I Don't Really Like Hereditary

Like the Babadook, Hereditary represents Barbara Creed’s “monstrous feminine” through its maternal figure. Also, like the Babadook, I don’t really like this movie, but that’s mostly irrelevant to this discussion. I think one of the primary reasons for this may be the fact that Hereditary is essentially just Rosemary’s Baby, but re-spun to be both more blatant and more obscure for contemporary audiences. It is more blatant in the sense that its scares are more explicit. In this way, it is again similar to The Babadook, which neatly names categorizes that which we are supposed to be afraid of. Hereditary does similarly by relying on prominent horror trope imagery and gruesome violence to achieve its effects. This is not a problem in and of itself, but I think that this coupled with the fact that of its narrative unoriginality and the lofty pretensions of its writer/director make for a rather eye-rolling experience—passing off a flashier, gorier retelling of Rosemary’s Baby for millennials as “America’s next great horror film” is totally contrary to what I think makes horror such a powerful genre in the first place. They are intended to shock and repulse and to be controversial, not to be on everyone’s “best movies of the year” list. This is what I mean when I say that Hereditary is more obscure than Rosemary’s Baby, it cloaks its generic intentions in the guise of the ever-troubling notion of auteurism. Perhaps this is more of a critique of the film’s reception than its actual content, though. Isn’t it strange that we’re putting a highly-polished, critically claimed work next to the likes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Day of the Woman?

Sorry, this strayed very far from the readings. I just don’t like Hereditary.