Writer-director Ari Aster's 2018 debut feature film Hereditary is the horror movie equivalent
of a haymaker punch to the gut.
Hereditary tells the story of a family plagued by generational curses as well as a demon
cult, but, believe it or not, that really freaky cult isn't the scariest part of the
movie.
Be warned, however: major spoilers ahead.
One of the most memorable scenes in Hereditary is the closing scene in the treehouse, in
which Peter, now housing the demonic Paimon's soul, is crowned the King of Hell on Earth.
For the kinds of viewers who didn't care for the movie, this ending came out of nowhere.
But to viewers who paid close attention, who read the literal writing on the walls, this
scene was the culmination of every single frame of the film up to that point.
The closing scene is a testament to the secret machinations of the cult of Paimon.
Throughout the whole film, the cult manipulates nearly every event: from the funeral, to Charlie's
death, to Annie's desperate spiral into spiritualism, to Peter's utter mental and physical collapse.
We even learn that the cult stretches back generations before the events of the film,
leading to the deaths of Annie's father and brother and even the births of her children.
From the shadows, they manipulate everything that befalls the Graham family until all that's
left is Peter's broken shell with a demon filling.
But why should we be afraid, apart from the film's shocking imagery?
What's to fear?
Demons aren't real, right?
Wait… is Paimon real?
Well, Paimon is as real as any demon is real, which depends on your personal worldview.
But he's as real as any of those demons that were famously tamed by King Solomon.
Paimon appears in the 16th-century grimoire known as The Lesser Key of Solomon, arguably
the most influential work of demonology of all time.
According to The Lesser Key, Paimon is a King of Hell who wears a crown and rides a camel,
preceded by the sound of trumpets.
If you invoke him, he can grant you knowledge of all arts and sciences and secret knowledge
of the Earth, wind, and waters.
Furthermore, he can grant you good familiars and dignities and lordships, as well as revealing
hidden treasures.
Writer-director Ari Aster goes to some pains to be accurate in his depiction of Paimon,
though he embellishes in a few places.
For example, the idea that Paimon requires a male host seems to be an original idea,
though Paimon is sometimes described as having a woman's face, so gender issues are not out
of nowhere.
But is Paimon himself out of nowhere in the movie?
What are signs of his presence?
One of the biggest clues to Paimon's presence is his symbol which can be found lurking in
many crucial scenes.
Annie and her mother are both seen wearing necklaces with the seal of Paimon at the first
funeral.
Once Joan is revealed as a cult member, you can see Paimon's seal on her wall.
Most significantly, though, you can see Paimon's seal carved on the utility pole where Charlie
will later be decapitated, which reveals how even that shocking event was orchestrated
by the cult of Paimon.
The most literal sign of Paimon's presence, however, is the glimmering blue light that
indicates he is manipulating events: Besides the obvious moments of possession, close viewing
will catch this light knocking over Annie's paint bottle and popping up during key events
at Peter and Charlie's school.
Besides Paimon, there's one character in Hereditary whose presence is the most pervasive in the
film despite being literally defined by her absence: Ellen, Annie's mother and Peter and
Charlie's grandmother.
Ellen is the catalyst for everything in the movie, from any angle.
As a leader in the cult of Paimon, her desire to provide a host for her demon king is the
driving force behind the shadow conspiracy that wrecks the Graham family.
Likewise, her death and the complicated feelings this stirs up in Annie lead to a lot of the
emotional conflict in the film.
But going back even further, it was her treatment of Annie as a child that teaches Annie how
to deal with her own children, a lineage of abuse and poor communication that culminates
with Annie's explosion at the dinner table.
"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."
More than any demon or cultist, it's Ellen's toxic presence that leads to the ruin of three
generations of a family.
Her lifetime of machinations lead to the film's most tragic events in a practical sense, but
it's her emotional abuse of her family that creates the environment that makes the family's
total dissolution possible.
But what is it that makes a crappy grandma a scarier proposition than a King of Hell?
If a scene takes place in a classroom, you should pay attention to the lecture.
That's because there's a good chance the teacher will say something thematically relevant.
Peter sits in on three classes where the movie's theme is, in some cases, literally written
on a chalkboard.
The final classroom scene has only a snippet of discussion of Aeschylus' Oresteia, a trilogy
of plays about the cycle of intergenerational violence, with the words "Punishment brings
wisdom" somewhat ominously written on the board.
Meanwhile, a history class discusses the Great Depression, which is reflective of the, well,
great depression Peter suffers after Charlie's accident.
Sometimes things are just that straightforward.
However, the first scene is the most telling.
Peter's English teacher is discussing Sophocles' tragedy Trachiniae while Peter texts his friend.
The discussion centers on how the tragedy of the play is heightened by Heracles' futile
attempts to escape his unconditional fate and how his attempt to control his destiny
is an arrogance that is his fatal flaw.
Unfortunately, this was an English class Peter and his mom probably should have paid attention
to.
It's tragic.
As Peter's classmate would say:
"I think it's more tragic because if it's all just inevitable than that means that the
characters have no hope."
