‘Hereditary’s’ Scariest Scene Isn’t About Gore, It’s About Trauma

Warning: This article contains major spoilers for Hereditary. Proceed at your own risk!

This Fourth of July marks the opening weekend of Midsommar, director Ari Aster‘s highly-anticipated follow-up to Hereditary. The film—starring Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, and William Jackson Harper as a group of friends who get caught up in a Swedish cult—is highly anticipated for good reason: Hereditary was really, really scary, and really, really good.

The buzz around Hereditary began after it premiered at Sundance in early 2018. The word on the street (read: Film Twitter) was that it was “the scariest movie of all time.” Because of that, I went into my theater that summer with one hand over my eyes, expecting jump scares and body horror. I did indeed get those things, and it was very scary. But the true terror of Hereditary—and what cemented its title as the scariest movie I’ve ever seen—was in its brutal, unflinching depiction of trauma. And no scene in Hereditary did that better than Charlie’s death scene.

First, a quick refresher for those who haven’t seen the film or have forgotten some of the details. (The film is streaming free for Amazon Prime subscribers, so you can also rectify that immediately.) Hereditary stars Toni Collette as Annie Graham, an artist and a mother of two children. Her 16-year-old son Peter (played by Alex Wolff) is a more or less normal stoner kid, but her 13-year-old daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro) is weird, reserved, and dead-eyed. There’s a lot in there about mental illness, the death of Annie’s mother, and ghosts—but all you really need to know to appreciate the horror of this scene is that however messed up this family may be, they still love each other. Oh, and also: Charlie is allergic to nuts.

One day, Peter lies to his mom and says he is going to a school event that’s really a party. She forces him to take his sister with him. Charlie wanders around unsupervised at the party and eats cake with nuts in it, and starts to go into anaphylactic shock. Peter, stoned out of his mind but still trying to help his sister, rushes Charlie into the car to drive her to the hospital. As they’re speeding down the road, Charlie puts her head out of the window, trying to breathe. Peter swerves to avoid a dead deer, and Charlie is decapitated by a telephone pole. There is no blood at all—just the screech of tires, the sickening crack of Charlie’s neck snapping, and then, worst of all, complete silence.

In the excruciating four minutes that follow, Aster resists the obvious, gruesome shot of Charlie’s decapitated head or her remaining corpse, which any other horror film would cut to immediately. Instead, the camera stays on Wolff, who gives a pitch-perfect, anxiety-inducing performance of being in shock. Peter sits there in his car, knowing what just happened but unable to process or accept it. At one point he offers a mumbled, aborted “Are you OK?” in the direction of his sister’s body, though he knows it’s useless.

We sit with his trauma in real time for a full minute, before Aster finally releases us and pulls the camera way. Peter drives silently home. He walks in a zombie-like state into his house. He crawls into bed. The complete lack of music up until this point only adds to the horrific realism of the scene. But then, the faint sounds of Colin Stetson’s eerie score start to creep in as we watch Peter lie in bed, dead-eyed. The sun eventually comes up—and we’re still tight on Peter’s face—and then the blood-curdling sound of Toni Collette’s scream pierces the silence. She’s discovered her daughter’s body in the car. At this point, Aster finally, finally cuts to Charlie’s rotting, bloody head, now covered in ants, laying in the sun-light road.

It’s horrific, and a great prop to be sure. But the image that sticks with me is Wolff’s anguished face before that terrible drive home.

Woof. Who else feels extremely uncomfortable and would like to never, ever think about this scene again? But who also feels strangely fascinated by it, and wants to watch it over and over, because it’s just kind of horrible? Now that’s what I call a realistic depiction of trauma. There’s nothing scarier than the horrors of real life.

Watch Hereditary on Prime Video