‘Hereditary’ on VOD: A Film Scary Enough to Live Up to the Hype

As of today, Hereditary is available to rent on VOD platforms like Prime Video and iTunes, and if you’re in the mood to scar your psyche for like with things you’ll never be able to unsee, we highly recommend it. Seriously, if you’re squeamish about horror, this isn’t one to try out. Oftentimes, the buzziest horror movies are the ones we feel like we can recommend to our friends who “don’t usually like horror”; those movies tend to be terrifically creepy and unsettling but nothing we feel might truly traumatize anyone. Think The Witch or The Babadook or even It Follows, the latter of which comes close to active harm to the viewer but is still mostly a really well-told scary story.

Hereditary is not one of those movies. Hereditary means you harm. It wants to mess you up. And it will, if you give yourself over to its intensity. That said, hype is the enemy of horror. Excessive hype over a horror movie tends to put a viewer — especially one coming to the movie late, as with a VOD release — in a defensive position. It’s not pretentiousness; it’s an actual defense mechanism. Everybody says this movie’s going to scare me, so I’m going to put up all my defenses and say “Prove it.” But movies don’t work that way. Movies aren’t at their best when trying to break through your defensive little exoskeleton. Movies require some fertile ground in the viewer with which it can take root.

That said, the hype issue with Hereditary is going to be a thing, after months and months of yahoos (like me) saying it’s the scariest thing they’ve seen in years. Still, there are plenty of reasons why it’s worth braving that hype to see the movie anyway, with as few expectations as you can possibly manage. We’ve rounded up a few of the best reasons.

Hereditary Is a Family Drama

This isn’t one of those “Crimson Peak is really a gothic romance” statements of misdirection. Hereditary is still very much a horror movie. But it’s a horror movie that grows out of a family drama, and that is crucial. Toni Collette plays Annie, a woman who, at the beginning of the movie, is grieving the death of her mother, who we learn was an incredibly difficult woman whose relationship with Annie was often close but never warm. Annie’s grief lingers, grows, and is later compounded by the events of the movie, and in many ways, all the horror we experience is meant to evoke the horror of dealing with the grief that accompanies a loved one’s death. Annie’s husband (Gabriel Byrne) and children (Alex Wolff and Milly Shapiro) are in many ways trapped in this house of grief with Annie, from which there is no escape.

Toni Collette Is Genuinely Oscar Worthy

To have a horror movie where your main character goes through an extreme psychological breakdown like this, you need to cast an actress who’s up to the part. Toni Collette was the perfect choice, and she plays Annie as simultaneously a protagonist who we all feel bad (and scared) for and someone who’s become unhinged, whom we all feel scared of. She’s working multiple levels at once, and at times she’s so intense you almost have to look away.

The Rest of the Cast Is Superb

Gabriel Byrne gets the oft-thankless role of the steady, supportive husband who never quite believes what’s going on. But Byrne plays such a decidedly decent person that he makes you intensely concerned for his well-being. Milly Shapiro is unsettling as hell as Charlie, Annie’s daughter who was curiously close to Annie’s mother (when no one else was). Charlie is …strange. Like, preternaturally strange. Like, attracts birds to fly into windows and cuts their heads off and makes little bird-headed dolls with it strange. Ann Dowd almost passes by unexpected the first time you see her character, but with each subsequent appearance, her presence is felt more strongly and suspiciously.

But by far the most unexpected surprise is Alex Wolff as Peter, Annie’s oldest son and an unexpected focal point of all this horror. Peter’s a character who starts out serving one function in the story but by the end is something else entirely, and Wolff goes all out to play an extreme sense of horror. In any other film that didn’t also star Toni Collette going for the Olympic gold in terror, it’s Wolff’s performance we’d all be talking about.

The Horror Builds Through Unusual Things Like Set Design

The doll-house motif in Hereditary is not subtle, but writer/director Ari Aster does some really fascinating and insidious things with the fact that, from the opening minutes, we’re meant to distrust the very house that most of the action takes place in. It’s one of the many ways that Hereditary reminded me of last year’s divisive mother!, another movie whose existence on some astral plane between reality and and pure Biblical horror is often very fuzzy. There are times in this movie where it takes you a while to orient yourself as to which direction is up, and the effect is properly disorienting and ultimately terrifying.

It’ll Leave You Clucking

Any good horror movie needs a hook, and some of the best ones leave you with a small motif that lingers and becomes familiar enough to scare your friends. Like how after we both saw The Strangers, I was able to scare the hell out of my sister by just asking her “Is Tamara home?” Hereditary definitely boasts something similar, it is a tongue cluck, and once you see the movie, it will be impossible not to sneak up behind friends and cluck at them to freak them out.

Where to stream Hereditary