feels them a lot, and strongly. And we, as an audience, just don’t know what to do about it. And I fucking love that.

Annie’s father died of psychotic depression and starvation. Her older brother had schizophrenia “and hanged himself in his mother’s room claiming she was trying to put people inside him.” (Welp… it turns out she actually was.)

So, why Peter? Why does Peter survive when all of the other men in Annie’s family line don’t? When Steve doesn’t? Does his femininity actually make him stronger than the other men? The masculine men; the strong, rational ones, like Steve, with the stiff upper lip?

Why is he, dare I say it, the Final Girl?

His survival only to be the host for Paimon also begs the bigger question: why are victims of possession always female? Think about all of the exorcism movies you’ve ever seen. There’s The Exorcist, of course, and The Exorcism of Emily Rose. There are still cases in present day of female victims being exorcised — and they are victims. Women are exorcised for being argumentative, for cursing, for defending themselves, for raising their voices. Women are the ones we expect to be demonically possessed and so Peter, the feminized male, is the only male in Annie’s family lineage who actually survives this possession. Who survives in order to be possessed at all. He survives, one might say, because of his femininity. But is it really surviving? Has he really made it out alive?

The horrors Peter experiences finally seem to break him and, by the end of the film, he has been stripped of all emotion: stripped of fear, of grief, of insanity. He becomes a vessel, just like the rest of the women in the film. Charlie and Annie are both decapitated, thereby separating their bodies — the female vessel — from the knowledge they both inherently possessed. And women have always been vessels, too. Vessels for male pleasure, and a man’s offspring. Annie is a vessel to bring Peter into the world.

What is ‘soft’ or feminine in Peter has to be erased completely before he can be a host for Paimon, as Paimon cannot live in a female body, nor, apparently, could he live in Peter until now. Peter must be de-feminized first.

Only when he is hollowed out and surrounded by death and destruction can he embody what Joan’s cult bows down to and worships. Only when he has been stripped of any softness in him, emptied completely of warmth, of feeling, even of guilt; when he has been made cold and heartless, when he has everything feminine within him crushed out … only in this moment can Peter finally become what the demonic force needs: a man.

So… no. I don’t know if Peter does make it out alive, after all.