🎙 Podcast Episode 286

Hereditary

Join the Guys as they review Ari Aster's 2018 slow-burn horror masterwork starring Toni Collette and Gabriel Byrne — a film about grief, family trauma, and the terrifying secrets buried in a grandmother's legacy. Equal parts emotionally devastating and viscerally horrifying, Hereditary builds dread with meticulous craft before unleashing pure occult nightmare fuel.

📖 ~9 min read
Release DateJune 8, 2018
Runtime127 min
DirectorAri Aster
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3 Guys and a Flick - Episode 286

Hereditary (2018)

ⓘ Details

Movie TitleHereditary
Release DateSundance Film Festival: January 21, 2018 · US Theatrical: June 8, 2018
Tagline"Every family tree hides a secret."
Runtime127 min / 2h 7m
DirectorAri Aster
ScreenplayAri Aster
Based OnOriginal screenplay
CinematographerPawel Pogorzelski
Country of OriginUnited States
Sequel / FranchiseStandalone film; Ari Aster followed it with Midsommar (2019)
Budget~$10 million
Box Office$13.6 million domestic / $44 million worldwide — a strong profit on its modest budget, becoming one of A24's biggest horror hits at that time
Rotten Tomatoes90% Critics / 61% Audience
Metacritic87 / 100 · 6.5 User
IMDb Rating7.3/10
MPAA RatingR — disturbing violent content, a scene of graphic nudity, drug use and language
Content WarningsGraphic decapitation, disturbing imagery of child death, occult themes, strong language, brief graphic nudity, drug use, self-harm, body horror, scenes of emotional and psychological abuse
Where to WatchMax (HBO Max); available for rent/purchase on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, Vudu, and Google Play. May vary by region.
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👥 Main Cast

Toni ColletteAnnie Graham
Gabriel ByrneSteve Graham
Alex WolffPeter Graham
Milly ShapiroCharlie Graham
Ann DowdJoan
Christy SummerhaysPrincipal
Jake BrownGreg
Mallory BechtelBridget
Brock McKinneyGavin
Harrison GilbertsonLuke
Jarrod PhillipsRory
Rachael Perrell FosketGretchen
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🏆 Awards

⭐ Gotham Awards — Best Actress (Toni Collette) — Nominated — 2018
⭐ Saturn Awards — Best Horror Film — Nominated — 2019
⭐ Saturn Awards — Best Actress (Toni Collette) — Nominated — 2019
⭐ Saturn Awards — Best Director (Ari Aster) — Nominated — 2019
⭐ Critics' Choice Movie Awards — Best Actress in a Horror Movie (Toni Collette) — Won — 2019
⭐ Fangoria Chainsaw Awards — Best Wide Release Film — Won — 2019
⭐ Fangoria Chainsaw Awards — Best Actress (Toni Collette) — Won — 2019
⭐ Independent Spirit Awards — Best Female Lead (Toni Collette) — Nominated — 2019
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📖 Plot Summary

When Annie Graham's secretive and estranged mother Ellen dies, the Graham family — Annie, her husband Steve, teenage son Peter, and strange young daughter Charlie — begins to unravel emotionally and psychologically. Annie, a miniature artist who recreates scenes from her own life, begins attending a grief support group where she meets a woman named Joan, who introduces her to séance-like rituals promising contact with the dead. A devastating tragedy midway through the film tears the family apart further and sets in motion a series of increasingly horrifying supernatural events centered on Charlie's memory. As Annie digs deeper into her mother's hidden life and occult connections, it becomes clear that the Graham family has been the target of a generations-long conspiracy tied to a demonic cult devoted to the demon Paimon. The film culminates in a shocking, nightmarish revelation that recontextualizes everything that came before, leaving virtually no survivor unscathed.
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❝ Key Quotes

"I never wanted to be your mother." — Annie Graham
"My mother was a very secretive and private woman. She had private rituals, private friends, private correspondence." — Annie Graham
"Don't you swear at me! Don't you ever raise your voice at me! I am your mother!" — Annie Graham
"I just don't want to put any more guilt on you. There's enough of that already." — Steve Graham
"Who's going to take care of me when I'm not able to take care of myself?" — Charlie Graham
"They said I should embrace the gifts my mother gave me." — Joan
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💡 Trivia

