Showing posts with label Toni Collette. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Toni Collette. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 30, 2018

HEREDITARY - Like a really good Rosemary's Baby



In the spirit of the season, I got special permission to write about a movie not featured on the Out There Movies channel, so I’ll be talking about what I consider to be the scariest movie of 2018: HEREDITARY.


Ryan’s Recommendations:

  1. Watch this in the dark, at night.
  2. Slam some caffeine before. Get tense and get focused.
  3. Don’t chat or chuckle to cover up the silences.  Let that uncertainty invade you.
  4. If you have a need for subtitles, please use them. If you can avoid them though, they add a lot of white light to scenes that otherwise might be fundamentally dark. Seriously, run an experiment in your bedroom when it’s dark, look at all the extra light on your ceiling when subs are on.

Let this be a genuine encounter with cosmic evil. There’s just a little glass between you and hell, like a trip to the zoo in your nightmares.




Hereditary is a modern horror movie with clear nods to classic horror throughout. Like many horror movies we all love, selective focus is an important tool. Watch the backgrounds.  If you like the soundtracks John Carpenter and Goblin made for some of my favorite horror movies, you’ll be familiar and comfortable with the threatening sequencer that accompanies some scenes in Hereditary.

Recommendation number three is listed here because I love the original TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. When we first encounter the bone room, we can’t see what she has found, but there’s a shot of Sally’s anguished face as she looks around the room and realizes what she has stumbled into.  It’s an effective tension builder in general, and in the context of a chase scene is a really clever choice. We see the same technique used multiple times in Hereditary, particularly with Peter, and it’s still an excellent tool.


I don’t want to address the plot specifically, so no spoilers, but part of what unsettled me so much about this movie was the suggestion of contaminated blood. If you can honestly claim to have zero family members whose behavior has made you worry that you might carry the capacity for malevolence, and that you might enjoy it, that’s wonderful and I’m happy for you. For everyone else, there’s the suggestion in Hereditary that despite your desires, for all the effort you have made, your future might not be in your control. This movie doesn’t say that a monster is coming to eat you, but that as you live and persist, moving toward what the story of your whole life will be, no matter how foul the destination, your arrival there might be inevitable.



Hereditary is also scary to me because it isn’t some far off location where these events could happen. It was shot where I live, in Salt Lake City.  I play in a death metal band called WINTER LIGHT, and the cover of our first demo is a photo I took of the tallest peak east of my apartment. That very peak is a part of the range you see behind this funeral scene from Hereditary.  Just a little south of where that body was lowered is the peak shown on the cover of Momentum. It is my city, and just as easily it could have been yours.




This was a strong year for scary movies in general, so if you’re keeping up on what people are buzzing about, this name has surely come up for you before.  If not though, and you’re in the mood to see how the other half (of yourself) lives, check out HEREDITARY.


Check out Winter Light's music here, and pair it with a scary movie on a dark night:
winterlightdm.bandcamp.com