HEREDITARY (2018) Explained
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00:00 Hey friends, strangers and film aficionados alike.
00:16 Niat here with Film Comics Explained and today we're going to take a walk down a sacrilegious
00:20 lane towards unlocking the secrets of my favourite horror film of the year titled Hereditary,
00:25 which was directed by Ari Aster with a star studded cast including Gabriel Byrne, Ann
00:30 Dowd, Millie Shapiro, Alex Wolfe and the outstanding Toni Collette.
00:34 When the matriarch of the Graham family passes away, her daughter's family begins to unravel
00:38 cryptic and increasingly terrifying secrets about their ancestry.
00:42 As the title would suggest, the film is about family and the things we inherit from our
00:46 bloodlines.
00:47 For the most part of the film, we assume that the thing that is being passed down is a mixture
00:51 of physical and psychological illnesses.
00:53 But as the film progresses, we come to find that the Graham family had also inherited
00:57 something far more sinister.
00:59 It's refreshing to see independent distributors like A24 take on projects like The Witch,
01:04 Under the Skin and It Comes at Night, breathing life into the predictable jump scare infused
01:08 style of horror movies we've grown accustomed to and in a way we've become desensitised
01:13 to.
01:14 It's for this reason that when a film like Hereditary comes along, I feel legitimately
01:17 scared.
01:18 I've covered the incredible film The Witch in another video, going through its themes
01:22 and explaining the ending, which I'll leave links to below, and I highly recommend that
01:25 you guys check it out.
01:27 Most horror films will build tension up to a moment of terror that will get us to have
01:30 a strong reaction to a jump scare of sorts, and in a way, we get a sense of temporary
01:34 relief until the next moment that something pops on screen.
01:37 The genius of this film is that nothing ever pops onto the screen and the things that scare
01:41 us are usually right in front of our eyes for minutes until the lighting slowly changes
01:46 to reveal their presence.
01:47 Even so, these often fade into the darkness and prevent us from getting the sharp relief
01:51 we get from jump scares, and as a result, the tension continues to grow until the unsettling
01:55 climax.
01:56 The film is beautifully crafted and shot, and much of its success was due to the director's
02:01 fantastic working relationship with his film school buddy and the film's cinematographer,
02:06 Pavel Pogorovsky.
02:07 The set of the house was also meticulously constructed to match the miniature sculptures
02:11 Annie had built in her workshop, with many of the establishing shots in the film using
02:15 the interior and exterior of the model dioramas, which were seamlessly interlaced with shots
02:19 of the actual home.
02:20 Now when I say seamless, I of course don't mean that you don't notice it, as it's
02:24 pretty obvious at times, but the jumps between the model sets to reality helped reinforce
02:28 the notion that the Graham family were much like the miniature representations of themselves
02:32 as they were also being watched and controlled by an outside force.
02:36 The story follows the troubled Graham family who were dealing with the passing of Annie's
02:39 mother Ellen, and from the beginning we notice that they aren't particularly close, with
02:43 each of them choosing to isolate themselves from each other.
02:46 With Annie spending most of her time in the workshop, her husband Steve, who was also
02:49 her psychiatrist, is often seen in his study.
02:52 Her 16 year old Peter usually occupies his room, while the enigmatic Charlie spent most
02:56 of her time in the treehouse.
02:58 At the funeral of her secretive mother, Annie delivers a strange eulogy explaining their
03:02 fraught relationship, and also points out that she doesn't recognise most of the people
03:05 that were there, something that we will come back to down the track.
03:08 During the eulogy, we also notice the young Charlie drawing on her sketch pad while making
03:12 an unusual clucking noise, and though this seemed like a harmless tick, it was actually
03:16 a sign of something far more horrendous.
03:27 When they return home, none of them actually seem to be in any measure of pain, and Annie
03:31 even has a moment when she asks Steve whether or not she should be feeling sad, and he simply
03:35 tells her that she should be feeling whatever she feels.
03:38 The only person that appears to be really upset about the passing of Ellen is the young
03:41 Charlie, with Annie mentioning that after she'd given birth to Charlie, her grandmother
03:45 had even begun breastfeeding the young girl, which is super creepy and will make absolute
03:49 sense towards the film's conclusion.
03:52 After a few days, Steve is informed that Ellen's grave had been desecrated, and he withholds
03:56 this information from Annie, not wanting to put too much on his wife's plate.
03:59 Annie also sees an apparition of Ellen, which coupled with advice from her husband, leads
04:03 her to join a support group for those dealing with grief.
04:06 Now during her first session, Annie reveals that the rest of her family suffered from
04:09 mental illnesses that resulted in their deaths.
04:12 It's very clear that she had a troubled relationship with her mother, and while she admitted to
04:15 loving her, she'd actually cut her out of their lives.
