2018 honestly feels like a whole lifetime ago. The world was certainly in a much different place. Horror fans were eager to witness the next chapter in the beloved Halloween saga, spearheaded by the Pineapple Express folks. We’d finally gotten a sequel to The Strangers, though horror had been cycling through its latest in a seemingly long series of those Insidious flicks. Films like Mandy and Luca Guadagino’s Suspiria were on the horizon.
Now, just as we’re barely halfway through 2023, horror fans are eager to witness the next chapter in The Exorcist franchise, spearheaded by the Pineapple Express folks. There’s a new addition to the Insidious franchise out now, and. Uhm. Well – time is certainly a flat circle.
Nevertheless, looking back now – it feels as though horror was at the precipice of a massive shift. It geared toward a new direction in storytelling and filmmaking that set the tone for what was ahead. I can’t help but feel like the shift has something to do with a film that came out five Junes ago.
On June 8th, 2018, Ari Aster’s debut feature film, Hereditary hit theaters and, much like the head of a young girl in anaphylactic shock to a telephone pole, made a massive impact (sorry) with audiences and fans of the genre. It felt like a much-needed breath of fresh air for horror, as it seemed to reignite something. Fans appreciated the film’s commitment to subverting tired tropes of horror and its ability to instill genuine terror that wasn’t the result of a trite series of ineffective jump scares or unappealing CG creatures/demons/etc.
Hereditary felt like a defining statement on where horror had been leading up to, with the previous films of the 2010s and their grief-based indie horror (a movement I’ve written about before). And in the time since its release, there’ve been more films that echo the sentiments Aster had implemented in this film. Even as recently as last year, a moderately budgeted wide studio horror release, Smile, tried to get in on the fun, with its tone and stylistic choices seemingly borrowing from what is slowly becoming the norm.
The extent of the success and lasting importance of Aster’s film – even a mere five years later, doesn’t lie solely in the hands of the impact on the genre as a whole. Instead, I’d like to think that Hereditary’s continued success and reverence are related to how much the film resonated and connected on a deeper, unconscious level.
And that level has something to do with the uncanny.
First, what exactly is The Uncanny?
The Uncanny is a concept introduced by German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch– though it most notably would become popularized and further elaborated upon by the world-renowned psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud in an essay of his titled Das Unheimliche.
What Freud discusses in his work can (sort of) explain our attraction to certain aspects of horror media and why we return so often or feel a connection to things that terrify us. As Freud hypothesizes, these images are connected to repressed feelings buried within our subconscious and rise to the surface only when the horrors on-screen manifest themselves into recognizable images that are palatable to our conscious mind– triggering something in our unconscious. Thus, provoking some cathartic understanding.
He categorizes the images into two distinct fields: Heimlich and Unheimlich. Those within the Heimlich– or “home-like” as a crass translation — are images or ideas that can often be associated/paired with things we register as familiar and personal. They aren’t alien to our realm of consciousness. Conversely, images that we can consider to be unheimlich- are those that are unfamiliar, uncomfortable, or unconcealed and reveal what was previously unnoticed.
To further illustrate this idea, Freud discusses the likeness of children and the relationship that has with the uncanny. As it’s explained, children are often the representation of pure innocence. This notion often creates difficulty for us to associate or pair the image of children with feelings of malice or terror. The uncanny revelation is most apparent when filmmakers attach the horror behind the likeness of kids, which — indirectly, will bring forth hidden fears and force the viewer to confront themselves with these emotions and process something they might not have even been aware of, to begin with.
As an example, let’s consider Rosemary’s Baby. The film uses the idea of pregnancy as one of its genesis of horror. Throughout the film, our association of harm comes from the people around the titular Rosemary (Mia Farrow)- we never consider that the horror — the true horror — is INSIDE of her all along: The son of The Devil. The Heimlich images, in this instance, would be motherhood and pregnancy. To think that something so pure as the creation of life or a child could, in the slightest, become associated with the second coming of Lucifer himself would be unseemly. Now, it’s not to say that this particular example is simply a part of the Uncanny because it deals with pregnancy or children, for that matter.
