Movies Up Close

If you’re here, you already know that Hereditary is a very scary movie. Its disturbing imagery and scalding portrayal of family strife leave an impact long after the closing credits. Nightmares, anyone?

But there are also mysteries that invite us to look more deeply. For example: why do everyone’s heads keep coming off? What was the grandmother up to? What did the miniature models mean? Why is the movie called Hereditary?

In this piece, I’ll go on to answer all of these questions, plus many more. To summarize my conclusion before I begin, Hereditary uses horror movie tropes to dramatize the experience of developing hereditary mental illness, in particular schizophrenia.

Evidence and full analysis below.

---

At the beginning of Hereditary, Ellen Taper Leigh has died. Over the course of the movie, we learn that Ellen was no ordinary woman. She belonged to a pagan cult obsessed with the return of a powerful demon named King Paimon. In service of this cult, she fed her baby granddaughter, Charlie, special foods, preparing her body to one day be possessed by Paimon.

So far, what I’ve described is fairly standard horror content. It’s reminiscent of, among others, Rosemary’s Baby (1968). But there’s a deeper thematic significance at play. To discover it, we should start with a speech that Ellen’s daughter, Annie (Toni Collette), makes to a support group after Ellen’s death:

[My mom] didn’t have an easy life. She had DID [dissociative identity disorder], which became extreme at the end. … And my father died when I was a baby from starvation because he had psychotic depression, and he starved himself. … And there’s my brother. My older brother had schizophrenia, and when he was sixteen he hanged himself in my mother’s bedroom, and of course the suicide note blamed her for putting people inside him.

This is a severe family history of psychosis. I’m a psychiatrist myself, and I can attest that a family background like this raises immediate concern that a young person will go on to develop significant mental illness. Particularly worrisome is that not only did Annie’s father and brother both suffer from psychosis, but in both cases the symptoms were so severe that they committed suicide. Ellen didn’t suffer from psychosis, as DID is typically a sequelae of severe trauma (which she obviously did experience, through her family tragedies). So Ellen’s son apparently inherited schizophrenia from his father.

Viewed from this clinical perspective, there’s metaphorical truth in Ellen’s son’s suicide note. The note, remember, “blamed” Ellen for “putting people inside him.” And indeed, by procreating with her husband, who had severe psychotic illness, Ellen extracted and transmitted to her son the genes that conferred high risk for schizophrenia, thereby indirectly causing his hallucinations and torment.

This metaphorical connection between actual mental illness and supernatural pagan activity is the key that unlocks the symbolic meaning of the movie. The entire story reimagines Ellen’s transmission of pro-psychotic genes as a sinister plot on her part to subject her descendants to demonic possession.

The movie is called Hereditary, and now we can begin to see why. Symbolically, it’s about the passing down of “bad” genes and the devastation that can result.

Consider the theme of predetermined fate, frequently emphasized during the film. This emphasis suddenly makes sense when we recognize that, by virtue of their genetics, Annie’s children, Peter (Alex Wolff) and Charlie (Milly Shapiro), may indeed be destined to suffer severe mental illness. Annie, thankfully, doesn’t have schizophrenia. But her lineage is such that it would hardly be surprising if her offspring developed it. Again, these genetic facts manifest in the genre-familiar storyline of the children’s grandmother scheming to sacrifice them to King Paimon.

Recall that after Ellen’s burial, her body quickly goes missing and later turns up in the family attic. The meaning of this is that Ellen isn’t truly “gone,” since her long-ago act of procreation with a mentally ill man continues to dictate her family’s experiences. The genes that she helped pass on continue to “haunt” her family.

Here’s a picture of the seal for Ellen’s cult. The seal recurs at various points in the movie, often suggesting that the characters have terrible destinies. (For example, it appears on the telephone pole that later decapitates Charlie.) To me, it looks somewhat like a DNA double helix:

Fitting. Because, in the case of schizophrenia, DNA does often predetermine one’s fate. This seal eventually appears above Ellen’s dead body in the attic, underscoring what we’ve already said: that her influence on the family continues via the genetic transmission in which she participated long ago.

The theme of destiny also figures heavily in a classroom scene in which a teacher asks whether doomed literary heroes are “more tragic or less tragic.” A student responds:

I think it’s more tragic. Because if it’s all just inevitable, then that means that the characters had no hope. They never had hope, because they’re all just hopeless—they’re all just like pawns in this horrible, hopeless machine.

Her view obviously applies to Peter and Charlie, if in fact they’re genetically disposed to develop schizophrenia. Those who harbor the genes for schizophrenia indeed have “no hope.” Forces beyond their control—biological forces—have decided their fates.

Aster appears to be speaking through this student. We can infer that he, too, believes hereditary mental illness to be an extremely “tragic” subject. Hence his making a scary movie about it.

