History Film / Hereditary

* RoomFullOfCrazy: [[spoiler:When Annie goes to confront Joan, her once-neat and homely apartment is shown to be a mess, with the central living space completely taken over by an altar featuring Charlie's handmade figurines and a photo of Peter.]]
** Also, the [[spoiler:cultists turn the treehouse into this in the ending, in preparation for Paimon's return.]]

* NoPeripheralVision:
** Annie apparently doesn’t notice the mysterious figure in the distance surrounded by fire when Charlie wanders off into the forest, despite it being almost directly in front of Charlie.
** If Peter had turned his head slightly when smoking outside his window, he might’ve noticed the figure standing slightly offscreen, breathing heavily.

* ArmorPiercingQuestion: Peter softly asks Annie one, after she blows up at him.

** First and foremost, the trailer makes the film seem like a generic, uninteresting, low-grade, Hollywood schlock horror film full of cheap scares by featuring the exact same tired, recycled editing style that trailers for all those kinds of films tend to get. The film itself is ''anything'' but generic, uninteresting, low-grade, Hollywood schlock full of cheap scares.
** The trailer gives the impression that Annie spends the film struggling with her grief over her mother's death, and Charlie is some kind of unstable CreepyChild responsible for everything that goes wrong in the movie. [[spoiler: Charlie dies in a horrible accident early in the film, and grief over ''her'' death is the one that the family spends so much of the film struggling with, rather than Ellen's]].

* ChekhovsGun: The telephone pole that leads to Charlie's demise, marked with the seal of the cult, is focused on when Peter drives out to the party.

* GutPunch: [[spoiler:Charlie's death by decapitation]] immediately sets the tone for the rest of film, obliterating all prospects of it being a standard family horror and unveiling the true darkness at its core. For some, the effect of this was amplified by the film's trailers strongly implying that [[spoiler:the movie would center around the family's grief towards Ellen's death, not Charlie's, and that Charlie would spend the film's runtime as a CreepyChild responsible for everything that goes wrong]].

* AMistakeIsBorn: Annie confesses to Peter that she never wanted to have him. She even tried to miscarry him in numerous ways but he prevailed. She adds that after he was born she was happy to have him. However, he reminds her that she still tried to kill him and his sister while {{sleepwalking}}.

--->'''Annie:''' [[spoiler:I never wanted to be your mother.]]

* BodyHorror:
** [[spoiler:Charlie being brutally decapitated during a freak accident, with her head later being shown rotting and covered in ants. Later, her decomposed head is part of a grotesque statue of Paimon.]]
** [[spoiler:Annie's mother's corpse in the attic of the family home, blackened, rotting, and distended]].
** [[spoiler:Annie]] using piano wire to [[spoiler:slowly and then quickly slice her own head off]].
*** And just before this, we hear pounding on the trapdoor to the attic. [[spoiler:Turns out that Annie is ''on the ceiling'', '''''rapidly slamming her head''''' into the door!]]

* DaylightHorror: Many of the film's most intense scenes take place when it's light outside. For instance, ''that'' classroom scene, Annie discovering [[spoiler: Charlie's]] body (albeit off-screen), [[spoiler: Charlie's head on the side of the road]], and [[spoiler: Steve burning alive]] all happen when the sun is still out.

When the Graham family's secretive grandmother and matriarch, Ellen Graham, passes away, the family -- miniaturist mother Annie (Collette), father Steve (Byrne), daughter Charlie (Shapiro), and son Peter (Wolff) -- begins to unravel cryptic and increasingly terrifying secrets about their ancestry. The more they discover, the more they find themselves trying to outrun the sinister fate they seem to have inherited.

* CainAndAbel: Charlie is suggested to have some animosity towards Peter [[spoiler:and possibly trying posthumously to kill him for accidentally causing her death. She ultimately possesses his body, and an incantation he hears earlier suggests his spirit has been forced out entirely in death. Subverted in that Charlie's spirit doesn't seem hostile to him in their previous encounter, and it turns out the threat to Peter is something else entirely]].
** Played with during the [[spoiler: séance to contact Charlie. It appears that the real Charlie makes contact through Annie's body. During this, she cries for Peter to help her and comfort her, showing the real Charlie loved her older brother. It's most likely Paimon who harbors animosity towards Peter, probably out of jealousy as he's been stuck in Charlie's female body and covets Peter's male body.]]

* TheBadGuyWins: [[spoiler:The cult successfully transfers Paimon into Peter's body]].

** When Charlie [[spoiler:is brutally decapitated during a freak accident, with her head later being shown rotting and covered in ants. Later, her decomposed head is part of a grotesque statue of Paimon.]]
** When Annie finds [[spoiler:her mother's corpse in the attic of the family home, blackened, rotting, and distended.]]
** [[spoiler:Annie]] using piano wire to slowly and then quickly slice [[spoiler:her own]] head off.
*** And just before this, we hear pounding on the trapdoor to the attic. [[spoiler:Turns out that Annie is ''on the ceiling'', '''''rapidly slamming her head''''' into the door]]!
* BodyMotifs: Weirdly enough, there's a lot of emphasis on [[OffWithHisHead decapitation]].

