Nightmare Fuel / Hereditary

There are very good reasons Hereditary has been called not only "one of the best horror films of 2018", but one of the scariest films the genre has ever produced.

Be wary: per wiki policy, spoilers are off on Nightmare Fuel pages!

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Trailers

• The first trailer alone is goddamn terrifying.
  • It opens with a Wes Anderson-esque dollhouse/cutaway home, a cutesy gag that only further emphasizes the horror coming.
  • The sound design and music are enough to set you on edge.

Film

• The first remotely supernatural scene. Annie leaves her workshop, turns out the light...and sees her dead mother standing in the darkness. It happens with neither a Scare Chord nor dramatic camera zoom. Ellen is just...there, silent and unmoving, smiling at her daughter from the shadows. And when the lights are flipped on, she's simply gone again, like mistaking a coat rack for a person in the dark. Is this supernatural, or a by-product of Annie's mental health issues? The ambiguity alone is disturbing.
• What happens 30 minutes into the film has become such a phenomenon for being both wholly unpredictable and immensely shocking that a mere mention of the words "car scene" is enough to send a chill down the spines of many. Peter is speeding down the highway from the party he was told to take Charlie to; she ate nuts, she's having an allergic reaction, and he's high. She rolls down her window to get some air, and Peter ends up swerving to avoid a dead deer in the road. This swerve puts Charlie's head directly in the path of an oncoming pole, and...bang. In one instantaneous moment, audiences realized that they were not watching their standard horror movie, but something much, much darker.
  • Peter's reaction to this event (or lack thereof) does a lot to illustrate how horrific it is.
    • After the impact, the scene literally grinds to a halt as he slams the brakes, then sits in complete Stunned Silence as the camera holds on his face and he essentially shuts down, his face slowly becoming a mask of pain, only able to shed a single tear. He can only muster the wherewithal to drive home, park the car, and climb into bed fully clothed. Anyone with little brothers or sisters will probably feel either nauseated, tearfully understanding, or both by his reaction.
    • As much as some may fault Peter for leaving Charlie's body in the car, it's hard not to feel empathy for him and his terror. How would you react, or how should you react, as a teenager, having inadvertently killed your sister? Would you have this "Schrödinger's cat" argument with yourself — "if I don't look back at her, it's like she's not dead" (hinted at when we see a first-person shot of Peter trying to look at the rear-view mirror but averting his eyes at the last second, and later when he's in class and sees a vision of the same rear-view mirror for a second)? Even if you could get out of the car and collect your sister's decapitated smashed-in head, where would you take it? The hospital? The police? The funeral home? To your PARENTS? The only thing worse for Peter than admitting to himself that Charlie's dead is telling his parents — how the hell can he wake them up and tell them what happened? He's living in a nightmare with no way out or any good options, so he gets into bed and doesn't even sleep, hoping he'll wake up... and he never does, not even when he hears his mother's blood-curdling screams upon finding the headless body.
  • The horrific shot of Charlie's severed head lying on the side of the road, covered in ants, with Annie's agonized screaming in the background. It's both terrifying and heart-wrenching to listen to.
    • It tends to be common to drum up hype for a horror movie by saying people walked out. But in this movie's case? They were not kidding. It actually did happen to various audience members.
    • Worse? We listen on with the emotionally-numb Peter to Annie's reaction in real time. There's strong dread built up by hearing her cheerfully converse with Steve and walk to her car, making her inevitable discovery and her following screams of despair and grief all the more gut-wrenching.
• The dinner scene after Charlie's death. The tension between Annie, Steve, and Peter is already high considering the circumstances, but the sudden lash of anger from Annie when Peter swears at her is enough to give people a nasty scare.
  Annie: Don't you swear at me, you little shit! Don't you ever raise your voice at me! I am your mother! You understand? All I do is worry and slave and defend you, and I get back is that... fucking face on your face! So full of disdain and resentment and always so annoyed! Well, now your sister is dead! And I know you miss her...and I know it was an accident, and I know you're in pain, and I wish I could take that away for you. I wish I could shield you from the knowledge that you did what you did! But your sister is dead! She's gone forever! And what a waste...if it could've maybe brought us together, or something, if you could've just said "I'm sorry", or faced up to what happened. Maybe then we could do something with this. But you can't take responsibility for anything! So now, I can't accept. And I can't forgive. Because... because NOBODY ADMITS ANYTHING THEY'VE DONE!