The Uncanny, by definition, revolves around recognizing something on such a personal level that there is an understandable sense of unease when coming in contact with it. People who often feel weary with the idea of motherhood and pregnancy are already dealing with fear on some deeper level. Thus, when someone who struggles with this issue watches this film and bears witness to a woman who has involuntarily given birth to the anti-christ — those fears intensify tenfold. However, what remains helpful and relieving to this dread that comes with confronting an uncanny horror is that — movies can end. And, in that ending, often lies release.
On that same notion of familiarity, as touched upon in Rosemary’s, the idea that the source of evil can come from those around us and whom we trust personally, like family, becomes another inherent Heimlich terror that Freud could be hinting at, in regards to The Uncanny. I mean– how much more familiar can you get than your family?
Our family represents an extension of ourselves. Who we are and where we come from are parts of our identity we can never truly escape. So, masking the invasion of horror behind this idea makes it easier for true terror to seep in and cause us to squirm in discomfort as we come face-to-face with a conflux of thoughts and emotions we deemed best kept hidden.
Something like this is what a filmmaker exploring themes in the horror genre should strive to achieve, or at least consider when crafting a story that seeks to terrify and keep us on edge. Of course, there are great horror films out there that can scare the audience without all these complex ideas embedded into the story. However, the ones that usually stick with us, for better or worse, strike at something inside us.
So, why is this important?
It’s pertinent to understand that often, what makes a film terrifying isn’t the surface-level horror we take at face value. It’s all the deep-rooted subtext that we, coincidentally enough, would prefer to avoid talking about. Somehow it’s both astonishing and unsettling to see films portray aspects of our personal experiences to such a realistic degree. The contempt shared between a mother and her son with the weight of grief drowning them or the unspoken glares of pent-up emotions. All of these things that Aster pulls off in the film give it this necessary sense of realism that subjects us to these emotions tethered to the Uncanny.
The Uncanny, though being theoretical for the most part — which is sure to annoy many who don’t subscribe to these ideas — nevertheless still gives us a chance at understanding why certain things in horror work the way they do. More importantly, it becomes the bedrock of why I believe Ari Aster’s debut feature is as gripping as it is.
Every family tree hides a secret. Evil runs in the family.
Hereditary follows Annie, played by Toni Collette, in an Academy Award-worthy performance as she struggles to deal with the traumatic events befalling her family. In the film, death and grief seem to be around the corner — further testing the wits of her sanity.
It’s apparent throughout the film that Annie, like any mother, truly wants what’s best for her family — more specifically — her children, Charlie (Milly Shapiro) and Peter (Alex Wolfe) — while also dealing with the emotional turmoil that seems to linger (often literally) in the shadows.
So much of the horror in Hereditary lies firmly in this idea of The Uncanny. The traumatizing events these characters face — at least those relative to an Uncanny experience — leave them broken and fundamentally changed. On top of the many real-world fears that Annie grapples with, it’s apparent she’s terrified at the thought of figuratively (or, as she thinks, literally) becoming her mother. We’re privy to the notion that Annie’s upbringing was a series of traumatic experiences and disheartening relationships. The disconnect and contempt she feels for her mother and the thought of inevitably becoming her — hinting at the multi-faceted meaning of the title itself — becomes one of her driving forces. However, as she fails to cope with her daughter’s death, she inadvertently causes Peter to form the same loathing — forcing her to fall in line with her fears. This primal, grounded fear of the inevitable and becoming the other is deeply rooted in psychoanalysis and horror. As she experiences the supernatural presence tormenting her family, Annie comes vis-a-vis the emotions she’d so professedly hidden.
Annie’s woes of becoming another patriarchal figure of odium for her children and her control over the matter is one of the film’s many depressing factors. Her struggle for agency manifests itself on-screen with what she does whenever there aren’t nude cultists around or deadly ghost moms hiding in corners. She spends most of her time crafting miniature set-pieces, almost as if to gain a better perspective on certain moments or events in her life. Her sculpting lends itself as a morbidly ironic sense of mirroring, becoming one of many instances where this idea — or the Freudian “double” if you want to take it a step further– presents itself throughout the film. Annie’s craftwork ultimately reflects how the cult of Paimon has been meticulously planning every single thing that happens. Eventually, their desired goal of obtaining Peter’s body in hopes of it being a host for their king of Hell proves successful as headless bodies and devotees hail around a possessed Peter.
