When the lights in the theater came up a little voice in my head said "breath!" I sharply gasped, filling my lungs with the oxygen I needed to live. Oxegen I had been denying myself during the last 20 minutes of Hereditary. I sat there looking around, my head doing a dumb little "wow, that was nuts, right?" bob looking for a fellow oxygen deprived sympathizer. I looked to the guy next to me my face giving the universal sign for, "fucking good right?" He met my gaze and said, "That was the dumbest thing I have ever seen." Thats Hereditary.
To some it will be the heart stopping, slow burn, get in your head mess it up from the inside, psychological horror film for the ages. To others it will be "dumb." This is not some main stream Blumhouse cookie cutter Quija movie. Hereditary will not have a maze at Halloween Horror Nights. Those who expected a Freddy or Jason, will/might be disappointed. Hereditary is more of a family grief drama than a horror film, but when it becomes horrifying, it comes with a real payload. It got in my head. It had real characters, people you believed, you invested in. Their pain, their difunctional family, their agony had real gravity. It planted the seeds so well that when the crazy started to emerge, it was already in your head. I know this movie will not be for everyone, its not straight forward. Its not going to be a watch every Halloween, midnight movie, crowd pleaser. This is a movie that stuck with me for days though. It didn't do it with sadistic violence, or gore, it didn't need a monster, it didn't need jump scares. All it needed was a family that felt real, that I even had empathy for, and to watch them be torn apart from the inside, predestined to be destroyed by forces they couldn't control. In a genre that can be so base it is rare to see a film so well crafted, it is unfortunate that with that quality, the care put into making a real story, with empathetic characters, it can alienate, and divide horror fans. Some people just want, some blood, some tits, and a monster you can put on a T-shirt. -Aaron
UPDATE:
Meh, not my cup of tea... -Matt