  • The idea that a parent can't console or protect their own children from the fact that they were responsible for their own sibling's death is both horrifying and gut-wrenching.
  • And then there's Peter's retort at Annie regarding her own role in Charlie's death, at which Annie responds with a chilling, contemptuous glare.
    Peter: What about you, Mom? She didn't want to go to the party...so why was she there?
• Annie tearfully confessing to Joan that, during a sleepwalking episode, she once covered her children in lighter fluid and was preparing to set them on fire. She woke up at the striking of the match.
• Early on, we see a shot of Peter smoking from outside, with a second person's breath coming from offscreen.
• Annie's nightmare in Peter's bedroom. Although it's not revealed to be a nightmare at first, the scene has the fluidity and logic of one.
  • We first see her trying to brush away ants that have somehow landed in her bed, only to realize that there's a trail of them, and they're leading her to Peter's room. Once she enters, she sees Peter’s sleeping body completely covered in ants, including a close-up on him so detailed that you can see them bubbling out of his mouth. Unable to process what she's seeing, her face can only contort in terror◊ before Peter casually asks her what she's doing and says that she was sleepwalking again.
  • Especially eerie is how the building music completely stops when Peter first speaks, and how his subsequent conversation with Annie has zero room tone, creating an effect that Ari Aster describes in the script as a "dreamy vacuum". It's not just quiet; it's too quiet.
  • Annie’s heartbreaking reveal that she tried to abort Peter multiple times before he was born, by "[doing] everything they told me not to."
  • After this reveal, Peter breaks down and keeps sobbing "You tried to kill me!", before we see him suddenly dripping with paint thinner. Cut back to Annie, who's inexplicably covered with it as well, as a match is lit off-screen and ignites the frame, finally startling Annie awake.
• The several unexplained visions Peter has of Charlie at night.
  • In one scene, he wakes up in the middle of the night after hearing Charlie’s tongue click and sees what appears to be Charlie sitting in the corner facing away from him, but is really just a jacket hanging over a chair.
  • Another evening, he hallucinates his sister standing in the darkness and her head falling off, which is really just a ball. Suddenly, two hands come through his bed frame and try to rip his head off.
• The seance. Charlie seemingly possesses Annie, repeatedly exclaiming how terrified and confused she is. Peter cries and screams for his mother to stop. She regains her senses after Steve douses her with water. The ambiguity of this scene enhances the terror, especially when considering that dissociative identity disorder runs in Annie's family. Is she actually possessed? Is she having an episode? Both? A great deal of the terror comes from not just watching the actual event, but trying to figure out just what in the world is happening to these people.
• Annie stumbling upon the bloated, headless corpse of her mother in her attic.
• Peter's possession at school is way more disturbing than the trailer made it look. His body and face look twisted before he starts smashing his head against his desk.
• Damn near everything about the last 20 minutes or so. From Steve catching fire, to Annie being possessed and crawling over the walls, and her actually decapitating herself with a wire. THEN after Peter is possessed by Paimon, he goes to the treehouse to find the cult, where they mounted Charlie's heavily decomposed head onto a statue.
  • Throughout the film, the passage of time is shown with a shot of the exterior of the house hard-cutting from day to night. In the last of these cuts there are suddenly dozens of naked people standing around the house.
  • Before the possessed Annie chases Peter through the house, the latter turns around and sees a naked cult member standing in a dark closet, silently staring at him with a bone-chilling smile. Remember him? He's the same man that smiled at Charlie during the opening funeral scene.
• Towards the end of the movie, after Steve is dead and Annie has been possessed, a nightmare wakes Peter up. As he slowly rises, the camera holds on him for a while, which gives the audience plenty of time to realize Annie is crouched in the corner of his bedroom ceiling holding completely still. The anticipation builds for Annie to simply attack, but she instead waits at the perfect opportunity, making the scene all the more frightening. When Peter starts to turn towards where we know she is, we instead see her scuttle away behind him in mid-air, completely silently.
