(Creepy music)
- (Helen) Hey Wisecrack, Helen here. Today we’re going to talk about a film that explores
the beautiful dynamics of a happy, loving family with zero trauma to speak of. Just
kidding, we’re talking about Hereditary, a movie that makes Thanksgiving at the Bluth
house look like a Norman Rockwell painting. Hereditary immediately established director
Ari Aster as a bona fide horror maestro. But it’s worth asking: what makes a movie about
your typical family one of the most disturbing horror films in recent memory?
The answer has nothing to do with naked cults, demons or dark arts, and everything to do
with your DNA. Don’t worry, we’ll explain in this Wisecrack
edition on Hereditary. And, of course, spoilers ahead.
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whole family dying,” you can also hang out with the Wisecrack team and other Patrons
on our exclusive Patron discord. Click here, or go to Patreon.com/wisecrack to check it out.
And now back to the show.
- (Helen) Hereditary centers around artist Annie Graham, who is sort-of in mourning over
the death of her estranged mother. Before she can even process that loss, though, her
daughter, Charlie, is killed in a freak car accident while her son is at the wheel.
As Annie’s whole world subsequently crumbles, a mysterious woman teaches her to perform
a seance that channels Charlie’s spirit. And that’s where everything goes a little
… off-the-rails.
(Girl screams)
- (Helen) Eventually, we learn that Annie’s dead mom was part of a totally bananas pagan
cult that is looking for a vessel for its favorite demon. By the end, pretty much everyone
is beheadedly-worshipping Charlie’s spirit, which has been planted into Peter’s body.
(Peter makes clicking sound)
- (Helen) So why is it so scary? Well, partially, because it contains stuff like this.
- (Peter) Mommy please I’m begging you! - (Annie slams her head against trapdoor)
- (Helen) But horror films that really shake us tend to anchor even their most supernatural
scares in our real-life fears. In Hereditary’s case, the clue is in the name – it’s the
story of a family doomed to misery by their lineage. While most of us probably don’t
have to worry about our grandmothers being secret occultists, the idea that we might
suffer for our parents’ sins is pretty universal. And that universality has everything to do
with Hereditary’s scare factor.
See, some of the most unhinged events of the film can be explained by the concept of repression,
one of the cornerstones of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. Repression is the process
by which the conscious mind is shielded from feelings and thoughts which are too painful
to acknowledge. These buried emotions are left to fester unresolved and often manifest
themselves in occasionally alarming ways. Like, uh, this.
(Annie screams)
- (Helen) Indeed, Annie is a case-study in repression: Her life has been littered with
tragedies that she is unable to fully confront. In her eulogy for her mother, Annie tries
to find nice words to say but inadvertently ends up stressing how emotionally unavailable
and controlling she was.
- (Annie) My mother was a very secretive and private woman. She had private rituals, private
friends, private anxieties.
- (Helen) Annie’s true feelings bubble beneath the surface, too repressed to be articulated,
and too powerful to be let go.
This is pretty blatant foreshadowing – Annie doesn’t know how sinister her mother’s
“private rituals” were or that the strange faces she sees in the pews are actually members
of Ellen’s cult. Right from the beginning, the things that the Graham family hides are
sowing the seeds of their own destruction. Annie’s repression makes honest communication
with those closest to her difficult, if not impossible.
- (Steve) If it gets too cold come back in. - (Annie) I just need to sleep.
- (Helen) The only place she’ll talk about her traumatic past is at a grief support group
full of strangers. Even then, she’s completely detached, reeling off the laundry list of
horrifying things that occurred during her childhood in an almost casual way.
- (Annie) She didn’t have an easy life. She had DID which became extreme at the end.
And dementia. And my father died when I was a baby, from starvation. Because he had psychotic
depression.
- But wait, there’s more!
- (Annie) My older brother had schizophrenia. And when he was 16 he hanged himself from
my mother’s bedroom. And of course his suicide note blamed her, accusing her of putting people
inside him. So… that was my mom’s life.
