Hereditary Film Analysis: Symbolism, Themes, and Hidden Meanings

[00:00:00]this video was brought to you by my based patrons and I'm especially thankful for them today because YouTube keeps claiming this video stick around to the end to learn more it's that time of year again the time when all the horror movies start coming out from every dark corner and crevice to pop up on your recommended list in every streaming service Halloween is right around the corner I'm David pumpkins and in another week or so your annoying neighbor will already be putting up their Christmas decorations that's me I'm that neighbor you can thank my mother for that anyway I've never done a Halloween themed video so I thought I'd Rectify that this year by talking about my new favorite horror movie hereditary yes I know it's old just like me a quick heads up though this video is going to contain massive and Myriad spoilers for hereditary we are going to do a scorched Earth no stone unturn Deep dive into this incredible piece of art and I am making it specifically for people who have already seen the movie so if you haven't please do yourself a favor and go watch it first but since it's Halloween and maybe you're here looking for a recommendation here are some of my other favorite spooky flicks hereditary no really go watch it also Midsummer written and directed by the same guy that did hereditary sensing a pattern yet Midsummer is a wickedly unsettling film about a grieving sister going to a commune in Sweden with her boyfriend and his friends for a pagan Festival when things start to to go wrong I think director Ari Aster really likes delving into the process of grieving a loved one and the strange things that that grief can make us do also no need to go down on someone when you get your daily serving of pubes and your chicken pot pies you'll get it when you get it ready or not this is more of a campy Thriller with some horror elements based around a deadly game of hide-and seek but if you've ever been fed up with horror protagonists acting supremely [ __ ] stupid then this movie is for you plus it has one of if not the best endings of any film I've ever seen in the genre the witch awesome movie about a 17th century Frontier American Family dealing with well witchcraft don't want to give too much away but damn this is a good movie really set the stage for fantastic a24 style horror and was the film that catapulted Ana Taylor Joy's career into stardom you know what just any a24 horror thriller movie they basically all sure bets on the flip side I'd recommend basically Nothing by Ryan Murphy they'll just Intrigue you for the first half and let you down by the end cinematic blue balls basically if you want horror series check out The Haunting of Hill housee based on the acclaimed Shirley Jackson story or midnight mass both directed by the same guy Mike Flanigan the former has an episode filmed with these two amazing single takes one present day and one flashback where the camera spins the entire episode spinning around slowly both forcing you to stay in the moment with these characters while simultaneously evoking this great sense of disorientation that they're feeling really awesome stuff all right that's enough of that let's talk about the movie that you actually clicked on this video for hereditary is probably the single greatest anti-pot PSA ever put to film and yes I stole that joke from Reddit it blows all those truth commercials out of the water hey Lindsay I wish you didn't smoke weed and I don't even think the director is against using pot what the [ __ ] am I talking about the movie is also the theatrical debut of writer director Ari Aster and I want you to remember that as we go through the rest of this video because it's the guy's first [ __ ] film incredible hereditary tells the story of a family moving on from the loss of a loved one trying to process that grief while in the uncomfortable situation of not really liking said loved one as the film progresses every everything goes sideways first the son Peter is in a horrific car accident which kills his little sister then trying to cope with that loss the family particularly Peter and his mother Annie begin to experience supernatural phenomena slowly it is revealed that they are being manipulated by a cult worshiping a demon named Pimon trying to implant it into Peter Allah Rosemary's Baby it is equal parts horror and psychological Thriller but I think a more accurate genre would just be super supremely [ __ ] upsetting the movie is a feast for the eyes the ears and the mind there is not a single wasted frame or line of dialogue the amount of details and Easter eggs hidden throughout is like a new rock star's wet dream but better yet every major piece of the movie is layered in meaning there are both in Universe literal explanations as well as thematic symbolic meanings behind everything I am absolutely in love with this film I've watched it three times now just in preparation for this video and poured over think pieces and Reddit threads alike trying to catch every detail and I still feel like I'm discovering new things it is an absolute Masterpiece and a great subject for anyone interested in dissecting film I banged out this entire 12-page script in a single day because there's so much to talk about the very first shot of hereditary depicts a treehouse and really gives us an early look at the style of arter the shot is framed through well a literal window frame Ari does this a lot in the film framing is just the choice of what the director and cinematographer choose to show the viewer in other words what's visible in the shot from what perspective it's shown what angle the camera at relative to the scene Etc literally anything in the frame that you can see and that which is hidden is almost always a deliberate Choice by filmmakers but that is especially true in hereditary there are many shot shot in this film framed through literal frames window frames door frames hallways Etc