Matriarchal Malice: The Role of Women in Hereditary’s Horror

Hey spookies and welcome to another Graveyard Shift and welcome to our first two part post! We’ll be looking at Ari Aster’s films Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019). In this part one, we’ll focus on Hereditary and look at Midsommar next time. While they are very different movies, one dealing with supernatural possession and the other with a Swedish cult, they both have themes of loneliness and mental health and talk about modern ideals of individualism, family, and toxic relationships. And yes, that is a recipe for two absolutely wild films. They are so often linked together, coming out almost exactly a year apart – minus about ten days –  even by Aster himself as the production times were effectively one right after another. And it might seem obvious, but spoilers for both films incoming. So, what happens in the films and what does it mean? Let’s talk about that.

Hereditary really starts and ends with Ellen. The film starts with Ellen’s death and funeral. It’s easy to think this is the end of her role in the film, not even five minutes in, but she is maybe one of the main driving forces of conflict throughout the whole film. When Annie goes to the group support meeting, we learn a lot about Ellen and about their relationship. We learn that mental illness claimed the lives of Annie’s brother and father, and it was ever present throughout her mother’s life. We learn that Ellen was the one who pressured Annie into having children in the first place, and that while Annie kept Ellen away from Peter with some help from Steve, Annie allowed Ellen to be in Charlie’s life. Ellen immediately asserted herself as a sort of second mother figure for Charlie and Annie tells us how guilty she feels for letting her mother influence not just her life but her family’s lives to the extent she has. This is a lot of information for one scene, and to start to break it down, we look at how individuality is a root of horror here.

To start with, Ellen pushes Annie into having children, raising the question of would Annie have had children if it weren’t for her mother’s influence? Both Ellen and Annie’s father suffered mental illness, which makes it possible to pass down a genetic predisposition for mental illness as we can see in Annie’s brother. Annie herself also seems to be struggling mentally, and sadly it just gets worse throughout the film. She becomes more irrational and paranoid, we see her taking medication, she has outbursts of anger and uncontrollable emotion. With how guilty Annie seems to constantly feel, it wouldn’t be a difficult assumption that she would be worried about having biological children and passing that predisposition for mental illness down to them.

This comes into the territory of individuality abjection. Abjection is a theory put forward by Julie Kristeva and is used by a good many film theorists. Barbara Creed uses it as a launching pad for her book “The Monstrous Feminine” which is a great read if you enjoy reading theory. I read the whole thing because I am a giant nerd for film theory. Abjection is the capital O Other, the Other from the self, that which disrespects societal boundaries. This is part of why horror is so subjective and so based on personal and societal experiences. Ellen disrespects the boundaries of Annie’s individuality and personhood by forcing her into having biological children. In this sense, Ellen is representative of the pro-life movement. If you don’t know, the pro-life movement is a group who want to preserve life in any circumstance, including protesting to make abortion illegal. They’ve had an unfortunate history of violence, including a one Michael Frederick Griffin, who fatally shot a doctor who performed abortions during a pro-life protest rally in 1993. Dr David Gunn is considered the first murder specifically in the name of preventing abortions. The sad thing is, back alley abortions were always around in the days of highest legal regulations preventing abortions. What legislation has done is make abortion safer. To me it seems that the anti abortion movement is seeking to take away that safety in the name of ‘saving the unborn’.

A counter argument to the pro-life movement is often the question of how is it pro-life to disregard the wishes of the mother of her life and to ignore that the mother may not be able to provide a good quality of life to the child or even survive birth. Ellen isn’t caring about what Annie wants, or the quality of life unborn Peter and Charlie may have, her focus is on a host for Paimon. And throughout all this, where is Annie’s individuality? Her choice? Western society has a tendency towards focus on individualism, towards personal success and happiness. As a parent, you’re told to care for your children and to allow them growth and personhood. Ellen appears to have zero concern for this in her children, as she becomes what Barbara Creed calls the Archaic Mother; the mother who isn’t concerned with her child’s wellbeing but rather using the child as a means to an end.

Paimon needs a male host to come to full power. Ellen’s first attempt must have been her own son, Annie’s brother. Annie tells us that her brother had schizophrenia and when he committed suicide, he blamed Ellen for ‘putting people in him’. This tells us Ellen was trying to use Annie’s brother as a host for Paimon but he couldn’t cope. Ellen then moved onto Annie to pressure into having children, using her powers as the Archaic Mother to manipulate Annie. But when Annie had Peter, Steve helped her keep Ellen away from Peter. So when Annie fell pregnant with Charlie and started to allow Ellen back into her life, Ellen wanted so desperately for Charlie to be a boy, and Charlie says this herself the night after Ellen’s funeral. When Charlie was a girl, Ellen saw a new plan, a way into the family, a way to Peter. And then of course, her and her cult orchestrate the rest of the film, killing Charlie, inserting Joan into Annie’s life, and getting to Peter.

She is the Archaic Mother of not only Annie but also the cult; they refer to her as their queen, they carry out her bidding, they are what I’m going to call the Archaic Children. We see the Archaic Children again in Midsommar, in those who are in what they refer to as the summer of their lives and venture out into the world and bring outsiders back to the cult.

We’ll look at this more in depth next week, but what do you think so far? Hereditary is a film so close to my heart and I’ve spent so much time with it. Let me know your thoughts below and until next time, this has been Graveyard Shifts.