- (Helen) It's notable that Annie finishes this speech by distancing herself from the
narrative - these are her mother’s traumas, not hers. Even when acknowledging her family’s
history, she is unwilling to accept it as a part of her story.
Annie’s not unique in her inability to deal with tragedy. During what Freud calls the
“first use” of the psychoanalytic, approach, the patient, Anna O, was encouraged to make
“poetical compositions” that could offer her relief from her chronic anxiety, using
art to express what she couldn’t say out loud. Fittingly, Annie’s art functions in
the same way: She makes miniature doll houses that recreate her traumatic life events. However,
it’s not accurate to call Annie’s creepy model home “therapeutic” - Freud emphasized
that it’s not enough to artistically depict traumatic events, the patient also has to
engage with the emotions attached. Even as Annie recreates her past traumas in minute
detail, she refuses to acknowledge the emotional payload they carry – something which becomes
ghoulishly clear after she creates a bleak depiction of Charlie’s death and Peter’s
role in it:
- (Annie) It’s not about him! - (Steve) I know.
- (Annie) No! It’s a neutral view of the accident!
- (Helen) But Annie’s strange behavior is ultimately understandable: She’s coping
with her trauma all on her own. When tragedy strikes, we hope to lean on the people around
us for support, often relying on a stable familial structure to hold us together. However,
many modern familial units are really not set up to deal with such severe emotions.
In fact, many aren’t really set up to deal with emotions at all.
- (Annie) Don’t you swear at me you little shit! Don’t you ever raise your voice at
me, I am your mother!
- (Helen) And that brings us to what really makes Hereditary so scary: family. In the
surprisingly-whimsical bestseller Families and How to Survive Them, Dr. Robin Skynner
and British comedian John Cleese elucidate why talking openly with our loved ones can
feel so impossible. And its lessons become all too relevant in Hereditary, which is all
about people who are fundamentally unable to survive their own family.
- (Girl)They’re all just like pawns in this horrible, hopeless machine.
- (Helen) The book centers on the premise that “most of our attitudes and characteristics
are grounded in our original family experience and relationships” and argues that repressed
people tend to form family units that are also repressive. I.e.-- the Grahams. Annie
and her husband, Steve, lie to one another rather than dealing with upsetting emotions
– she hides the fact she is going to a grief support group, and he hides the fact that
her mother’s grave has been desecrated. This chronic inability to communicate soon
comes back to haunt them.
- ( Annie) What was it? - (Steve) Just some billing crap.
- (Annie) Ok well, I’m uh, I’m gonna go see a movie.
- (Helen) The perpetual secrecy that hangs over their relationship leads to mistrust
and even paranoia, as when Steve accuses Annie herself of being responsible for desecrating
the grave:
- (Steve) You dug up the grave. It was you, wasn’t it?
- (Annie) What? - (Steve) All those nights you pretended to
go to the movies”
- (Helen) Here, the staggeringly toxic results of family-wide repression become abundantly
clear.
And the same is true for the Graham’s children. After the grandmother’s funeral, Annie and
Steve try to prompt Charlie and Peter to open up about their feelings to no avail - not
surprising given their parents’ reluctance to honestly voice their own emotions. Charlie
is repressed to the point where she barely talks, responding to emotional stimuli with
a strange and truly terrifying clicking noise instead.
- (Charlie makes clicking noise)
- (Helen) She is particularly unable to express anything negative or confrontational – when
forced into an argument, she simply concedes
- (Charlie) That’s okay.
- (Helen) And we learn that her practice of suppressing emotions started very early:
- (Annie) You never cried as a baby, you know that?
- (Helen) Peter, on the other hand, buries his emotions under a cloud of marijuana smoke,
numbly sleepwalking through much of the day. His parents do the same, popping prescription
pills to blank out their own feelings.
So what happens when you make four deeply-repressed people share a home? You know, stuff like
this.
- (Helen) The Grahams are completely cut-off from one another emotionally – compartmentalized
into separate rooms, as if in one of Annie’s miniatures.
