Hereditary

Ever since near the end of my junior year in high school I knew I was probably gonna go to school to study film. So after halfway through my senior year, I decided my New Year’s resolution for 2024 would be to watch as many movies off my watchlist as possible and start prioritizing it. Since then, ive also watched a lot of films from the horror genre (although I still have a lot more I need to get to). I picked up on a pattern for some horror films. Some horror films tend to do this really cheap thing where they do really dumb cliches, like the one where the room goes silent for a few seconds than bam, jump-scare. Or have most of the main characters be a bunch of idiots. Or just be painfully uninteresting because of it being a premise that’s been used over and over again.  Here, it takes a premise that most audiences are somewhat familiar with, but does it in a way I haven’t seen before. The pattern that I’ve picked up on from horror films that I’ve seen, but liked, is always the ones that take enough time to try to reel me in as the viewer. This movie did that, and made me care about the characters and their dynamic a lot, and then when the scares came in, thats what made it so unbelievably effective. Even before the supernatural elements of the film kick in, it’s still making you question what you’re seeing and what’s going on. There’s so much that feels like it’s going unexplained, which keeps your attention so well. And when the crazy parts kick in, sometimes you don’t even notice things in the frame till a few seconds later, and than when you finally notice, it makes what you’re watching so much more frightening. In a lot of this film, you’re just as clueless as the characters in it, so when things start to go wrong, you are with them in every moment. The more intense it gets, the more intimate you feel with these characters. So when they’re slowly turning their heads, you’re just as terrified as them at what you’re about to see.  I truly cannot imagine being more terrified while watching a movie than when I watched this. It had me on the edge of my seat, and I really pressed play on this thing thinking I wasn’t about to get humbled.  Easiest 10/10 ever, as of right now, the best horror film I’ve ever seen.