The discussion of fate can also help us understand one of the movie’s signature motifs: Annie’s models, also known as miniatures. Via fancy camera shots, Aster sometimes playfully suggests that the characters’ very world is a miniature—that they’re subject to control or manipulation by an unseen power.

Now, we can identify that power: the power of genetics. To use the student’s phrasing, DNA indeed makes “pawns” of those with inherited family illnesses. Again, the movie is called Hereditary for good reason.

It’s appropriate, then, that Annie is the one to build the miniatures. After all, her children’s genetics were determined in her womb. Therefore, Annie is the “modeler” of their lives, the architect who has—through uncontrollable cellular processes—laid out their fates.

Some scenes suggest that Annie has some awareness of this hereditary risk to which she has exposed her children. In one dream scene, Annie appears to confront guilt over giving birth to Peter. He accuses her in the dream of being “scared” of him, and she admits having desperately tried to abort him. In another scene, she recounts nearly setting her children and herself on fire while sleepwalking—suggesting a subconscious desire to undo her act of birthing them.

Let’s take a detour to focus specifically on Charlie. We’ve already noted that Charlie faces significant risk for developing psychotic illness based on her mother’s family history. But Charlie soon dies, and the bulk of the drama instead focuses on Peter. In addition, events seem to suggest that Peter’s troubles stem from Charlie’s ghostly return from the dead during a séance. What do these plot points mean in the context of our symbolic framework?

They indicate that Charlie should be seen as a human embodiment of the schizophrenia that runs in the family. Her death and subsequent return in the séance symbolize the trait’s “return” to prominence following its lack of expression in Annie.

For evidence that Charlie symbolizes the trait of schizophrenia, consider the manner of her death: decapitation. The loss of one’s head surely evokes the experience of losing one’s sanity. Schizophrenia interferes with one’s perception of reality, so decapitation is a logical (if grotesque) metaphor.

Plus, an unsettling scene involving a dead bird shows that Charlie makes a habit of decapitating others, as well. And she appears to do this for her dead grandmother’s sake, carrying the bird’s head to a vision of Ellen in a field. All of this fits with our symbolic framework. If Ellen’s evil cult represents the influence of the bad genes she reproduced, then it makes sense that Charlie, a human representation of schizophrenia, would cut off heads for Ellen. Several early scenes emphasize that Charlie had a special bond with her grandmother not shared by the rest of her family.

Next, consider Charlie’s calling card: making a clucking sound with her tongue. This sound resembles that of a ticking clock. And indeed, schizophrenia is a “ticking clock” for those with genetic predisposition. It typically emerges in young adults, most commonly in one’s twenties. However, in many cases (which tend to become the most severe), it emerges in teenagers. Given that Annie’s schizophrenic brother killed himself when he was sixteen, it seems likely that the Leigh family illness would present in teenage years.

Peter’s current age? Sixteen.

Finally, Charlie makes a habit of sleeping outside in the family treehouse. This angers her father, Steve (Gabriel Byrne), who doesn’t understand why she would prefer this uncomfortable space to the family’s posh, mansion-like house. But we can infer that if Charlie embodies schizophrenia or psychosis, she belongs, symbolically, in an environment outside of the “typical” realm. She belongs in a space like the treehouse, which sits somewhat removed from society, right on the edge of the wilderness.

If Charlie represents schizophrenia, might her death symbolize a positive development? Is the family illness gone for good?

As it turns out, no. That’s because Annie conducts a séance and brings Charlie’s spirit back from the dead. As previously mentioned, this represents the family psychosis returning after a skipped generation. Charlie’s death symbolizes Annie’s absence of schizophrenia. But Charlie’s resurrection symbolizes Annie passing the hereditary vulnerability to her offspring. In other words, Annie serves as the trait’s conduit to the next generation—just as she serves as a conduit for Charlie to return to the physical world.

And predictably, after Charlie returns, bad things begin to happen. Annie has a dream in which ants engulf Peter’s head, another rendition of the “decapitation” motif, which, as we’ve established, evokes mental illness. The same motif also underlies a different scene in which Peter sees Charlie’s head fall off and turn into a ball, then feels an attacker trying to rip his own head off. Lastly, the sound of Charlie’s clucking tongue begins to haunt both Peter and Annie.

In summary, all signs point in one direction regarding Peter’s approaching genetic fate. His clock is ticking.

Now for another detour. You might feel that, given the analysis so far, the movie is quite harsh on women. After all, it imagines the family’s grandmother, who helped pass on her husband’s bad genes, as an evil occultist aiming to have her grandchildren possessed. And it imagines the mother, who passed on those genes as a silent carrier, as a conduit for a malicious spirit haunting the family. Why do only Ellen and Annie receive attention for perpetuating schizophrenia in the family? Didn’t the men contribute, as well?