Even in the wake of Ellen’s death, the family is more concerned with how they are “supposed”
to feel than how they actually feel.
- (Annie) Should I be sadder? - (Steve) You should be whatever you are.
It’ll come.
- (Helen) As a result, the Grahams are totally unequipped to deal with Charlie’s death
– which is made gallingly clear by Peter’s decision to cocoon himself in bed, leaving
his parents to discover her body.
- (Annie and Steve scream in the distance)
- (Helen) He is so unable to process the trauma and his role in it that he simply shuts down.
In an emotionally healthy family, the trauma of Charlie’s death, though intolerably painful,
could be the impetus for self reflection and even growth. In Life and How to Survive It,
another book written by the doctor-comedian duo, Skynner explains that “The healthier
people are, the more they are willing to admit to their limitations and so the more open
they are to the possibility of improvement.” But the Grahams were emotionally unhealthy
even before the tragedy. In its wake, they are unable to reckon with the pain or even
ask for help. In the rare moments when the Grahams DO talk
about their feelings, it gets ugly fast. In one exchange, Annie projects many of her own
problems onto Peter while refusing to recognize them in herself. Even at this explosive moment,
she continues to repress her feelings, specifically her guilt about Charlie’s death.
- (Annie) I can’t accept! And I can’t forgive! Because nobody admits anything they’ve
done! - (Peter) What about you Mom? She didn’t
want to go to the party. So why was she there?
- (Helen) But Annie’s inability to get in touch with her feelings isn’t some kind
of moral failing - it was somewhat inevitable. Skynner talks about how many of our painful
experiences are ultimately “a simple consequence of family history over which no-one had any
control.” For the Grahams, this is certainly true. Their grandmother ultimately dooms them,
but not just because of her Pagan machinations. Rather, her most potent legacy is her emotional
detachment, which continues to drive her family apart even after she’s gone.
In this sense, the Grahams are beset by a very real family curse. They each inherit
the repressive tendencies of their parents which causes their trauma to fester until
it’s out of control. As Annie explains in her eulogy, her mother was an emotionally
distant person, unable to offer her the love or support that she needed. Fittingly, Cleese
argues that "Many of our 'problems' are really childhood difficulties that we failed to resolve
when we were young and consequently carry around with us in our adult lives."
It’s no surprise, then, that Annie inherited a complex, damaged idea of what it was to
be a mother, which in turn instilled a deep fear of becoming one. She represses that fear,
though, burying it in her unconscious so it can only manifest in her dreams.
- (Annie) I didn’t feel like a mother. But she pressured me.
- (Helen) Both her dreamed confession and her murderous sleepwalking are byproducts
of these unwanted, unthinkable ideas. Annie remains unable to accept them as parts of
herself – even after she almost burns her children alive, she refuses to admit the severity
of the situation.
- (Annie) And I was standing there with a box of matches and an empty can of paint thinner.
And I woke myself up striking the match. Which also woke Peter up, and he started to scream.
- (Helen) To do so would mean acknowledging the part of her that wanted to harm her children,
shattering her already-tenuous maternal identity.
- (Annie) I mean, I was just as shocked as he was! And it was impossible to convince
them it was just sleepwalking.
- (Helen) Unable to process her childhood traumas, she replicates them. She unwittingly
neglects her children – even “giving” Charlie to Ellen in a desperate attempt to
win the approval she still craves.
- (Annie) I didn’t let her anywhere near me when I had my first, my son. Which is why
I gave her my daughter who she immediately stabbed her hooks into.
- (Helen) And, in turn she creates kids who are just like her – repressing their traumatic
childhood experiences to preserve an image of normalcy. Peter and Charlie can’t confront
the idea that their mother tried to kill them or in Charlie’s case, functionally gave
her away, any more than Annie can, so the whole family continues stumbling forward in
willful ignorance. And this is where the freaky supernatural
elements of the film become so important. The family’s increasingly creepy experiences
are symbolic of their dysfunction. As a result, they are blinded to all the signs that something
sinister is brewing. Even as they each individually notice markings and apparitions, they are
unable to communicate about them for fear that their sanity will be called into question.
