Genre: Horror
Premise: When Ellen, the matriarch of the Graham family, passes away, her daughter’s family begins to unravel cryptic and increasingly terrifying secrets about their ancestry.
About: Billed “The scariest movie of the year!” Hereditary comes out this weekend. It made waves after a few festival screenings, with many coming away saying that we’d found our next great director. That director, Ari Aster, is also the writer.
Writer: Ari Aster
Details: 118 pages (for a horror script?!?)
I’d been hearing a lot of good things about this movie. It’s the scariest movie ever. It killed at all the festivals. It’s taking A24 to the next level. It unleashes a new visionary director.
I will concede that AS A MOVIE these things may be true. I don’t know. I haven’t seen it. But as a screenplay? This is one of the worst horror scripts I’ve read in a long time. I am talking that if this script competed on Amateur Offerings, it wouldn’t have even beaten out the other four scripts that week. It’d be the 2-3 vote script a few kind-hearted souls offered the writer encouragement on. “Keep working at it. Writing takes time!”
This goes to show the power of being a writer-director. You can get a piece of shit script straight through the system cause you’re directing it yourself. So congrats to Aster. Cause if he wasn’t directing this script, it would’ve ended up in the digital cemetery.
Wife and mother, Annie, husband and father, Steve, teenage son, Peter, and teenage daughter, Charlie, are all reeling after the death of Annie’s mother, who had dementia and lived in the house up until her passing.
But truth be told, this family was fucked up long before that. Weirdo outcast Charlie cuts off the heads of dead animals and keeps them in a shoebox that she hides in the treehouse she sleeps in, even though it’s winter and she nearly dies of pneumonia every night.
Peter hates his crazy mom because, as we learn from one of the many random monologues she spews, he woke up one night covered in paint thinner with Annie standing over him with a match.
Charlie has a nut allergy. The surest way to identify a newbie screenwriter (besides naming a female character with a male name) is the old nut allergy trope! And we get a LOT of reminders of that nut allergy. Hmm, I wonder why. Could it be that, at some point, Charlie is going to accidentally eat something with nuts in it?
Hold your horses, folks. Cause this is the nut allergy scene to end all nut allergy scenes. Peter brings outcast Charlie to a party because, yeah, teenage boys desperate to fit in with the cool crowd always take their weirdo animal-head-loving younger sisters who are often mistaken for a guy to parties. Totally sounds like real life to me.
But we need that nut allergy scene! So she’s coming with.
Charlie, who normally talks to nobody, is so taken by the chocolate cake being baked in the kitchen (cause, you know, teenagers always bake cakes at high school parties), scarfs several pieces down, only to find out afterwards that the cake had nuts in it!
A freaked out Peter throws her in the car and tries to rush her to the hospital, during which Charlie sticks her head out the window to enjoy the wind – since that’s what you do when you’re dying, enjoy a nice breeze – only for Peter to see a deer, swerve out of the way, and for Charlie’s head to hit a telephone poll and DECAPITATE.
I’m not lying. This happens.
Oh, this is the good part. Peter ignores this, drives home, parks the car, and goes to sleep. Because… well because this situation WAS RIPPED OFF FROM A REAL LIFE STORY THAT HAPPENED A DECADE AGO AND MADE NATIONAL HEADLINES. So I guess we’re just randomly ripping off real life fantastical events to get our shock on.
It only gets worse, folks.
The script has NO POINT. NO DESTINATION. The writer has no concept of how to craft a story. So we just follow the characters as they wander about their lives until the writer comes up with something he thinks may be scary. Seances are scary, right?! Let’s do one of those then! So it’s time for a seance where Annie talks like Charlie.
Hey, what happened to the grandmother? The one we’re told is the reason this story exists? Ehhh… not relevant. But we’ve got sleepwalking! Lots of people sleepwalk in this movie. Why? Cause sleepwalking is scary! That’s the only determinant for inclusion in Hereditary. Something scary? Include it. Something that crafts compelling characters or a story with a purpose? Throw it out.
I suppose the driving force of the story is the growing animosity between Peter and his mother. We’re supposed to want to see how that’s going to end? But I never bought it. Not for a second. Why? Because there wasn’t a single honest beat between this family. They talked like they’d all met each other a week before the movie started.
And everything is manipulated. Nobody talks TO each other. The dialogue is used solely as a means to justify an improbable moment or reveal relevant backstory. For example, Peter, who has never once in the movie expressed any interest in talking to his mom or seeing how she feels, out of nowhere starts yelling at Annie to tell him what she “really feels.” This allows Annie to monologue an admission that she hates her son and never wanted him in the first place. When you make characters do things that they wouldn’t normally do in order to make something happen that you need to happen, you are CHEATING. You are LYING. You are undermining the reality of your characters.
But I kept on.
There were so many things that irritated me in this script. Like when we cut to the decapitated head of Charlie the next day, it has ants all over it.
Ants?
IT’S BEEN WINTER THE WHOLE MOVIE!!!
Are these winter ants??? Are you creating new species of ants?????
This may seem like a nitpick but it embodies everything that is wrong with this script. The writer liked the image of ants on the head so much that he was willing to disregard everything he’d set up beforehand. Style over substance.
The only thing that saves this from being the worst horror script in existence is the last 20 pages, where we finally get some unique imagery, like a possessed Peter being ripped around by a demon in his classroom. But it’s still a sham. It’s still style over screenplay. Every moment is looked at through the lens of, “What’s the most shocking image I can come up with right now?” Not, “How can I explore these characters in an interesting way?” or “How can I mine my concept to create an interesting story?”
This script, with its lack of originality, with its shock-first mindset, with its inauthentic family relationship, with its wandering second act, with its blatant transperency, made me physically angry. It’s everything I preach not to do. I shouldn’t be surprised. This is the same company that made “It Comes at Night” and “The Witch,” two pretty to look at auteur-driven movies with horrible screenplays. A24, at least when it comes to horror, might want to hire a few more producers who understand screenwriting.
[x] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The BIGGEST horror screenplay sin is prioritizing imagery over story. That’s the blueprint for writing a terrible horror film. A blueprint this writer followed from page 1 to page 118.
