Welcome back! Sorry to everyone out there who doesn’t like horror movies, but—seeing as it is October—my friend and I watched another one this week. Hereditary follows a grown woman and her family after her mother passes, as they uncover secrets of their ancestry and attempt to fend off their family’s fatal curse. Check out the full plot summary on Wikipedia.

As we do every week, my friend and I searched for movies by watching various trailers. Hereditary’s trailer is captivating and fear-inducing, but I discovered the best part about it after I watched the movie: it didn’t spoil the plot. Trailers tend to reveal the most climactic scenes in a movie or even leave the watcher overwhelmed and confused. This trailer, however, had me thinking the movie was centered around a character that died within the first ten minutes! It was the perfect amount of suspenseful and exciting without giving away too much of the movie.

Now, for the movie itself. Hereditary is wonderfully disturbing, shocking, and unforgettable. I want to highlight unforgettable because for me this movie wasn’t tremble-and-cover-your-eyes scary, but certain scenes required that I take a minute to recover. One scene in particular kept me up at night because it was quite realistic yet utterly appalling. It left me and one of the characters in the movie in paralytic shock.

Most of the movie involves realistic horror, horrors of everyday life, such as feeling like an inadequate family member. The reliability adds to the terrifying experience in a way that most horror movies centered around the supernatural fail to achieve. The dinner scene in which familial tensions culminate in a heated argument and confessions by the mother and son is incredibly emotional and haunting in its own way. You can watch the scene and read the screenplay for the scene below:

The success of this movie can be attributed to two main things: the director and the performances. Ari Aster wrote and directed Hereditary. Unlike most horror movies, thanks to his incredible talent, the narrative and the storytelling drive the film. You can read the movie’s screenplay here. He created incredibly nuanced characters struggling to battle internal and external demons within their family dynamic. These nuances are brought to life by Toni Collette, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro, and Gabriel Byrne. Each actor conveys the emotions of the scenes phenomenally and makes the characters almost too relatable, intensifying the movie’s horror. Horror movies tend to showcase inexperienced actors who give laughable performances, but each member of this cast portrayed their characters dynamically.

Grab a friend, make some popcorn, and enjoy!