The struggle for agency and the thematic sense of inescapable fears and horrors is foreshadowed in an earlier moment in the film, as Peter’s crush reveals, “It’s all just inevitable, that means the characters have no hope and that they never had hope, because they’re just like pawns in this horrible, hopeless machine.” We find that the Graham family never stood a chance — doomed from the beginning; the cult of Paimon’s signature on the fateful pole that beheads dearest Charlie makes this evident.
Backtracking to Uncanny again, one of its most recognizable features in the film is the resident “creepy child,” Charlie. Much like Damien from The Omen, the baby spawn of Satan in Rosemary’s, or the vomit-spewing Regan– Charlie is our manifestation of evil here. While the film later reveals that she had been inhabited by Paimon all along– dead or alive, she seemed to have been a hot spot for eeriness. Keeping that in mind, it feels oddly more terrifying to see just how malicious the idea of evil is in the film. Like the other children in those movies, it isn’t Charlie’s fault that she is Paimon, nor does she have any control over the matter. She just is, unfortunately. Her being an intense presence of evil is an attack on the child and an attack on innocence. In other words, this is an attack on the family and the home– the Heimlich, if you will. Understanding this idea becomes incumbent on understanding the film’s central theme and what’s so unsettling about it. First and foremost, it’s about a family’s struggle with grief and of the home – which happens to be where the horror is rooted in. Using Charlie as a vessel for all the unfortunate things that transpire summons our sympathy and forces us to process alongside the rest of the family through this modern-day Greek tragedy.
Now, what creates the film’s Uncanny experience for us, the audience, is how intrinsically grounded the emotions of each character feel upon reflection. Freud makes it paramount to understand that we can only receive the gratification of an uncanny experience when the medium in question allows its story to partake in the real world, with real people, real situations, and so on. This point, more than anything, I think, is why Hereditary resonated so much with audiences. Sure, the film is terrifying; the shots are mesmerizing, and Colin Stetson’s score is remarkable. However, the emotional burden that these characters struggle with feels palpable through every performance in the film– which propels our ability to have an Uncanny experience, eventually causing us to undergo an unsettling realization. It can (and should) be considered almost universal for people to experience a sense of disconnection from their parents — which this film plays to a T. Whether it is explicit in an explosive dinner scene or what is left unsaid amongst unsettling glares and looks. Moments like these help transcend the film and ultimately permit those unconscious fears to come about– allowing all that was once hidden and concealed to confront us, leaving us as horrified as a mother facing her mortality in the death of her mother and daughter.
A lasting impression.
Alright. So, you could be sitting here, thinking that five years might be too soon to discuss whether Hereditary has truly made a lasting impression on the genre on a larger scale. However, I argue that, if anything, the answer to this lies in horror’s past.
One of the many annoying taglines you’ll read for any modern horror picture is the futile moniker of being the “scariest film since The Exorcist!”
This needlessly provoking sentiment was one of many selling points for the film around the time of its release – and, I’m not about to sit here and argue whether Hereditary is scarier than The Exorcist or if its the best horror film since and so on because truthfully – it’s not the point.
What’s “scary” is entirely subjective and varies from person to person, experience to experience. The lasting impact of Friedkin’s film doesn’t solely rely on the terror that felt groundbreaking for that generation. I would argue that among the most impactful sequences of the film are the intimate and intense moments of vulnerability that have stuck with us since.
We see a mother at her wit’s end, struggling to come up with any substantial explanation for how or why what’s happening to Reagan is taking place. A grief-stricken priest who has fallen out of his faith and can no longer see his sense of self-worth and make sense of the world he lives in. Because this film gives as much weight to all of humanity – or lack of it in some cases, as it does to spinning heads and penetration by way of crucifixes; the lasting memory and impact still have horror fans reeling a whole FIFTY years later.
Hereditary offers a similar emotional resonance to this new generation of horror – my generation of horror– as movie-goers in the seventies when they first saw Exorcist. Much like Aster’s film, we see the incomprehensible evil wear the face of a young girl; the victim of a raw deal she had no say in, as it tears a family to its core. Sure, both films offer so many terrifying visuals that can make the hair stand up on anyone’s neck – but it also depicts intense relationships and emotions that are tangible. Real. Familiar.
In that familiarity lies the uncanny, ready to rear its ugly head and force us to confront thoughts and horrors laying dormant and clawing at our psyche. And it doesn’t matter if it’s been five or fifty years. These horrors are always there, as we become pawns in its horrible, hopeless machine.