establishing shots in particular often depict the family house from far away with what I believe is a tilt shift effect layered on top all of this together gives the sense that these people we are watching are almost toys Miniatures being moved around like ponds on a chessboard this theme will come up again and again throughout the movie the first shot at the Treehouse is also an example of another Style by the director it Clues us into the idea that the Treehouse will become important in some way later arri Aster does this a lot throughout his work silently hanging the camera's focus on an object or a place that will later become critical usually involved in the death of a character many shots utilize a slow Zoom or lateral pan which gives the viewer the sense that the camera is in the eyes of the character as they slowly shift their gaze around a room all of this information is contained in that first shot we then move away from The Treehouse and into Annie's Workshop she is an artist that creates Miniatures like dollhouses this is one of those things that I mentioned that has layers of meaning within the fiction of the film these Miniatures serve as a way for Annie to cope with her trauma throughout her life both before and during the film Annie dealt with absolute chaos from a battery of mental illness in her close family to the horrific deaths of those same people she clearly feels that life is totally outside her control but these Miniatures are an outlet for her we see her throughout the film recreate some of those events from her life pouring over every excruciating detail controlling everything in defiance of every other aspect of her life yet the Miniatures are also a different metaphor for control going back to that first scene we zoom in on one of those diaramas a smallscale recreation of the family's house painstakingly detailed slowly the camera moves in on a single room room Peter's Room and as it fills the frame it slowly morphs into Peter's actual room where he lies in bed from the audience's perspective it's kind of like the director is shouting at us saying these people are toys their actions are being controlled they have no real choices and their Fates are predetermined actually this is literally told to us later in a scene with Peter while in class the teacher is discussing the story of Hercules I'm not pronouncing it Heracles [ __ ] you but let's all remember Sophocles wrote The Oracle so that it was unconditional meaning Heracles never had any choice right so does that make it more tragic or less tragic than if he has a choice all right so now we are finally past the first couple of shots the Dad Steve wakes the children to prepare for their grandmother's funeral strangely though none of the family seem all that broken up about Annie's mother's death speaking in the ceremony Annie describes her mother as a very private person and just not super nice my mother was a very secretive and private woman she had private rituals private friends pay attention to the faces in the Wake afterwards because some of them will be seen again later on Annie goes to a group therapy meeting for grieving loved ones there she describes herself as being resistant to these sorts of things but that they helped her once before this scene serves as an exposition dump which gives the viewer the history of the family my mom died a week ago and she didn't have an easy life she had did and my father died when I was a baby um because he had psychotic depression my older brother had schizophrenia and when he was 16 he hanged himself in my mother's bedroom accusing her of putting people inside him so but film students pay attention here says the guy that studied physics not film Exposition can really weigh down the pacing of a film and take the viewer out of the experience if done wrong but here the wrer very smartly placed it in a scene where Annie is openly expressing her feelings to a group of people letting out her grief while simultaneously informing us the viewer of a lot of important background details that is really clever writing this history is one explanation of the title also hereditary often mental illnesses like depression and schizophrenia are passed down genetically generation to generation and from the outside Observer such as Annie in the beginning of the film and later Steve much of the events are viewed as a result of mental illness however we the viewer soon become aware that the true generational baton is of a supernatural nature possession by the demon Pimon likely What was seen as multiple personalities in Annie's mother was actually the switching between her true personality and the demon possessing her the brother also claimed people were being put inside him which in retrospect was obviously an attempted possession and this continues throughout the film through different family members down the generational line another possible interpretation is the seemingly hereditary trait the family keeping secrets from one another Annie tells Steve that she is going to see movies when she is really attending these grief counseling sessions Steve tells her that the cemetery is calling about billing issues when they are really notifying him that the grandmother's grave was dug up soon Peter follows in their footsteps because nobody admits anything they've done but before that we see Charlie the daughter in school it is never explicitly stated but Charlie is coded as developmentally challenged in some way she is a very quiet child barely communicating more than a few words at a time we first see her sleeping in the treehouse with barely any blankets and no heater in the cold climate of mountainous Utah yet she didn't seem bothered by it at all that's how you get pneumonia that's okay later at school we see her take a pair of scissors and cut off the head from an already dead pigeon she uses it to create one of her unsettling figurines again it's never explicitly stated but the girl we see isn't actually Charlie