Before we meet Charlie (Milly Shapiro), the younger of the Graham family’s children in Ari Aster’s 2018 film Hereditary, we’re already worried about her. It’s the morning of her grandmother’s funeral, and her father, Steve, played by Gabriel Byrne, can’t find her anywhere. Exasperated, he finally wakes Charlie in the treehouse. “You could catch pneumonia!” he warns.
“It’s okay,” she says, but Charlie is not okay.
She evinces a flat affect—Charlie is not so much passive aggressive as just passive. She couples this quality with a pathological carelessness. At 13, Charlie demonstrates less concern about her serious food allergy than many 5 year-olds. Constantly munching on sweets, she has an appetite for the types of food that could be fatal to her. Charlie’s radical insouciance seems to suggest that she has inherited the family’s history of mental disorder, but her troubles resist diagnosis. She doesn’t seem depressed. Is she on the autism spectrum? The characters of Hereditary overtly reference a number of mental disorders, but never one in regard to Charlie.
Charlie (Millie Shapiro) eating a chocolate bar
Charlie’s increasingly dark eccentricity eventually moves her out of the realm of the psychiatric and into the demoniac. The influence of one of pop culture’s best-known demon children, Damien (Harvey Stephens) of The Omen (1976), menaces the characters of Hereditary. Unlike Damien, the anti-Christ who is switched at birth into a loving family, Charlie is her mother’s daughter. In spite of this, she, like Damien, is a play on the medieval trope of the changeling.
Damien (Harvey Spencer Stephens) in The Omen
The changeling was a trope in medieval literature and folklore in which a fairy would kidnap a human baby and replace it with its own offspring, leaving the human mother to raise a strange but seemingly human creature. Changeling stories seem to have expressed a number of maternal anxieties. If the child suffered a physical deformity or developmental abnormality, perhaps it was really a fairy. If the new mother experienced post-partum depression or struggled to establish an emotional connection with her infant, perhaps it was really a fairy. Changeling stories dehumanize the infant. In doing so, they offer an explanation for a range of maladies besetting mother and child.
In The Omen, Damien’s mysterious nativity addresses the problem of evil. “Why do bad children happen to good parents?” the film asks. Perhaps, like Damien, they were born that way. Bad children, then, are changelings who never really belonged to their good parents.
But at first look, such a reading doesn’t seem to apply to Hereditary. The film never calls Charlie’s heredity into question; in fact, her weirdness only cements her place among the star-crossed Grahams. She is Annie’s (Toni Collette) daughter, but, we learn, she really belongs to Ellen.
Annie explains to Charlie the role her grandmother played in raising her: “She wouldn’t let me feed you. It was infuriating.” Annie protected Peter (Alex Wolff) from her mother’s entrapping attention, but Charlie she surrendered, to disastrous effect.Charlie is not a changeling, but she is changed. (Only in the final moments of the film do we begin to understand just how changed.) Still, the trope of the changeling illuminates the maternal issues that are at the heart of Hereditary; it is easier to accept Charlie’s apparent disability early in the story in light of the later revelations.
One anxiety the film is speaking to is the inexplicable rise of developmental disabilities, such as autism, in children during recent years. Many viewers of Hereditary who are parents will identify with the strained relationship Annie has with her teenage son. A growing minority of those parents will also identify with the exasperation Steve and Annie feel raising a girl who seems indifferent to her health or to “normal” social cues.
Charlie at her workbench
For Annie, these fraught relationships with her children must be the source of the feelings of “blame” she confesses to. She struggles to articulate who blames her, or even for what, but the blame is undeniably real to her.
By the movie’s end, we can see that Annie deserves no blame at all. She glides through her final trial with lifeless eyes, like a marionette guided by strings. Her gravest errors—allowing herself to be deceived in her grief, failing to cut off her ties with her mother sooner—stem from her love for her family. This, Annie’s love, is the heroine’s fatal flaw that Peter’s English teacher encourages the audience to find.
Most importantly, though, we learn that Annie is absolutely blameless for Charlie’s distorted personality. It wasn’t even Annie’s genes that caused Charlie’s problems. Rather, Charlie, and Annie, and the whole family, are victims of a malevolence beyond imagining. They are pawns, like the tiny figures that populate Annie’s small-scale houses. This evil, channeled somehow through Ellen, infected Charlie in her infancy, changing her from the baby to which Anne gave life into something strange, aloof, and evil.
Charlie’s disorder, whatever it is, is not Annie’s fault, the movie insists.Of course it isn’t. Almost all parents understand, on an intellectual level, that a child’s developmental disorder is no one’s fault. Modern viewers don’t require a narrative of fey kidnappers to assuage the conscience. And yet, Annie’s vague “blame” persists. This quality makes her, perhaps, even more identifiable as a mother than her heroic love. Her secret guilt is as irrational as it is insistent.
Annie’s “blame” is the stuff of horror.
Trevor Babcock is a Visiting Lecturer at Indiana University where he earned his PhD in
literature in 2017. He has written on the Netflix exclusive, Velvet Buzzsaw (2019) and Beyond the Black Rainbow here.
You can read more about Hereditary here. And check out a post on how Upgrade, Hereditary, and First Reformed all feature decapitation and body horror generally in very provocative ways.
The Omen is available to stream on Amazon:
And you can stream Hereditary on Amazon:
