Hereditary, Ari Aster’s incredible horror debut, is well-known the world over for being perhaps one of the best horror movies of recent memory. The film itself is so expertly crafted that you may not have noticed some of the hints it gives its viewers about the cult-shaped carnage that’s going to ensue in the last quarter of the film.
While not all of these are obvious on the first watch without being fairly familiar with occultism and a keen eye, upon a second watch, you’ll notice people hiding in the shadows and a strange symbol around the necks of a lot of the main family.
Shadow People. Everywhere.
When watching Hereditary, you might need to turn the brightness up on your TV to catch some of these. The film features tons of people hiding in the shadows, from Peter’s mother standing in the back of his room when she has no business being there, to a man who eagerly and rather creepily eyes Charlie at the beginning of the film during her grandmother’s funeral. He later shows in the hallway. Naked. That’s much later in the film though, after it has been fairly well-established that something sinister is going on behind the scenes.
Paimon’s Seal
What’s the weird necklace that Toni Colette’s character Annie is wearing around her neck during the funeral? Just some sort of knick-knack belonging to her deceased grandmother we can assume. But why was her mother buried with one of those on instead of just something like a nice pearl necklace or a brooch? Because that’s the seal of Paimon in demonology, used for summoning him into a triangle to be bound by a magician. Either because they need something and think that consorting with chthonic entities is the best way to go about getting it, or because the sly demon has duped the unexperienced mage into worshipping it.
Paimon’s Physical Appearance In Demonology
When specifically asked about it, Ari Aster said that he chose Paimon over anyone else such as Satan because Satan’s just a little bit played-out. But aside from that, Paimon isn’t all that crazy-looking in appearance. He’s just a man who’s riding a camel through the desert, which means that Natt Wolfe is a perfect option, being just a normal-looking kid.
No makeup needed, and if he wanted to, he could have played with the idea of the audience never knowing whether or not Peter was possessed until it was too late. It’s not as if it would require some sort of transformation or anything. With a little bit of demonology knowledge in conjunction with the seal, you could pretty much guess that Peter becomes the candidate for possession.
The Spirit In The Triangle
If you’re looking at the floors in the film, which is maybe not where most of the action is most of the time, you’ll notice that there are black triangles carved into the floor of the main family’s house. Aside from that, when the evil agent of Paimon,, Joan, has Annie visit her to talk about the seance, she has a triangle set up neatly on her table. This is a hint that she’s not using the table just for seances, but to have audiences with Paimon himself. It might even mean that neither of them are talking to the dead at all. One of the worries of Christians during the time of Spiritism was that those who take part in seances aren’t talking to the dead, but demons pretending to be their lost loved ones.
A Male Host
While we hear in the film that Grandma had a certain affinity for Charlie, maybe she just always wanted a granddaughter. Nothing against Peter who was the firstborn or anything, but that’s just how it is, right? Wrong. “Grandma always wanted me to be a boy.” Why’s that? Because it would be preferable for Paimon to take the form of a male. We can assume that Charlie also got that name since it’s fairly gender-neutral, so as not to upset Paimon who was living inside of her, driving her to do odd things like harvest the corpses of dead birds.
Magick Words And Aleister Crowley
There are incantations written throughout the film, and shouted at Peter by Joan. One of these words is Zazas, a word used by Aleister Crowley to call forth Choronzon. Aleister Crowley was a magician born in Victorian England who died in the US in 1947. In his cosmology, Satan wasn’t an evil force, but it’s difficult to classify Crowley as a Satanist anyway.
The big bad in his religion was Choronzon, and the portal to Choronzon was opened with an invocation featured in Hereditary. While it isn’t a 1:1 mapping, it’s most likely one of the spookiest, alien-sounding words Ari Aster dug up in his research, and the dark connotations make it all the more an applicable addition to the film.
Grandma’s Insanity
Grandma wasn’t the most well-loved by Annie, which is well-evidenced by the fact that the eulogy she wrote for her mother could be seen as almost insulting. Her mother was almost always distant from her, and when she got really bad “mentally” towards the end of her life, she stayed with the family, taking a particular liking to Charlie. Annie’s older brother was also a schizophrenic who committed suicide in his mother’s bedroom. Not only is this a particularly weird place to hang yourself, but it gets even more strange when we hear in some dialogue that he accused his mother of trying to “put people inside of” him.
The Herb
There’s a picture of Annie’s mother feeding Charlie as a baby, and the bottle doesn’t seem to be just milk. It also appears to be odd that Annie is incapable of breastfeeding Charlie, and therefore has to bottle-feed her in the first place. When we see a picture of Charlie being bottle-fed on the refrigerator, you notice that there’s a strange green herb in her bottle, and not just like it’s sprinkled. It’s visible in the photo. It’s also pointed out explicitly by Ari Aster as being the same herb that Annie pulls out of her mouth when drinking tea with Joan.
Rosemary’s Baby Connection
The whole film wears its influences on its sleeve, which isn’t exactly a bad thing. It’s just easy to see that there’s something more sinister going on behind the scenes than it would appear at first glance.
Once we start to figure out that there’s an obvious shift in focus from Charlie after her death to Annie, Joan, and Peter, it becomes obvious that they all have no small part in what is to come. There’s also Joan. Joan appears to be entirely too sweet, if not a little bit strange. She’s extremely reminiscent of the Castavet family that features so heavily in Rosemary’s Baby.
Grief, Or Something More?
Annie is constantly consumed by her family struggles, so much so that she’s unable to complete her work, which as far as we know is the main income that the family relies on. It’s understandable with the death of her mother and the death of her daughter happening so close together, but it also appears as if there’s something else going on. She starts to sleepwalk again, and in a few instances, it’s unclear if Peter’s having a nightmare or if Annie is actually in his room attempting to murder him. This all becomes clear at the end of the film when we realize that she was trying to save Peter from becoming possessed by the end of the film, most likely subconsciously.