at least that's how I interpret it the real Charlie may never have been neurod Divergent at all through some of the details that Annie shares in her group we learn that Charlie has likely always been possessed by the demon Pigman Annie even states that Charlie had a very close relationship with her grandma which why I gave her my daughter who she immediately stabbed her hooks into and one of those Miniatures shows the grandma breastfeeding her also of note Charlie has a tick often clicking her tongue to the roof of her mouth yet later in the film this is revealed to be a sound that pman himself makes regardless of his host and now that we've met the whole family we get to the inciting incident of the film and oh Lord this is an absolute clinic on a effective upsetting film making let me set the scene first some background back in the classroom scene Peter's teacher discusses Hercules being undone by his fatal flaw arrogance at the same time though the camera which is Peter's eyes at this point seems to be staring at the ass of the female student in front of him keep that in the back of your pocket Also earlier on in the film it was set up that Charlie has a nut allergy there aren't nuts in that other no so back in the present Peter wants to go to a party but Annie forces Charlie to tag along with him on the way there the camera follows the car as it drives along the road but then suddenly snaps into Focus onto a telephone pole that they pass and sits there for a few seconds there's a strange symbol on the poll as well as soon as they get to the party Peter makes a beine towards the girl from his class and asks her to go do one or two weeds in the other room he tells Charlie to occupy herself with some of the chocolate cake which is a totally normal thing that high schoolers bake at a party unfortunately for Peter he didn't see that they also put an assload of crushed pecans on the cake cut to Charlie a few minutes later interrupting the smoke session complaining that her throat is swelling up it's hard to breathe what do you mean what do you mean Peter freaks out he picks her up and speeds away in the car trying to get to a hospital before his little sister asphyxiates apparently in this world epipens are far too expensive even for millionaire homeowners to give their child to carry around as a preventative measure in the car things aren't going great Charlie is clearly suffering pretty horrifically she opens up the window and sticks her head out presumably trying to force fresh air into her mouth hole but just then Peter has to Swerve to avoid what looks like a dead dog in the road and when he does well remember the telephone pole [Applause] so that is the inciting incident of the plot Charlie's Suffocation and decapitation are absolutely horrific even if we don't really see the ladder happen clearly but and not to take away from the tragedy of Charlie's death the truly horrific part is what happens next the camera hovers over the tires as Peter brings the car to a screeching halt then a closeup on his face the silent processing of what just happened his eyes inch up towards the rearview mirror but then Dart away before he actually sees his sister's headless corpse very slowly he forces his body to move tears streaming down his face letting his foot off the pedal motivating himself to go forward it's just so [ __ ] good the directing is fantastic sure but Alex Wolf's acting is just insane the complex sequence of emotions he is able to display with no words spoken just incredible but that's only half of it though because Peter is unable to truly process the weight of what just happened in the car he goes into autopilot mode slowly walking to his room and laying in bed the camera follows him and then we get another closeup on his blank catatonic face as he lies there the scene shifts from from night to day we hear his parents talking far away Annie saying that she's going out to run errands yet the camera is still stuck on Peter it hasn't moved at all we don't see Annie discover her daughter's body but we hear it we feel her pain and we see Peter's reaction to it at the same time the camera is still stuck in place just as he is the scream and what follows immediately after literally made me feel sick I just want to [Music] die I don't know that I've ever been impacted that powerfully in that way by a film before it reminds me of this video I saw online I'm not showing it here for obvious reasons but I can describe it it was a dash cam view where a random stray brick flies off the back of a truck and threw the windshield of a car instantly killing the passenger you don't actually see the death or the reaction in that video either yet you hear the absolute despair in the driver's scream when it happens of all the death or gore videos I had seen up to that point none affected me the way that one did even though it only showed a broken windshield I stopped watching those kinds of videos after that so please trust me and don't go looking for it it's awful that's the exact feeling this movie gave me though and while I'm horrified to write this that is damn good film making the point of art such as film is to cause a reaction in its audience high octane action scenes evoke ooze and Oz while romantic scenes are more still isn't over horror specifically allows us to safely explore the darker parts of the human condition but this I don't know what sound is appropriate I guess Annie's Scream the scene cuts to Charlie's head left out on the road covered in ants I feel increasingly ill but life must go on the family buries Charlie's body apparently still without its head more on this later and as Annie tries to cope with the loss of her daughter she is approached by the cult that her mother was in and is slowly lured in by her new friend Joan Joan at first is just a shoulder for Annie to cry on relating to her by telling about her own son and grandson that died though things begin to quickly escalate there is a conspicuous