One of the most striking elements of the movie is Annie's miniatures.
As the film goes on, it becomes clear that these miniatures are representations of emotional
and even traumatic moments in Annie's life that she uses to try to process her feelings
toward these moments: her mother's funeral, her mother's bizarre behavior in her final
days, Charlie's death, and so on.
In one of the movie's blackest, most absurdly comic moments, Annie defends her choice to
make a miniature of Charlie's death scene to her husband Stephen.
"It's not about him!"
"Oh no?"
"No!
It's a neutral view of the accident!"
Clearly creating an objective third-person view of these terrible moments is Annie's
attempt at exerting some control over these things that made her feel powerless.
By stripping the scenes of subtext, she can hope to finally understand the text of them.
But as director Ari Aster tells Variety, this is at best an illusion of control.
The constant framing of the Graham house in such a way that it often becomes impossible
to distinguish real house from miniature house is no coincidence.
The Grahams themselves are merely dolls living in a dollhouse, puppets whose strings are
held by Ellen, by Paimon, by the cult, by fate itself.
This, or at least Peter's classmates would assert, makes the fall of the house of Graham
all the more tragic.
Aster described the story of Hereditary to Variety in a surprisingly succinct elevator
pitch:
"It’s a story about a long-lived possession ritual told from the perspective of the sacrificial
lamb."
From the very first frame of this movie, Peter is manipulated by others toward his fate,
by his grandmother's manipulations, by his mother's emotional abuse, and even by a literal
demon.
He's led like an unwitting lamb to slaughter, until he is physically and emotionally broken
down enough to be receptive to Paimon's possession.
Hereditary is Lovecraftian in the sense that it examines regular people who find themselves
confronted with forces so beyond their everyday comprehension that facing it head on destroys
their sanity and ultimately their lives.
Paimon's logic is not human logic, and any attempts to impose such logic on the tragedies
befalling the Grahams has disastrous consequences.
And while Peter is Paimon's main focus, no one suffers the consequences of trying to
control fate more than Annie.
The obvious question to ask over the course of the movie is, "Has Annie lost her mind?"
Her psychiatrist husband seems to think so, as we even see him drafting an email to a
colleague about Annie's possible breakdown.
Mental illness, we hear, runs in her family: her mother suffered dissociative identity
disorder, her father starved himself to death, and her brother committed suicide in an apparent
schizophrenic episode.
But within the literal reality of the movie, it's possible most of these diagnoses were
misunderstandings of demonic activity.
Annie's brother, the original Charlie, was at least telling the truth.
His mother really was trying to put someone inside him.
"My older brother had schizophrenia, and when he was sixteen he hanged himself in my mother's
bedroom, and of course his suicide note blamed her, accusing her of putting people inside
him."
Annie isn't suffering a breakdown, she's reacting to literal reality around her.
In fact, the least rational thing she tries to do is impose logic on an illogical world.
Her attempts to impose order and save her family only make things worse.
She tries to contact Charlie to soothe that pain and summons Paimon's loose spirit into
their home.
The worst example of this, however, comes when Annie tries to have a grand redemptive
moment by sacrificing herself for her family by throwing the notebook into the fire, expecting
it to consume her.
Of course, her husband is burned to death instead.
And why wouldn't he be?
Why should Annie catch fire this time just because she did before?
Paimon's logic is not human logic.
But while the presence of mental illness within the literal reality of Hereditary is ambiguous
at best, it is impossible to deny the looming shadow it casts over the film on a metaphorical
level.
The mental illness passed down from Ellen to Annie and her brother and then to Peter
and Charlie is merely one element that moves from generation to generation.
Ellen's emotional abuse is passed on from mother to daughter, despite Annie's best attempts
to remove herself from it.
The keeping of secrets and issues with communicating also cross generational lines.
Ultimately Peter bears the brunt of all this pain in the way that mental illness, abuse,
and intergenerational trauma ate his family from the inside.
Aster sums it up when he told Vox that the movie is ultimately:
"... About how trauma can utterly transform a person, and not necessarily for the better."
"You can choose your friends, but you can't choose your family," or so the saying goes.
You might not believe in fate, and you might not believe in demon cults manipulating your
life.
You might fully believe in the pure existence of free will and that we as humans choose
our own destinies.
But there are some forces that determine facts about us completely outside our capacity to
choose: our DNA and the traits we derive from it, the traumas we inherit from our families,
the scars they put in us.
Even if you fully abandon your family, cutting them off entirely, you still carry them with
you, both in your genes and in your neuroses.
More than the idea of being responsible for the death of a loved one, more than the fear
of ghosts lurking in the corner, more than multiple decapitations, the scary thing about
Hereditary is that there are things in our lives that we absolutely cannot control.
Our loved ones will change.
Our loved ones will die.
We are destined, in one way or another, to become our parents.
It is impossible for any of us to ever truly know someone.
And all these things are terrifying.
Check out one of our newest videos right here!
Plus, even more Grunge videos about movies and demon-kings are coming soon.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.