#but i never learn i just bought the nun although i wasn't fully convinved by the summary

[evangelineartemiasamos]

I watched Hereditary last night and my first impression was what a bad horror movie it is. Especially after I saw it praised a lot.

To me, it’s an incredible mess. It throws in numerous horror tropes and themes like witchcraft, paganism, family tragedy, overacting, hauntings, lonely haunted houses, séance-ing, stalking, guilt, mental illness, gore, the stress of being an artist, grief, obscure-brooding soundtrack, unconventional cinematography, supernatual abilities, open-ending, possession etc etc while it fully commits to none of these themes. All of these elements are quickly forgotten and never fully explored or thought out. The result is a mash-up where nothing makes sense, which is insulting to the audience especially in the horror genre that relies so much on tropes (and often on harmful stereotypes, yes, it’s a shame).

A thing most horror movies have in common is a sense of harsh justice. You don’t have to agree with it, you might think it’s unjust and unfair in its own way, but for all the rule-breakings and unaccountable events, you see a sense and a why in the things happening. The contrast between the supernatural and this justice (and, in a way, the tropes and the formal storytelling) is a draw of the horror genre.

Hereditary doesn’t offer that. You don’t know why anything happens. Critics praise it for not having jump-scares but the soundtrack trying to create a scary atmosphere although nothing is actually scary counts as a jump scare to me too, though. Overall, the film-making felt like it was playing me: The camera drifts do nothing but making the pictures look less boring and the music often feels simply tacked on. You aren’t supposed to notice a good soundtrack, because it supports the mood in a subtle way. The soundtrack in Hereditary screams at you, “Look! It’s so scary! They are so dysfuntional!1! They’ll do something very bad in a moment!!” and it just annoyed me from the start of the movie.

The thing is, the movie itself is terribly conventional when outstanding horror movies are the opposite of conventional. They’re supposed to break rules, be ugly, depict immoral deeds, show dark desires, to challenge viewing expectations and be subversive and so on. But a white middle-class family living in a fancy house dealing with the loss of a family member is nothing new, and the storytelling, besides those random horror elements, doesn’t make it progressive or ground-breaking in any way, especially not compared to actually innovative and highly stylized horror movies like Hagazussa where those cinematic effects do serve the movie.

The only way I can make sense of Hereditary is regarding it as satirical of horror movies and its tropes by not respecting them. Horror movies certainly deserve criticism for their often harmful tropes while Hereditary avoids most harmful tropes. But I find it hard to make fun of the tragic fate of this family or not to take it serious, and only the most elitist tastes would be amused by such a dry, humourless satire. Unless the intention is to tell the horror audience how vile they are for being entertained by the tragic stories featured in the horror genre. But that would raise the question whether the existence of the horror genre is justified - which it is clearly is, or there would be neither the genre nor the fandom. There is an interest in horror stories, and denying that would mean Hereditary is a horror movie for people who don’t like horror movies (aka critics) while it’s trolling the horror fandom itself.

I should’ve just watched A Quiet Place instead.