In a recent post on Ari Aster’s debut film Hereditary (2018), Brian Fanelli contends that “grief, mental illness, and the challenges of motherhood are the subconscious fears that erupt after the family suffers one loss after another.” Fanelli thus summarizes the traits passed down through the generations in the film; he also implicitly reads the text as an addition to a canon that follows what Dawn Keetley has identified as “an intriguing new trend in horror film: the horror of motherhood” and, on a larger scale, to what genre critics such as Tony Williams and Kimberly Jackson call “the family horror film.” I argue that a conjoined reading of these ideas in the context of the movie’s central horror plot—possession by a mythological demon as a result of ritualistic ceremonies—situates Hereditary within yet another new (or rather, revived) field in horror studies: folk horror.
