Rated R

Spoilers about the film Hereditary

October has arrived, and everyone knows what that means! It’s the spooky season! And in celebration of the spookiest month of the year, I wanted to review the best horror film I’ve seen made in the past decade, Hereditary. The film came out last summer, and I finally gathered the courage to watch it (with my mom) after hearing about how bone-chilling it was.

Now, I am in no way the biggest horror movie fiend; I just recently started getting into this genre because I was always too scared to sit through any horror film rated R. But I have seen my fair share this year, and Hereditary is without a doubt a work of art … just a very, very terrifying one.

Hereditary focuses on a family of four after the passing of their grandmother. Because there are only so many characters, viewers intimately get to know each member of the family, from the parents Steve and Annie to the teenage siblings Peter and Charlie, and see how they react to losing this family member that none of them knew all too well. The secretive past of the grandmother sets up a ticking time bomb that I knew would have to be revealed by the end of the movie.

Something you’ll notice from the beginning is that the movie is not your average scary movie full of jump scares and gimmicks. It’s very cinematic in the way it’s shot, the color schemes that were used, and in its rustic setting, which is gorgeous and probably the least scary thing about the movie.

The true horror starts after Peter and Charlie head to a party where Charlie, who’s allergic to nuts, accidentally eats a piece of cake containing some. She has a severe allergic reaction, and Peter obviously tries to rush her to the hospital.

On the way there, however, things go awfully wrong, and Charlie is killed in an appalling way that I won’t spoil but has nothing to do with her nut allergy. Peter, in shock, drives home with his sister’s body in the backseat and immediately goes to bed, leaving his mother to find her in the morning. Here is where tensions escalate the most, and we see the family in unbelievable grief, creating these internal conflicts between the characters that make the film seem so real and raw.

The external conflict of the film is much more complex. Annie meets a woman named Joan at a support group, and Joan eventually convinces Annie to perform a seance to conjure Charlie’s spirit after her death. Annie uses Charlie’s token sketchbook as a tool to summon her. During the seance, Charlie somehow possesses Annie’s body, and her spirit is completely evil. Luckily, Steve dumps water on Annie to get her out of it, and Annie tries to burn the sketchbook to get rid of the evil spirit. But she finds she’s connected to the sketchbook when she tries to burn it and almost burns herself in the process.

After the seance, Annie tries to reconnect with Joan, but Joan is nowhere to be found. Annie ends up searching through her mother’s things and realizes that her mother was a part of a cult … along with the mysteriously missing woman Joan.

Meanwhile, Peter gets possessed while he’s at school, in a very unsettling scene that is a commendable display of acting on Alex Wolff’s part. He breaks his nose and has to get picked up by his father. While Peter’s resting at home, Annie tries to burn the sketchbook once again to stop the possessions, but instead of her going up in flames, Steve does, and Annie gets possessed by the spirit once again.

Suddenly, we’re back to Peter. He wakes up, and perhaps the most creepy sequence of scenes commences: We see Annie hanging in the upper corners of his bedroom, eventually crawling on the ceiling to follow him as he finds his father’s burnt body. This scene is definitely the most talked about of the movie.

Peter finally sees his mother, and a chase ensues that leads to Annie getting killed and Peter jumping out of the window. The spirit now enters the only person still alive – Peter – and leads him to the treehouse in the backyard. Inside the treehouse, Joan is there along with all of the other cult members. Annie and Charlie’s bodies are there as well as the grandmother’s, and Joan tells us that the mission of the cult was to get a male host for the evil spirit that now resides in Peter’s body and that the mission is now complete.

Ha, didn’t that take an unexpected little turn? If you can muster the courage to sit through Hereditary, it is currently available to stream on Amazon Prime! I highly recommend watching it, even if you aren’t a fan of scary movies. It has some unforgettable moments that will go down in cinematic history, and it’s a horror film you can appreciate for its story and extended metaphors about trauma, family dynamics, and grief.