Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018) is often lauded as a masterpiece of modern horror, but to call it a “horror movie” is almost reductive. It is, fundamentally, a family tragedy dressed in the aesthetics of the occult.
What makes Hereditary so enduringly terrifying is not its jump scares—of which there are remarkably few—but its relentless exploitation of inevitable grief. Aster uses the mechanics of the camera to make the viewer feel complicit in the tragedy. The wide, unblinking shots of the miniatures in the Graham house serve to remind us that these characters are merely playthings, doomed by forces entirely outside their control.
This sense of fatalism is the true horror. It is the realization that the past is a poison that inevitably infects the present.