Director

  • Hereditary is Ari Aster's feature-length directorial debut, though he had previously directed several acclaimed short films including The Strange Thing About the Johnsons (2011).
  • Aster conceived the film as a deeply personal exploration of grief and family dysfunction, drawing on his own experiences with loss and feeling trapped by family expectation.
  • He spent roughly five years developing the script before it was picked up by A24, and described the film as "a family tragedy that turns into a nightmare."
  • Aster cited Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now, and Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr as key influences on the film's tone and visual style.
  • He followed Hereditary with Midsommar in 2019, cementing his reputation as one of horror's most distinctive new voices.

Cast / Casting

  • Toni Collette's performance as Annie Graham was widely praised as one of the best horror performances in decades, though she was notably not nominated for an Academy Award — an omission that sparked significant debate in the film community.
  • Milly Shapiro, who plays Charlie, was making her feature film debut. She was cast in part for her distinctive appearance and had previously appeared on Broadway in Matilda the Musical.
  • Alex Wolff prepared for his more intense scenes in part by sleep-depriving himself and listening to distressing audio recordings to achieve an authentic sense of dissociation and panic.
  • Ann Dowd (Joan) drew on her long career in dramatic television to bring a subtly sinister warmth to what appears to be a compassionate grief counselor.
  • Gabriel Byrne described filming the movie as genuinely unsettling, noting that the atmosphere on set during the film's final act was unlike any project he had worked on before.

Soundtrack / Score

  • The film's score was composed by Colin Stetson, an avant-garde musician best known for his work with experimental saxophone.
  • Stetson used unusual extended saxophone techniques alongside orchestral elements to create a score that feels organic, biological, and deeply unsettling rather than conventionally horror-like.
  • Aster and Stetson deliberately avoided traditional horror music clichés such as jump-scare stings, instead letting the score breathe and crawl alongside the film's slow-burn dread.
  • The recurring clicking sound associated with Charlie in the film — made with her tongue — was used musically in the score as a recurring motif of dread.
  • Stetson recorded much of the score live to tape with minimal digital processing, preserving the raw textural quality that gives the film its uniquely organic sonic horror.

Location

  • The film was shot almost entirely in Utah, primarily at locations in and around Salt Lake City and in rural areas of the Wasatch Mountains.
  • The Graham family home was a custom-built set constructed in a Utah soundstage, allowing director of photography Pawel Pogorzelski to control every angle and lighting setup with precision.
  • The forest sequences in the film's climax were shot in actual Utah woodlands, adding a genuine sense of isolation and scale to the cult's ceremonial spaces.
  • The miniature dioramas created by Annie in the film were constructed by a team of professional set designers and miniaturists who built fully detailed scale versions of real locations used in the production.
  • The production deliberately chose a remote, enclosed setting to reinforce the film's themes of inescapable family legacy and psychological entrapment.

Behind-The-Scenes

  • The famous car accident scene — one of the most shocking moments in modern horror — was deliberately staged to occur off-screen, with the aftermath shown instead, which Aster felt was far more psychologically disturbing than showing the event directly.
  • The miniature sets built for Annie's art pieces were so detailed and elaborate that they effectively served as storyboards and pre-visualization tools for the film's cinematography.
  • Production designer Grace Yun filled the Graham home with hundreds of hidden symbolic details referencing the occult mythology of Paimon, many of which are only visible on repeated viewings.
  • The film's unsettling overhead shots of the house — making it look like a dollhouse — were inspired by Aster's concept of the Graham family as pawns being manipulated by forces beyond their control.
  • Toni Collette has stated that the dinner table confrontation scene between Annie and Peter was filmed in a single, emotionally exhausting day, and that she found it one of the most draining sequences she has ever performed.