• After Annie rushes at Peter, he bolts into the attic, pulling the ladder behind him and, utterly confused, he starts sobbing and begging "Mommy" for forgiveness as she pounds rapidly on the door. It becomes far worse when we see just how the possessed Annie is managing to do this — she's kneeling on the underside of the door, and she's not banging on the door with her fists — she's rapidly bashing her head into it.
• Peter sees the candles outlining where Ellen's body was, and a photo of himself with eyes cut out of it. He starts trying to slap himself awake, hoping he's dreaming, before he's denied that hypothesis by a squelching sound. He looks up in horror and the audience sees Annie, stiffly levitating in the attic rafters, jerkily moving her back and forth. She does it a few more times as blood starts spurting out of her neck, and she stares down at Peter with a hauntingly unclear gaze before her body is puppeted to move much faster until her hands are a blur. The dark lighting and the nature of the action make it pretty hard to discern what's happening, so the audience is placed in the same confused trying-to-process-the-visual headspace as Peter...but it becomes clear after a few seconds that Paimon is forcing Annie to slice her own head off from behind using a wire. It's the most horrible thing Peter could be seeing at the moment—confirmation that his mother is possessed (he didn't know until this point) and watching her killing herself gruesomely in an inhuman way while her face stares him down. Peter jumps out the window after seeing more cultists and the camera follows him out of the attic, but we continue to hear the incredibly rapid sawing until the noise stops and we hear a heavy mass thud and roll onto the attic floor.
• Upon re-watch, the clues as to the ultimate reasons behind the terrible events happening to the Grahams are even more starkly apparent. It's entirely possible and very likely that Annie's family was truly mentally ill. Combine that with the machinations of the cult, and they truly had no chance. It's hard enough raising a family and going about your life while dealing with all that illness and trauma, then imagine if a truly evil group of people systematically engineered you and your family's demise for worldly riches and the favor of an Eldritch Abomination. A truly nightmarish scenario.
• The entirety of the final scene: the cult succeeds in their plan by using a captive Peter, the only member of the Grahams that they haven't killed (although it's left ambiguous if Peter survived his fall, or if he did, how much of him is even left), as a male host for Paimon. In a wider sense, this means that everything the Grahams tried to do to prevent this outcome was for nothing.
  • "Reborn", the most well-known and arguably most horrifying song in the film's score by experimental saxophonist Colin Stetson, is used for this finale. Though the song starts off with somewhat simple and even whimsical woodwinds, the song IMMEDIATELY takes a left turn into horrifying when a very low and bassy moan cuts through, and as the woodwind escalate and increase in volume over the drone, very loud and sharp trumpets/saxophones starting blasting over the whole song. The song has been aptly described by people in one of two ways: the victory of someone or something that shouldn't have won, or a victory that was ABSOLUTELY not worth the losses.
  • There's a very easy-to-miss detail in the scene: when the camera slowly pans over the headless corpses of Ellen and Annie after Peter is crowned, the middle finger of Annie's right hand twitches minutely.
  • Even more disturbing - when Peter first climbs into the attic, the corpses are "bowing" to the mannequin with Charlie's head on it. But after he's crowned, they're bowing towards him, with no indication that the cult members moved them, as if even lacking a motherfucking head isn't enough to free them from Paimon's spell.
    Joan: Oh, hey, hey, hey. It's alright. Charlie, you're alright, now. You... are Paimon. One of the eight kings of Hell. We have looked to the northwest and called you in. We've corrected your first female body and give you now this healthy male host. We reject the trinity and pray devoutly to you, Great Paimon. Give us your knowledge of all secret things, bring us honor, wealth, and good familiars. Bind all men to our will as we have bound ourselves for now and ever to yours. Hail, Paimon! HAIL, PAIMON! HAIL, PAIMON! HAIL!
• It's been stated that there existed a 3-hour cut of this film with an alternate ending that was deemed too much for audiences. Considering the already disturbing scenes that are still present in the film, the question of what this cut could have that's even more horrifying is a sobering one. Purportedly, this cut had Peter gouging his own eyes out, completing the Oedipus Rex parallel hinted at by the photo of Peter found in the attic with his eyes scratched out. This proved too much for test audiences, though.
• Special mention should go to the film's score by Colin Stetson. A lot of the songs throughout the film have a subtle, continuously thumping drone throughout a lot of the intense scenes in the film, further intensifying the anxiety of the scenes, with arguably the most memorable example being the aforementioned "Reborn".

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