Hereditary

Hereditary (2018) is a successful horror film -- the picture establishes an unpleasant atmosphere and, then, exploits audience fear by having its principal characters act irrationally to put themselves in positions of maximum peril.  In Hereditary, there is an attic swarming with flies, a lightless enclosed space in which a rotting, headless body is stored.  Of course, the characters spend substantial amounts of time in the attic -- when something is scary downstairs, which is much of the time, where do they flee? To the attic, of course.  Ordinarily, this doesn't make much sense and has to be accepted, tongue-in-cheek as it were, as a horror film convention.  (For instance, in Jon Kraszinski's A Quiet Place, the characters are always going off alone to throw himself in harm's way -- none of this makes any narrative sense, particularly since Kraszinski's monster movie, posits the hero as a caring, effective, and fearless father.  But, if this is the case, why does he blithely put his children in peril time and time again?)  Hereditary's innovation is to make the convention of characters deliberately, if inadvisably, going into dark and scary coverts intentional -- ultimately, the people in Hereditary want to be dismembered or horribly mutilated:  they seek refuge in places that maximally are awful because it is their intention to self-harm.  This makes Hereditary's images of suffering more unpleasant because the people are inflecting pain on themselves -- this is their fate as members of a coven of devil-worshiping witches.  Although Hereditary is not too sophisticated -- it lacks any sort of wit, eschews any self-mockery, and is grimly, if efficiently, nasty -- it is still fairly intelligent as a horror film: it's more similar to stylish and fairly literate pictures like Rosemary's Baby (Polanski 1968) and Val Lewton's The Seventh Victim (1943), movies that posit groups of devil worshipers passing for normal folks in milieu that are recognizably ordinary. 

Everything tilts toward the radically abnormal in Hereditary:  spectral voices summon devil-worshiping supplicants from school cafeterias and playgrounds.  The house of horrors at the film's center has an interior that is completely, and theatrically, unrelated to its outside.  The house's exterior is a typical McMansion, all gables and big windows set in a gorgeous forest beneath equally gorgeous mountains.  The inside of the house is like one of Edward Kienholz' more hideous environments:  it's all narrow corridors with ancient tightly shut doors, dark rooms with fireplaces guttering with sensitive flame, dismal, cell-like enclosures that all lightless -- in the attic, where the demons congregate, we actually see that the ceiling has been ripped open allowing jagged shards of light to penetrate the darkness.  This is surreally opposed to the way the house looks on the outside.  And, in fact, one motif in the film is that there are spaces within spaces, just as family histories contain horrors concealed within other horrors.  The mother in the super-dysfunctional family living in the house-of-horrors is like a figure in a Tarkovsky film -- she makes little models of the house and stashes miniature figures, including demons, inside the tiny rooms that she builds.  (She also can levitate like people in Tarkovsky's movies.)  The concept is that there are secrets within secrets, although all will be revealed in the film's final grandiose sequence.  This ending is the most exotic and spectacular aspect of the film -- after all the dimly lit Gran Guignol self-immolations and -beheadings at the movies frenzied climax, the picture ends with the coven of devil worshipers paying tribute to the chief demon, one of the Eight Lords of Hell, named "Paynim".  Ominous music is central to horror films -- generally, a horror movies is simply risible without the spooky musical cues.  Here, Paynim's followers gather in a sort of "treehouse of terror" -- I hope the reference to The Simpson's famous Halloween shows is intentional.  On the soundtrack, we hear arpeggios that are clearly derived from the monumental music at the outset of Wagner's Rheingold -- this is the surging, churning "Rhine motif", complete with booming bass and endlessly sustained bass note (Wagner's famous E-flat note from which the whole world is fashioned).  In the "treehouse of terror", Lord Paynim is crowned while supplicant devil worshipers kneel in obeisance, several of them, in a wonderfully disturbing tableaux, decomposing and headless bodies.  The head of one of the carcasses has been mounted in a wooden idol to which the corpses are bowing.  It's a completely psychotic and spectacular sequence, roaring with Wagnerian bombast, the music rising to a barbaric crescendo before the closing credits, weirdly enough Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now."  The best horror film's are often ultimately silly and inconsequential -- despite the rave reviews, I don't think Hereditary is one of the greatest of such films, although it aspires to greatness in its otherworldly and barbarous last five minutes.  And, therefore, if you can tolerate pictures of this sort, worth seeing.