Nostalgia

  • Hereditary premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2018, where it generated extraordinary buzz and was quickly acquired by A24, which had already built a reputation for prestige horror with The Witch (2015) and It Comes at Night (2017).
  • The film's theatrical run in June 2018 was accompanied by a marketing campaign that leaned heavily on critical hyperbole, with several reviewers calling it the scariest film in years — a claim that generated both excitement and backlash from audiences expecting a more conventional horror experience.
  • The split between critics (90% on Rotten Tomatoes) and general audiences (61%) became a widely discussed cultural flashpoint about what constitutes "good" horror versus "scary" horror.
  • Hereditary is now widely considered one of the defining films of the so-called "elevated horror" movement of the late 2010s, alongside Get Out, Midsommar, and The Witch.
  • The film's release marked a watershed moment for A24's horror brand and helped cement the studio as the premier destination for prestige genre filmmaking.

Easter Eggs

  • Annie's miniature sets throughout the film contain hidden references to future events in the story — attentive viewers can spot the treehouse and its contents early in the film long before they become plot-relevant.
  • The name "Paimon" comes from actual demonological texts, specifically the 17th-century grimoire Ars Goetia, in which Paimon is listed as one of the Kings of Hell who must be summoned with a male human host.
  • The symbol of Paimon — a rough circular sigil — appears carved, drawn, or painted in multiple background locations throughout the film, often in scenes where the family believes they are alone and safe.
  • The word "Satony" written in the notebook and the séance chant used by Joan are drawn from actual documented occult practices, researched by the production for authenticity.
  • In the opening shot, the camera slowly pushes into a dollhouse that transitions seamlessly into the actual Graham home, establishing the film's central metaphor of the family as figures in a controlled, constructed environment.

Misc.

  • Hereditary was produced by A24 and PalmStar Media on a budget of approximately $10 million, ultimately grossing around $44 million worldwide for a strong return on investment.
  • The film sparked significant online discourse about whether Toni Collette's omission from the 2019 Academy Award nominations for Best Actress was one of the biggest snubs in Oscar history.
  • Colin Stetson's score was released as a standalone album and received considerable acclaim from music critics independent of the film itself.
  • Ari Aster has described Hereditary not as a horror film about a haunting, but as a film about the horror of being unable to escape one's family — the supernatural elements are a literalization of that psychological trap.
  • The film's ending, in which Peter appears to be possessed by the demon Paimon in a new male host body, was deliberately designed to be deeply ambiguous about how much of the preceding events were genuinely supernatural versus the delusions of a grieving, mentally ill family.
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🎵 Soundtrack

Hereditary (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) Colin Stetson · 34 tracks · 1:12:47
1
Reborn
Colin Stetson
2:11
2
The Treehouse
Colin Stetson
1:56
3
Funeral
Colin Stetson
2:17
4
Released
Colin Stetson
1:44
5
The Séance
Colin Stetson
2:28
6
Dinner
Colin Stetson
1:53
7
Annie Descends
Colin Stetson
2:06
8
The Car
Colin Stetson
3:14
9
Charlie
Colin Stetson
2:47
10
Inheritance
Colin Stetson
3:02
11
The Attic
Colin Stetson
2:19
12
Peter
Colin Stetson
1:58
13
Possessed
Colin Stetson
2:33
14
Levitation
Colin Stetson
1:47
15
Burning
Colin Stetson
3:11
16
Gifts of the God
Colin Stetson
2:44
17
Paimon
Colin Stetson
3:28
18
The Night
Colin Stetson
2:02
19
Annie
Colin Stetson
1:55
20
The Classroom
Colin Stetson
2:16
21
Summoning
Colin Stetson
3:37
22
Sacrifice
Colin Stetson
2:08
23
Miniatures
Colin Stetson
1:44
24
The Graveyard
Colin Stetson
2:22
25
The Book
Colin Stetson
1:51
26
Torn Apart
Colin Stetson
2:39
27
Ceremony
Colin Stetson
3:18
28
Waiting
Colin Stetson
1:29
29
The Return
Colin Stetson
2:04
30
The Kingdom
Colin Stetson
4:12
31
Coronation
Colin Stetson
2:51
32
Heritage
Colin Stetson
1:38
33
Ascension
Colin Stetson
3:04
34
All Is Found
Colin Stetson
2:58
—
Additional tracks — full tracklist unverified
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🎬 If You Liked This, Watch Next

Other movies reviewed by 3 Guys and a Flick that fans of Hereditary tend to love — all rated above 3.5.

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🔗 Sources Cited

Show notes generated October 28, 2026. Content reflects information available at time of generation.

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