* HeroicSacrifice: [[spoiler:Attempted and subverted. Annie has resented her son for much of the movie (and to a degree, even before that due to her own mother pressuring her to have children she didn't want) and is so focused on contacting her dead daughter that she loses any regard for his mental state. Believing Charlie's sketchbook has been cursed and something horrible will happen to Peter unless she does something, Annie tries to destroy the sketchbook to save Peter, knowing it will burn her to death in the process. However, Steve burns instead and she becomes possessed, forced to assist in Peter's possession.]]

* InsistentTerminology: Meta, downplayed. Ari Aster has routinely summarized the film as "a family drama that curdles into a nightmare," rather than an outright horror film, seeing the drama and horror as two inseparable halves. He took great inspiration from domestic dramas while writing the film, pitched it as a family tragedy, and screened far more domestic dramas than horror films for his crew before production began. He has explained that he strove for the film's foundation to be its family dynamics, from which bleak, dark emotions arise that can be audience-alienating in a straightforward drama but audience-attracting when turned into horror set-pieces.

* GenderRestrictedAbility: [[spoiler:Only a male can successfully be a vessel for the demon king, Paimon. It appears that when he inhabits a female's body, that the female he's inhabiting deteriorates mentally and physically before going full blown demonic. In a "blink and you'll miss it" moment, Annie reads a passage from a book about Paimon that mentions he becomes "livid and vengeful" when offered a female host and mentions that the most successful incantations of Paimon have been with males. It's possible that the reason for the destruction wrought on the Graham family was due to Paimon's anger of being given Charlie as a host initially.]]

* ManOnFire: What happens to [[spoiler:Steve after Annie tosses Charlie's sketchbook into the fire]].

-->[[spoiler:"Now listen to me. Listen to me. Oh! You are the love of my life. I love you, Steve. I love you so, so much. Oh, God, I love you so much. And I love Peter so much."]]

* HeroicSacrifice: [[spoiler:Attempted and subverted. Annie has resented her son for much of the movie (and to a degree, even before that due to her own mother pressuring her to have children she didn't want) and is so focused on contacting her dead daughter that she loses any regard for his mental state. Believing Charlie's sketchbook has been cursed and something horrible will happen to Peter unless she does something, Annie tries to destroy the sketchbook to save Peter, knowing it will burn her to death in the process. However, her husband burns instead and she becomes possessed, forced to assist in Peter's possession.]]
* ICannotSelfTerminate: [[spoiler:Annie begs Steve to put Charlie's sketchbook into their fireplace because she wants to save Peter, but as she believes doing so will immolate her with it, she is too afraid to do it herself. When Steve refuses, Annie runs and throws it into the fireplace in a fit of desperation...only for Steve to burst into flames right in front of her instead.]]

* ManOnFire: What happens to [[spoiler:Steve after Annie tosses the sketchbook into the fire]].

* OutlivingOnesOffspring: Joan tells Annie that her 7-year-old grandchild died and caused her to seek out group therapy, [[spoiler:though later revelations about Joan imply that it's a lie to get Annie's sympathy. It's horribly used earlier when Charlie is beheaded in a freak accident.]]

** Also extending to the end credits, which follows the above sequence with the cheery music choice of [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8L1UngfqojI "Both Sides Now"]] by Judy Collins.

'''Annie Graham:''' Um, excuse me, you don't think I'm gonna take care of you?\\

* DepartmentOfRedundancyDepartment: [[spoiler:When Annie explodes at Peter at the dinner table, she voices her disdain for her hard work in looking after him being met with "that fucking ''face'' on your face". Given how flustered she is, the word repetition is {{justified|Trope}}, and it's been commonly praised as one of the most authentically-written lines in the film.]]
* DestinationDefenestration: [[spoiler:Peter's last act, following his witnessing both Annie sawing her own head off and several naked cultists in the dark, is to throw himself out of the nearest window. [[AmbiguousSituation It's unclear]] if he (as himself) survives the incident.]]

** Partially, dramatic irony is employed through the characters refusing to communicate with each other on almost anything, leaving the audience with a bigger picture than certain characters have to create a foul mood of emotional stagnation and tension. The most prominent case is a short-lived one--[[spoiler: the agonizing moment of the film where the audience waits with a horrified Peter for the rest of his family to discover Charlie's traumatic abrupt death.]]
** Dramatic irony pays off to splinter the characters mentally. For example, Annie and Steve never communicate about things the audience is privy to (like [[spoiler:the grave desecration or Annie's support group and friendship with Joan]]), and this causes things to build to a fracture point as Annie appears to go insane and Steve learns suspicious things about her activities. The most impactful payoff is with [[spoiler:Peter being broken down for Paimon's possession at the end of the film. After waking, Peter has every reason to believe Annie snapped and burned Steve alive with paint thinner and that she is attacking him now, since he doesn't know like the audience does that Paimon burned Steve and possessed Annie. Learning that Annie is possessed ''while'' she's killing herself adds new traumas on top of the ones Peter ''thought'' he was witnessing and breaks him open completely.]]

** Annie's brother Charles as a teenager, which she believes was due to mental illness.

** [[spoiler:Peter ultimately jumps out a window in terror to escape the sight of his mother sawing her own head off and the menacing strangers appearing in his house]].

** In another scene, Charlie is led into the forest by a strange light and sees a mysterious figure in the distance surrounded by fire. Annie stops her before she gets any closer and we never find out who that mysterious person is.

** [[spoiler:Twice Peter wakes up to seeing Charlie's ghost in his room, which turn out to be figments of his imagination.]]