04:18 Her mother had suffered from dissociative identity disorder and dementia, her father
04:22 had died when Annie was a baby because he suffered from psychotic depression, and had
04:26 essentially starved himself to death, while her brother suffered from schizophrenia and
04:30 had hung himself in his mother's bedroom, and also left a suicide note blaming Ellen
04:33 for his death, claiming that she was trying to put people into his head.
04:37 All of these awful factors led Annie to distance herself from Ellen, as she had hoped the problems
04:41 were not hereditary, and believed that she would be able to save her family from the
04:44 same fate if they stayed away from her.
04:47 While Steve had put a no contact rule in place to help Annie recover, by the time she'd
04:51 given birth to Charlie, her mother had snuck back into their lives and began stabbing her
04:55 hooks into Charlie as Annie described it.
04:57 Hoping to attend a party with his school friends, Peter lies to his mother and tells her that
05:01 he's going to a school event, leading her to force him to take Charlie with him.
05:05 Unsupervised, Charlie eats cake containing nuts, which he's allergic to, and experiences
05:09 anaphylactic shock. Realising that she was struggling to breathe, Peter desperately drove
05:13 her towards the hospital, but when he swerved to avoid a dead animal on the road, Charlie,
05:17 who had stuck her head out the window for a fair share, is suddenly and shockingly decapitated
05:21 by a pole.
05:23 While the family was generally numb to the loss of Ellen, the death of Charlie increased
05:26 tensions between Peter and his mother, who later admitted that his birth was an accident,
05:30 and one that she attempted to correct to no avail.
05:33 Just as Annie had seen apparitions of her mother after her death, Peter is also soon
05:36 plagued by Charlie's presence around the house. However, we'll come to find that both
05:40 these visions were actually the work of a demon of mischief.
05:44 Annie is soon befriended by a member of the support group called Joe, to whom she reveals
05:47 that she used to sleepwalk. She also recounts an incident in which she woke up in Peter's
05:51 bedroom to find herself, Peter and Charlie covered in paint thinner with a lip match
05:56 in her hand.
05:57 There's just something inherently not quite right about her, and we notice this several
06:01 times, especially in the car park where there's a stark contrast to the great news she shares
06:04 with Annie, and the forceful way that she handles her, preventing her sceptical nature
06:08 from ignoring Joan's sensational claims.
06:11 Joan eventually teaches Annie to perform a seance to communicate with Charlie, and assures
06:14 her that although she'd been sceptical at first, she'd actually gotten into contact
06:18 with her dead grandson, and even demonstrates this at her home.
06:21 Unfortunately for Annie, we soon come to realise that this was all a lie, as Joan did not have
06:25 any children, and was in fact a member of a cult of which Annie's mother Ellen was
06:29 their spiritual leader.
06:30 Annie then wakes from a nightmare and convinces the family to attempt the seance, where,
06:34 objects begin to move and break.
06:36 Charlie then seemingly possesses Annie, which terrifies Peter, until Steve douses her with
06:40 water.
06:41 It's at this point that Annie begins to suspect that Charlie's spirit had become malevolent,
06:44 leading her to throw Charlie's sketchbook into the fireplace, in the hopes that this
06:48 would destroy their connection to her.
06:49 But as the book catches fire, Annie's sleeve miraculously also begins to burn, forcing
06:54 her to pull it back out.
06:55 She then heads to Joan's apartment for advice, but finds that the woman had now vanished,
06:59 and though Annie doesn't get a chance to look into the house, we get an unsettling
07:01 look at the interior, which is filled with candles, and contained a makeshift altar with
07:06 offerings.
07:07 After noticing the similarities between Joan's welcome mat and her mother's craftwork, Annie
07:10 begins going through her mother's possessions, and finds a photo album linking Joan to Ellen,
07:15 and a book with information about a demon named Paimon, who wished to inhabit the body
07:19 of a male host.
07:20 Now Paimon is essentially a spirit named in the Lesser Key of Solomon, where he is described
07:24 as the most obedient of Satan's lesser kings, and in the Tribulation, Paimon is sanctioned
07:28 to the west of the human world by Satan himself.
07:31 Many interpretations also suggested that it was derived from a Middle Eastern pagan goddess,
07:36 on the grounds that some of the manuscripts depicted Paimon as a young woman riding a
07:39 camel, with three decapitated heads which were offerings to the demon.
07:43 The name Paimon also meant a tinkling sound in an unspecified language, and this was alluded
07:47 to in the film with his first host Charlie, who made the unusual clucking noise, which
07:51 was actually Paimon himself.