shot of the mail slot in the door already full when a card advertising a seance is sneakily slid on top however when Annie doesn't see this the cult pushes things even more Joan accidentally runs into her outside the craft store talking about contacting her own dead grandson in a seance she she even takes Annie to her apartment to prove it to her Annie is initially very skeptical of the Seance but after seeing and feeling the presence herself she is convinced to try it to speak to Charlie but before she leaves Joan very pointedly tells her to make sure her entire family is in the house when she does Annie tries the Seance in the middle of the night contacting Charlie first by herself and then once she is successful she brings in Steve and Peter with her what language is even that what the the hell is even that but things don't go quite right there is a decidedly ominous feel to this Seance Annie herself is seemingly possessed by Charlie this is I believe the only time in the movie where we actually see Charlie's true personality come out notice the way she speaks through Annie is much different than the way she spoke before Mom I don't like this Dad I don't like this what's happening please stop what's going on mom please you're really freak me out please stop what's why is everyone scared sure she could just be scared but she's far more vocal than she ever was in the early scenes of the movie regardless the entire thing scares the [ __ ] out of Peter and makes Steve fear for his wife's sanity recall the history of mental illness in Annie's family and combined with her actions here you can really see why he's concerned we're going to skip ahead a bit from here after the Seance the family begins to experience more and more Supernatural events Peter's face gets drawn in Charlie's old notebook seemingly by itself depicting his eyes being gouged out and his head cut off he begins to experience signs of possession being taken over by the demon he sees the same blue light glint effect that Charlie saw early on in the film notice the position of his hand in this last clip it's the same as the statue of pman at the end the details in this movie are honestly nigh endless and this video could be probably 3 hours long if I tried to point out everyone so we have to move on eventually Annie figures out that she's been duped by Joan and the cult she finds her mother's books on their Satanic rituals the symbols we have been seeing throughout the movie and she finds her mother's decapitated body up in the attic the second sacrifice for piman in those books we can see that piman is carrying a sack of three severed heads which are the three sacrifices that must be made to fully complete the ritual this theme of decapitation comes up again and again throughout the film first with the dead pigeon that Charlie mutilates then at the party some of the teens are watching a decapitation video then with Charlie herself then with the grandmother and finally later on with Annie this is another one of those layered elements not only are the severed heads the sacrifices pman require they also have a very important symbolic meaning it goes back to the idea that the family is supposedly passing down mental illness as one of the colloquial terms for insanity is losing your head or losing your mind these women were possessed by a demon losing control of their minds and later literally their heads notice that Annie's brother who supposedly had schizophrenia was said to have hung himself accusing Grandma of trying to put people inside him he knew what was going on he wanted out of it and as a result he was able to keep his head Annie trying to stop the event set in motion tries to burn Charlie's Journal which she used in the Seance the journal though was connected to her because of the ritual and so when she threw it in the fire her arm also caught fire finally she decides to open up to Steve about everything he has understandably been concerned with her behavior not only having to deal with the death of his daughter but trying to not make his son feel like he was a murderer trying to keep the family afloat and be the voice of reason through everything he's honestly probably the most likable character in the movie so when she starts frantically babbling about cults and demons showing them their daughter's notebook with pictures of Peter's eyes gouged out and trying to lead him in a seance he thinks that she's finally lost herself and succumbed to the same sickness that the rest of her family had oh St St please please understand baby please please please throw it in the fire this scene is so insanely good Tony Colette and Gabriel Brin are excellent you really feel for the both of them at the same time understanding that Annie is totally correct in her outlandish claims but also how she sounds to somebody that doesn't know the things that she does Annie tries to get Steve to burn the book for her she knows that she will be burnt with it and is just too scared to throw it in the fire herself she wants someone there with her but Steve understandably doesn't want to play along with what he thinks is her delusion he refuses and so Annie in pure desperation finally determined to save her son says [ __ ] it and yeets the Sketchbook into the Flames setting Steve on fire instead daddy chill there are multiple details and layers to the scene that I think we just need to take a step back and go through them one by one first Steve has constantly been worried about his family being cold throughout the movie Finding Charlie up in the treehouse in the beginning haven't slept there overnight with barely any blanket that's how you get pneumonia then later Annie goes to sleep up there as well to feel close to her daughter it gets too cold come back in then during the Seance the windows were left open it's freezing in here this poor guy who's just been constantly worried that his family is going to freeze to death dies by imulation engulfed in flames but also why