Friends come and go, but family is forever. However, it’s hard to say in today’s world how comforting that statement still is. The idea of a traditional family is one practiced less and less as the years march along, with the idea of what a ‘good’ family, let alone a functioning one, should look like.
Nevertheless, it’s practically etched into human nature to crave that sort of familial bond, even to the point of putting our lives on the line to maintain it. Your friends, the ones you pick, often feels like a more seamless relationship. Your family, the ones you don’t pick, usually come with more baggage than we’d care to admit. Still, they’re family, and that means they always want what’s best for you, right?
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Hereditary Shows Family as Scary, Unmovable Baggage
A24
For filmmaker Ari Aster, family is a lot of things. For starters, it’s something that follows you, no matter how hard you may try to leave it in the past. His debut feature Hereditary intensely highlighted this notion of family as baggage. The story circles around Annie, a mother of two and a woman who just recently lost her own mother, Ellen, at the beginning of the film.
We’re later given exposition revealing a long line of loss in her family, like a conveyor belt of traumatic experiences which are horrifying enough on their own but truly disturbing when considered as a whole. Even as her mother persisted to be close with her remaining relatives, Annie resisted, feeling (and later knowing) that the future her mother had intended for the family was left up for debate.
Always Good Intentioned?
The next thing that family means to Ari Aster? Control. Again, Hereditary revolves around a family unable to escape the control of their matriarch, even after death. Members of her ‘church’ attend her funeral en masse, much to the amazement of her actual biological family, who hadn’t met nearly any of them. Many of these guests keep an eye on Charlie, the youngest daughter until her untimely death, after which their attention is reverted to the eldest son Peter. It’s almost as if the family member is watching them through the eyes of others.
After her mother’s funeral, we see Annie discover a letter from the deceased, reading that the rewards of every trauma thus faced in her life would soon be revealed as a blessing. It’s a morbid sentiment that Ellen left behind, only really sealing the deal on the overall view of this grandma among the rest of the family. Even from beyond the grave, family still finds a way to control you.
Writing on the Wall, in an Inescapable Room
A third thing which family signifies for Aster is manipulation. The whole deal with Ellen’s cult is that in order to fully summon Paimon, the king of Hell that they worship, they need a healthy male host. Queue a father and son, both with vicious death stories and a concerned mother who wants to keep her son apart from the woman that married and raised such ill-fated men.
Ellen’s friend, Joan, even confronts Annie (ignorant of their previous relationship) at grief counseling and proceeds to invite her back to her home and reveal her gift of being able to communicate with the dead. A sure dying wish of Ellen, this then spirals the rest of the film into Annie’s delusions (or lack thereof) that proceed to tear the family apart. Ellen’s posthumous wish of having a male host for her deity is finally granted, in part due to the manipulative nature of Ellen’s relationship to her male heirs.
Hereditary and the Scary, Hidden Fears of Family
So there you have it, family according to Ari Aster. Manipulative, controlling baggage that often fails to share a mutual best interest in the ways we may think. Issues that, while usually tough to chew on, become tenderized under the guise of psychological and paranormal horror. In an interview with Mubi, Aster explained the importance of his filial themes as a foundation for the horror:
You can even see inklings of this notion in the way the film is shot as well. Slow pans, dragging shots, and a restrained lack of cheap horror jump cuts all helps seep that sense of uneasiness into the minds of the viewer as an almost ingrained anxiety throughout runtime. The walls seem to close in on you with every left turn.
It’s very telling that a genre of such intensity as horror highlights the ideas that it does. Hereditary effectively put Aster on the map, with an immediate green-light on his sophomore film Midsommar and an anticipated new feature slated for next year. While the likes of The Shining and Rosemary’s Baby take claim as the quintessential “familial house of horrors,” there’s still a lot of ground to cover with subject matter so complex. Love it or hate it, family is there for you, even if it’s under the spell of the eighth king of hell.