In fact, Ellen’s pagan tendencies only go unnoticed in the first place because of how
distanced she and Annie are. When she dies, all her secrets are there to be discovered
in a box in the attic but no-one finds them until it is too late. Fittingly, the fraught
emotional associations Annie has with her mother ensures she won’t do the work of
sorting her belongings or her own emotions.
This lays the groundwork for Ellen’s creepy friend, Joan to enact the latter stages of
their plan. Sure, they have hundreds of years of demonic knowledge and mystical energy on
their side, but their plan would be a non-starter if Annie had taken a brief flick through her
mom’s old things. The family’s maladjustment makes them vulnerable in the first place.
After drawing Annie in, Joan offers her a basic, psychological defence – denial. If
Annie can believe in the séance then she doesn’t have to really face the fact that
Charlie is dead, doesn’t have to reckon with her involvement in her death or reconcile
that with her fear of motherhood. So long as Charlie isn’t dead, that can all remain
buried.
- (Joan) You didn’t kill her, Annie. - (Annie) What?
- (Joan) She isn’t gone.
- (Helen) But the séance also serves a larger psychological purpose. Dr. Skynner talks about
how feeling “plugged in to a meaningful cosmic system” gives people a “greater
psychological balance and stability”, and that’s exactly what Joan’s mysticism offers
Annie. Her home life, her whole world has been shattered – and Joan offers her a way
to piece it back together, to reconstruct her family.
Of course, it is not inherently supernatural to believe that some part of the people we
lose lives on in us. But sometimes, it’s not exactly the parts we would like. Several
studies about transgenerational trauma have suggested that the descendants of those who
undergo great suffering might carry the psychological markers of it themselves, potentially leaving
them more vulnerable to PTSD, anxiety, depression and other conditions. One of the first studies
into this phenomenon was undertaken by Canadian psychiatrist Vivian M. Rakoff, who found that
the children of Holocaust survivors showed uncommonly high rates of psychological distress
Rakoff’s findings and subsequent studies give evidence to the idea that trauma is passed
down not only through the influence of our parent’s behavior but through their genetic
material.
In this way, Ellen passes her own trauma on to Annie, and Annie passes it on to Peter
and Charlie. Each member of the family has developed their own repressive mechanisms
to ensure that their demons are never exorcised. Eventually, those demons will destroy them.
The supernatural forces at play naturally parallel the severe mental illness which runs
in the family. Demonic possession and curses, after all, have historically been used as
explanations for mental health problems that could not be otherwise understood. Ellen’s
husband and son both kill themselves as a result of schizophrenia or psychotic depression,
although her son’s claim that she was “putting voices inside him” raises the question of
whether she was experimenting with demon-raising even back then.
Through these acts of violence, the family’s self-destructive legacy is passed on to each
member, dooming them to the same bloody fate as those who came before.
Much of who we are is hereditary – It’s why so many of us can probably relate to Annie
and her family, feeling somewhat-doomed to repeat the past and one day turn into our
parents. Ultimately the thing which locks the Graham
family into their fate isn’t ancient rites or mysterious ruins but their own inability
to process the trauma they have undergone. They suppress and suppress and suppress it,
until it finally explodes.
The violence which comes exploding out is filled with darkly poetic repetitions and
reversals. Annie beheads herself in a gorey imitation of Charlie’s death. Her night-time
fantasies of burning a family member alive come true when Steve goes up in flames.
(Steve screams)
- (Helen) Repression and trauma lock them into a cycle, and their tortured family history
seems doomed to repeat itself until they have all been destroyed.
But what do you guys think? Are we all doomed to repeat our family’s dysfunction? Let
us know in the comments. Big thanks to our patrons for your support. Light that subscribe
button on fire and, as always, thanks for watching. Peace!