did he catch fire instead of Annie well if we recall Joan said that the entire family needed to be present in the house for the Seance in doing so it l linked them all to piman and to the Sketchbook in one of Annie's mom's books piman was called the god of Mischief as well so it let Annie think that she was the only one that was linked to the book when in actuality it was the whole family anyways upon seeing her husband burned to death in their living room Annie snaps and is taken over by Pimon and from here the movie jumps into sixth gear outside the scene snaps from dusk to night Peter is star awake he looks outside and sees a light on in the treehouse and calls for his mom as he does so Ari Aster's wonderful style of framing is accentuated here once again as the camera and everything in frame are deathly still except for Peter and it takes us a moment for our eyes to really adjust and then we see a possessed Annie perched up in the corner of the [ __ ] ceiling she had been there the entire time as he gets up and looks around upstairs we hear a crash from from below the piano mom dad so he goes to investigate and finds the broken tumbled piano and then his father's extra crispy recipe lying on the ground then he turns around to find the creepy [ __ ] from the funeral standing in a darkened doorway naked and smiling somehow AR Aster made me more afraid of some random naked dude than I was for any season of American Horror Story finally possessed Annie reveals herself and chases Peter back upstairs into the still open attic Peter's reaction is so godamn believable he is still the quintessential teenager still just a child in a young man's body scared but wanting his mother to love him slowly Peter begins to take in his surroundings a dark attic barely lit by a few candles he finds the spot where his grandmother's corpse once lay and then an odd wet scratching sound remember the crash from earlier well the sound of the piano strings scraping against viscera and Bone and the spurting blood are deeply deeply disturbing especially as she is staring at him wide-eyed the entire time he looks down only to find more of the naked cultists staring at him as well what the [ __ ] at the end of his proverbial rope Peter jumps through the window as he lay there in the garden we hear Annie's head finally thump against the attic floor as soon as it does the three sacrifices the three heads required have been given to piman the ritual is complete we see his Telltale glint absorbed into Peter's body he slowly stands now completely possessed by the demon Annie's headless corpse floats by some unseen power out of the attic across the yard and up into the Treehouse Peter SL pman follows her slowly seeing more of the naked cultists watching him smiling among them we see what looks like the dog that caused Peter to swerve and kill Charlie setting the plot into motion and implying that the cult was somehow behind that too finally Peter enters the Treehouse seeing his mother and grandmother's corpses prostrated in front of a statue of piman made with the head of Charlie Joan is there too and as the movie closes out she and the cultists rejoice in their success in bringing the demon to Earth the music turns into this oddly lurgical reverent piece leaving behind the more traditional dissonant droning of horror music in favor of a consonant section of horns and Chimes to Signal a celebration this is as good a time as any to mention the Fantastic music and sound design of the movie good sound the very last shot of the film is one that shows the entire inside of the Treehouse as the cultists cheer for the coming of their lord filmed from a distance outside the fourth wall like looking at a diarama it is a very strange perspective but makes sense with our established context the movie ends how it began coming full circle we are again seeing these events happening to these small people being once again moved around like like toys in a miniature it wasn't just the family being manipulated by the cult the cult was also being manipulated by pman himself while hereditary may not be a traditional horror film it is easily one of the most terrifying unsettling movies I have ever seen everybody here is bringing their aame from the writing to the directing to the cinematography the editing the acting and on on and on and on Ari Aster doesn't use cheap jump scares instead he is a master of building up tension of a scene higher and higher in natural ways until something snaps both in the movie and in us the performances of Tony Colette Alex Wolf and Gabriel Brinn I have already discussed but even Millie Shapiro the actress who plays Charlie a young 13-year-old girl with barely any lines managed to create layers of meaning with her silent performance the car accident scene in particular is one that will haunt me for a long time and all that is just incredible especially considering that this is the first film Ari ever made I really hope that you took my advice at the beginning and watched the movie before the video because man it is really something that needs to be experienced without any bias or pre-knowledge yet even watching it a second or third time didn't diminish its effect on me so I hope you enjoyed this Halloween treat once once again I'd like to thank my wonderful patrons for making videos like these possible including my newest patrons hor chat thought Nikki ADM Lind and chicken pie thank you so much guys you rock if you'd like to join them and help me make more videos like these you can do so in the link in the description or at the end of the video when you join you get a bunch of different goodies like getting to read the scripts early early access to the videos exclusive streams and many other things like that either way thank you very much for watching I am still doing the before oral video but I'm trying to get a little surprise for you guys no promises yet but yeah either way the next time I see you will be with that video until next time