Hereditary as Folk Horror

In a recent post on Ari Aster’s debut film Hereditary (2018), Brian Fanelli contends that “grief, mental illness, and the challenges of motherhood are the subconscious fears that erupt after the family suffers one loss after another.” Fanelli thus summarizes the traits passed down through the generations in the film; he also implicitly reads the text as an addition to a canon that follows what Dawn Keetley has identified as “an intriguing new trend in horror film: the horror of motherhood” and, on a larger scale, to what genre critics such as Tony Williams and Kimberly Jackson call “the family horror film.” I argue that a conjoined reading of these ideas in the context of the movie’s central horror plot—possession by a mythological demon as a result of ritualistic ceremonies—situates Hereditary within yet another new (or rather, revived) field in horror studies: folk horror.

In his seminal study Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange, Adam Scovell pinpoints four key elements of folk horror—landscape, isolation, skewed belief systems and morality, and the summoning/happening—as part of “The Folk Horror Chain.”

You can find Scovell’s important book on Amazon:

These elements of the “folk horror chain” highlight that folk horror is more than “simply horror flavoured with a pinch of handpicked folklore” (8). Hereditary’s investment in myth and legend through its employment of a pagan cult and its satanic leader, King Paimon, evidently salutes that facet of ‘folk’ in folk horror Matilda Groves reads as horror of the people rooted in folklore. More importantly, however, the film also shows that the horror is represented by the people, the folk. Rather than exclusive ghostly or supernatural monsters, folk horror’s chief sources of terror are often earthly humans who force the horrified protagonists to confront, rethink, or overhaul their rigid beliefs in favor of knowledge at odds with their own. While the film’s focus on demonic possession and the occult suggests the protagonists’ downward spiral into the realm of the supernatural and thus away from the earthly concerns of the common folk, the themes of motherhood, familial crisis, mental illness, parental guilt, and generational heredity bring some of the fundamental challenges of the human condition back to the fore. As suggested in its title, Hereditary scrutinizes the possibilities for genealogically inherited traits through possession as a metaphor for psychological disorders: folklore thus binds mythology to the people and, as we will see, is only one cause of the film’s horrors.

 

FOLKLORE:

In The Lesser Key of Solomon, an anonymously written grimoire from the 17^th century, Paimon is described as an obedient henchman of Lucifer, who “appeareth in the form of a Man sitting upon a Dromedary with a Crown most glorious upon his head. […] This Spirit can teach all Arts and Sciences, and other secret things. […] He hath under him 200 Legions of Spirits, and part of them are of the Order of Angels […]. Now if thou callst this Spirit Paimon alone, thou must make him some offering” (Laurence 24).

Other sources have traced Paimon’s origins to the djinn of Arabian mythology, who symbolize “psychological pathologies of the unconscious mind” and who have been “cursed and castigated by magicians” when the actual “point of evoking any of the Djinn is to ‘redeem’ them […] in a disciplined manner.” Paimon’s conceptualization as an abused djinn and a hailed king who demands to be respected by those who summon him and who rewarded him for his greatness in the form of sacrifice proves a powerful articulation of myth, legend, and lore in Hereditary. His attributes can be seen, for example, in the artistic efforts of protagonist Annie Graham and her daughter Charlie, in the worship by Paimon’s legion of followers, the entrancing chants to “liftoach pandemonium” (open the gates for all the demons and let him enter the earthly world, and, first and foremost, the psychological disorders at the core of the Graham family’s struggles with heredity.

 

FOLK HORROR:

Hereditary dips into all four elements of Scovell’s folk horror chain: its treatment of landscape exemplified in the Grahams’ haunted house—which is not only surrounded by the seeming dangers of a remote forest but is also mirrored mise-en-abyme-style in protagonist Annie’s miniature dollhouse, complete with replicas of the family members’ bedrooms. Landscape is also manifest in the adjacent tree house, exposed by the end of the film as the demon-worshipping cult’s primary site of ritualistic celebration.

The houses quickly take on lives of their own and exert immense pressure on the moral, mental, and emotional stability of the family, all of which is reminiscent of the core ideas of psychogeography, a concept related to folk horror. Both Annie and her daughter Charlie can only find sleep in the treehouse at distinct points in the film—suggesting the structure’s connection with King Paimon and his control over anyone who enters it—while the main family home transforms from a safe, domestic sphere into a menacing, gothic mansion.

The houses’ remote geographical locations also mirror each family member’s isolation from their healthier selves and the rest of the family. They seem cut off from the intradiegetic world, preoccupied only with their own and the family’s dysfunctionality—those shared traits, weaknesses, and illnesses that are passed down from Annie’s mother Ellen to Annie and subsequently to her daughter Charlie and son Peter. That inheritance occurs in the same way and chronological order as Paimon’s demonic possession. Instead of bringing them closer together as a family unit (as is the case in A Quiet Place (2017), for example, another powerful iteration of family horror), the Grahams’ losses and health problems isolate them more and more, skewing their beliefs about what is right or fair and who is to blame for their moral and mental downfall.