08:01 Now in the attic, Annie also finds Ellen's decapitated body, with strange symbols on
08:05 the wall written in blood, which was the symbol of the cult, and a sign that is littered throughout
08:09 the film, from the jewellery the cultists wore, to symbols in the Graham home.
08:12 The pole that decapitated the young Charlie was also marked by the same symbol, an indication
08:17 that everything that was unfolding before our very eyes had been orchestrated by the
08:20 cult, who sought to find a new male host for their king.
08:23 Unfortunately for the family, by following the precise instructions of Joan, who was
08:27 now in charge of the cult after the death of their leader Ellen, the Grahams had actually
08:30 conjured Paimon to the living world, which enabled him to begin possessing the body of
08:34 Peter, just as he had done with Charlie.
08:36 After showing Steve her mother's body in the attic, and the sketchbook, the desperate
08:39 Annie started begging Steve to burn the book so that she could sacrifice herself to stop
08:43 the haunting.
08:44 But Steve, who assumed she had gone mad, begins accusing her of desecrating her mother's
08:48 grave.
08:49 This forces the desperate Annie to throw the book into the fireplace, but instead of setting
08:52 her alight, Steve burst into flames instead, prior to Annie being possessed, which of course
08:56 had all been part of Paimon's mischievous plan.
09:00 Peter then awakens to find his father's body, and is then chased by Annie into the
09:03 attic, which is decorated with cult imagery.
09:05 In the ancient texts, Paimon is also explained as being able to fly, and we see Annie levitating
09:10 as a result of this, before beheading herself with piano wire as naked coven members looked
09:14 on.
09:15 This was of course an offering to the king, along with the heads of Charlie and Ellen,
09:18 which were necessary before Paimon could successfully inhabit his male human host.
09:23 Terrified by the sight of what he'd just witnessed, Peter jumped out of the window
09:26 in an attempt to get away from it all, but as he lay on the ground, a light which is
09:29 seen throughout the film, symbolizing Paimon's presence, enters his body.
09:33 Peter then follows Annie's levitating corpse into Charlie's treehouse, where Charlie's
09:37 crowned, decapitated head rests on top of a mannequin, similar to the doll she had made
09:41 while she had been possessed by Paimon.
09:43 The coven members, and the headless corpses of Ellen and Annie then bow towards Peter,
09:47 as Joan swore an oath to Peter as Paimon, stating that he'd been liberated from Charlie,
09:51 his female host, and was now free to rule over them.
09:54 This was such an unsettling ending, reminiscent of the intimate, quiet birth of Jesus Christ
09:58 in the manger with a few witnesses.
10:00 But instead, here we have a joyless, horrific, pivotal event which marked the beginning of
10:04 the end for humanity in biblical proportions.
10:07 All of the religious iconography is also inverted, with Paimon seen displaying Christ's hand
10:12 gesture in the opposite direction.
10:13 The contrast between the uplifting trumpet music and the soft-spoken Joan telling Peter
10:17 not to be afraid as if something wonderful had happened, to the horrific sight of the
10:21 decapitated heads, creates a jarring experience that lingers on after the film is finished.
10:26 The performances by the entire cast were phenomenal, from Gabriel Byrne's calm and subtle portrayal
10:30 of a man trying to hold his family together, Milly Shapiro's fantastic idiosyncrasies,
10:35 to Alex Wolff's outstanding performance of an adolescent dealing with guilt.
10:39 Ann Dowd also skillfully balances on a fine line between a character that provides Annie
10:43 with much needed comfort, to one that skillfully manipulates her.
10:47 This of course leads us onto Tony Collette, who was a tool to force in this film, which
10:50 feels like a companion piece to a seminal work in the sixth sense.
10:54 The range of emotions the woman is forced to endure is incredible, from the brief glimpses
10:58 of happiness, moments of shock, despair to horror, and she skillfully navigates through
11:02 all of these without it feeling like it's over the top.
11:05 The emotional and psychological complexity of her character is fully explored and made
11:09 to bear, and it's her performance that truly carries the weight of the film.
11:12 Though as mentioned earlier, everything about this movie, from the supporting cast, the
11:16 script, cinematography, soundtrack, pace and direction, all came together beautifully that
11:21 you could scarcely believe that this was Ari Aster's directorial debut.
11:42 Well that's all for today folks.
11:43 Thanks to all of you guys who requested we take a look at Hereditary.
11:47 Don't forget to hit subscribe and click the notification icon to stay up to date on all
11:50 my content, and if there's anything else you'd like to request, please don't hesitate to
11:54 ask.
11:55 As always, it's been a pleasure.
11:56 Nihat here with Film Comics Explained, thanks for stopping by.
12:00 - Thank you.
12:25 - Thank you.
12:51 - Thank you.
12:56 (chimes)
12:58 [BLANK_AUDIO]