Yes. And this is the foundation for another mysterious scene. Annie recognizes that Charlie’s return has somehow put Peter in grave danger. She concludes that to save Peter, she must undo the séance and send her daughter back to the dead. Since she provided the link for Charlie to reenter the world, she reasons that she can sever that link and save Peter by destroying both herself and Charlie’s old sketchbook, the “object” that she used in the séance.

But this doesn’t go as planned. When Annie throws the sketchbook in the fire, Steve instead ignites. The meaning of this is that Steve also participated in the transmission of Annie’s genetics to their children. He, too, was a key transmitter of the bad genes—just as Ellen, who didn’t suffer from psychosis, nevertheless played an essential role in transmitting pro-psychosis genes to her descendants. Recall that Steve participated in the séance, thereby enabling Charlie to return—just as, by impregnating Annie, he allowed her family history of schizophrenia to take root in a new generation. He’s just as much a “link” for hereditary schizophrenia as Annie, hence his death upon the sketchbook’s destruction.

Steve’s incineration causes a dramatic change in Annie. Upon seeing her husband burn, her face goes blank, and she apparently becomes possessed for the rest of the movie. Why does this happen?

Recall Ellen’s diagnosis of DID, or dissociative identity disorder. As briefly mentioned before, symptoms of DID generally occur in response to severe trauma. Essentially, affected individuals develop a tendency to unconsciously “dissociate” from their original identity to escape intolerable emotional pain. Ellen’s husband and son both committed suicide, likely providing the trauma that led her to develop DID.

But now Annie, too, has experienced repeated, severe trauma. Watching Steve burn alive—by her own hand—appears to have been the last straw. Recall that she previously discovered her daughter’s headless body; plus, earlier in her life, both her father and brother killed themselves. Her ghostly condition in the final act of the movie therefore represents that she, like her mother, has developed DID.

Consider her most notable act following her sudden change: sawing off her own head with a wire. We’ve already explored how the motif of decapitation invokes the development of mental illness. But Annie’s self-mutilation is slightly different from the accidental decapitation of Charlie and the moment in which Peter feels someone trying to rip his head off. In this case, Annie intentionally removes her own head.

This corresponds nicely with DID. As I described, it’s a defense mechanism to escape the pain of repeated trauma. After the gruesome demise of her husband—her second loved one to recently die a terrible death—Annie’s brain dissociates for her own emotional protection. In other words, she subconsciously inflicts a mental change upon herself for self-preservation. This translates in horror movie imagery as cutting off her own head. A memorable (and disturbing) metaphor for DID.

Chased into the attic by his altered mother, Peter sees a naked man standing in the dark. We haven’t seen this man before. But we can reliably conclude that he’s Peter’s maternal grandfather, who starved himself to death due to psychosis. After all, Peter has apparently inherited his grandfather’s genes and is now on the verge of a psychotic break. (Recently at school, he had a terrifying vision and lost control of his body, suggestive of the emerging schizophrenia we had anticipated given the ominous signs since Charlie’s return.)

Peter then sees three more naked, ghostly figures, likely other family members who suffered from psychotic illness. This prompts him to jump out of the attic.

It’s possible to interpret this as a completed suicide. Peter may have followed in his uncle’s footsteps by killing himself at sixteen years old due to schizophrenia. This interpretation would certainly fit with the theme of genetic destiny we’ve explored.

Regardless, it’s clear that Peter ends the movie with full blown schizophrenia. After his jump, he follows his mother to the treehouse. Recall that Charlie favored this treehouse, which made sense given its “outsider” quality, conspicuously removed from typical society. Peter, having developed schizophrenia, now also gravitates toward the treehouse.

Inside, he finds Ellen’s pagan cult. He has become King Paimon, succumbing to Ellen’s malicious efforts. (These efforts, as we’ve said, correspond to her transmission of her husband’s pro-psychotic genes.) Among the cult are his mother and grandmother, both headless—symbolizing, as we’ve established, their respective DID. And the movie ends with a shot of the treehouse as yet another miniature, again conveying the predetermined nature of the characters’ fates.

I hope I’ve lent some helpful assistance in decoding Hereditary‘s symbolism and meaning. Most likely, you didn’t need my analysis to detect the movie’s thematic undercurrents of familial mental illness and trauma. But hopefully, investigating in more detail has allowed you a more comprehensive understanding of Ari Aster’s insightful and important debut. I’ve already ranked Hereditary as my favorite horror film released in the last ten years. I’m confident that given the substance reflected in this piece, you can see why.

 

—Dr. Jim Andersen

For more movies explained, see my analysis of Being John Malkovich.