The strange happenings in the film—from the demonic hauntings to the multiple decapitations, from the distorted window reflections to Charlie’s sinister clicking sounds—speak to this displacement of logic and emphasize the clash between mythic ideas and modern perspectives. It is exemplified, for instance, in Annie’s passive-aggressive eulogy to her recently deceased mother Ellen, whose conspicuous persona and occult practices clearly do not conform with her daughter’s contemporary views.

Following Charlie’s tragic death, however, Annie’s desperation leads her to reconsider her mother’s ways. The film’s central horror-triggering summoning of King Paimon by Annie as a way to resurrect her daughter and repair her loss—another central theme of folk horror—at first seems to be the reaction of a grieving mother. But it is a direct source of Annie’s demise, arguably a sacrifice to Paimon in return for his appearance.

It turns out, however, that the film’s consecutive possessions of Ellen, Annie, and Charlie were all part of the cult’s ongoing plans to enable Paimon’s control of his ultimate form—Peter. This plot suggests a two-way understanding of folklore and horror as causes and effects in the film: the demon’s wishes spark the coven’s actions; Ellen’s impulses spur on Annie’s resentment; Annie’s perceived failure as a mother triggers her estrangement from her son; and Peter’s willingness to defy his family’s expectations offer Paimon the necessary ground to fulfill his wishes.

Peter thus functions as the family’s final if involuntary offering to the demon, who, in turn, serves as both an iteration of and a metaphorical cure for the family’s mental illnesses, suggesting the Grahams’ deep-seated desire to put an end to their heredity—no matter at what cost.

Ultimately, the film suggests that not only Ellen’s dissociative identity disorder, Annie’s father’s depression, her brother’s schizophrenia, her own bipolar disorder, and Charlie’s seemingly autistic tendencies are hereditary; so are Paimon’s possessions of the women in the family. The demon’s success in inhabiting Peter’s body in the end is conditional on Ellen’s, Annie’s, and Charlie’s deaths, i.e. on the elimination of the matriarchal line.

In the final scene of the film (see above), Peter is crowned as King Paimon, who will henceforth “bind all men to [the coven’s] will.” As the group continuously chants “Hail, Paimon!” in honor of their new ruler, the viewer is reminded of the image of Paimon as the mythological demon with a crown on his head. The scene also evokes the final scene of Ben Wheatley’s folk horror film Kill List (2011), in which a pagan cult with an unidentified motive awards their new leader Jay with a wicker crown—a prop that is, in turn, suggestive of the folk horror classic The Wicker Man (1973)—after forcing him to unknowingly kill his wife and child. Both Jay in Kill List and Peter as Paimon’s “healthy male host” in Hereditary emerge as the chosen men in their respective stories. Ultimately, in the same way that Western mythology turned Paimon, an originally pagan goddess [Link 9], into a male demonic spirit, so do the coven’s efforts in Hereditary result in the triumph of the occult and patriarchy.

 

FAMILY FOLK HORROR:

Hereditary personifies a number of demons that continue to plague humankind: mental illness, patriarchal power, and the dangers of hell as recounted in many cultures’ folk tales and religious narratives. Paimon’s victory serves as a reminder of the interconnectedness of past and present, of what Scovell calls “the olde ways and modernity” (19): the Grahams—especially Annie—are punished for disbelieving in legendary beings and ancient rituals, and thus for disregarding the impact of the past on the present. Their story of heredity, however, echoes very clearly Howard David Ingham’s argument about the central concern of folk horror: “We are haunting ourselves” (428), and thus we cannot escape our own histories.

The film—in a somewhat problematic conclusion—equates the horrors of demonic possession with those of mental illness by suggesting that both are hereditary: in the frame of folk horror, this reading is testament to the fact that the common folk—the Graham family—are defeated by the powers of folklore. Similarly, as in many folk tales and horror narratives, the female characters fall victim to male hegemony. While Paimon’s final form is inherently human, it is also unambiguously male.

 

FUTURE FOLK HORROR:

Ari Aster’s upcoming film project, Midsommar, follows in the footsteps of Hereditary but dips even more specifically into the archives of folk horror, according to the director: “I’m in pre-production for my next film which will be shooting in Hungary. […] It’s Scandinavian folk horror” about a “couple that travels to Sweden to visit their friend’s rural hometown” and ends up amidst a “violent and bizarre competition at the hands of a pagan cult.” This next addition to A24’s list of successful films is reminiscent of recent folk horror texts such as the film adaptation of Adam Nevill’s novel The Ritual (2017), in which a group of friends embarks on a hiking trip in northern Sweden, where they are faced with the horrors of Scandinavian mythology and their own fears of what it means to be human and mortal.

 

Alexandra Hauke is a lecturer at the University of Passau, Germany, where her research and teaching focuses on American popular culture, crime and detective fiction, gothic and horror studies, and American film and TV.

Hereditary is available on Amazon:

 

Works Cited:

De Laurence, L.W. The Lesser Key of Solomon: Goetia—The Book of Evil Spirits. Health Research Books, 1976.

Ingham, Howard David. We Don’t Go Back: A Watcher’s Guide to Folk Horror. Room207 Press, 2018.

Jackson, Kimberly. Gender and the Nuclear Family in Twenty-First-Century Horror. Palgrave, 2016.

Scovell, Adam. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Auteur, 2017.

Williams, Tony. Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film, Updated Edition. The UP of Mississippi, 2014.