Editorials
[Editorial] ‘Hereditary’ and the True Horrors of the Grieving Process
SPOILERS AHEAD…
Hereditary, Ari Aster’s directorial debut is finally out, and it comes with the most amount of buzz for a horror film in years. This tale of family tragedy that curdles into a full-bore nightmare ride through hell was received with wide acclaim both at Sundance and SXSW, earning comparisons to William Friedkin’s classic The Exorcist. The comparison goes beyond the fact that both movies are great. Like the king of movies about demonic possession, Hereditary is first and foremost a story about the disintegration of a familial unit when struck by loss. Grief is one of the most common themes in horror movies, because of how vulnerable we are at times of loss. This is a premise that is also shared by recent horror films like The Witch, Verónica, and Pyewacket.
Folkloric tales have for centuries been used to try and explain the things we don’t understand. The award-winning, critically acclaimed podcast Lore devotes each episode to research folkloric tales and historical events bound by a common theme. Zombies, the Jersey Devil, witches, vampires. All these started as simple ways to try to explain things we couldn’t understand – to cope with tragedy. One of the most popular episodes deals with the theme of witchcraft. The creator of the podcast, Aaron Mahnke gives a possible reason for the popularity of witches during the 17th century. For him, it was the harsh world of early New England colonialism and religious tradition that made people blame everything that went wrong on demons and the devil.
Robert Eggers’ The Witch: A New-England Folktale best exemplifies this. The movie explores a family unit being slowly torn apart by panic, despair and superstition. We sense from the moment the family moves to a farm by the edge of a secluded forest that this is far from the supposedly “godly” land they think it is. The titular witch hangs over the family at every turn, making the very first sight of the New England woods a dreadful and cursed one. When the youngest son Samuel suddenly vanishes, the family quickly turns on the eldest, Thomasin for not watching the boy close enough. The incredibly annoying twin siblings Merce and Jonas go even further and accuse Thomasin of witchcraft.
The initial grief for Samuel starts growing and turning into mistrust and paranoia, fuelled by superstitions that were common at the time. While The Witch, Verónica, and Pyewacket focus on daughters, and Hereditary on a mother, all four films show families becoming so paranoid that they violently lash out against each other, before supernatural forces do come into play. The best parts of Ari Aster’s feature debut all involve the family trying to move on while knowing full well that they are beyond repair. Seeing a mother lash out and tell her son she tried to force a miscarriage is as scary as seeing her bang her head against a door while hanging from the ceiling. Perhaps even more so.
The cinematography, costume design and especially the dialogue in The Witch are all designed to make the audience feel as if they are watching a true-to-life story from the 17th century. That is until the words “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” are uttered and shit goes down, or should I say… up? Grief and paranoia finally turn Thomasin into the very thing her God-fearing parents accused her of being. As Margaret Atwood put it in her poem Half-Hanged Mary, “Before, I was not a witch. But now I am one.”
Similarly, the Spanish film Verónica, directed by Paco Plaza (of REC fame), uses grief as a gateway into the occult and a tale of demonic possession. The film is loosely based on true events known as “The Vallecas Case” in which an 18-year-old girl died mysteriously after she used an Ouija board; her family then started experiencing strange occurrences at home that the police still can’t explain. The film changes things a bit, and young Verónica is now 15 instead of 18, still grieving after the recent death of her father. With her mother working long hours at a bar, Verónica is left in charge of her three younger siblings – coincidentally, there’s also a set of twins here.
In both Hereditary and Pyewacket, characters turn to the occult to cope with their loss. The thought of an afterlife and the possibility that one can, in fact, contact the deceased is an appealing idea to anyone who has experienced a devastating loss. In the case of Verónica, she decides to play with an Ouija board with her friends at school, desperately trying to contact her deceased father. Obviously, things go wrong. Objects start flying across the room and Verónica spills some blood on the board, before it splits in half and a candle falls on an occult book, burning it. Oh, and Verónica starts convulsing before she lets out a demonic scream. While she becomes more and more convinced that a dark spirit has attached itself to her, the school thinks she has an iron deficiency, and her mother thinks she is being immature and tells her to grow up.
One of the best aspects of both Hereditary and The Exorcist is the guessing game the movies play with the audience, making you guess if it’s really a demon or some illness we are not aware of. What made the first half of Friedkin’s horror classic so scary was seeing Chris MacNeil going from doctor to doctor, unable to help her child. Horror movies that deal with the occult are best when you are not sure if it’s a demon you’re seeing, or a manifestation of the character’s grief. By the time the demon manifests itself in Verónica, you are not as scared of the demon as you are scared for the girl and her family. By the time the real police report is mentioned, Verónica becomes one hell of a sad horror film.
Likewise, the protagonist of Pyewacket is also fifteen and grieving over the death of her father. While her increasingly hostile mother turns to drinking to alleviate the pain, Leah finds solace in death metal and occultism. When her mom finally snaps and says something no child should hear (coincidentally, Toni Collette says the same thing to her character’s son in Hereditary), Leah runs off to the woods and summons a demon to kill her mother. Grief and occultism work so well in horror because it allows the audience to get a better understanding of a character’s inner struggle and mental well-being.
The best parts of Pyewacket and Hereditary have nothing to do with jump scares or a demon showing up, but with characters realizing their mistakes. The dread that slowly creeps up when Leah realizes what she has done; the horror that comes when you immediately regret your actions but know there is no way back. There is some incredibly disturbing imagery in Hereditary, but nothing surpasses the simple shot of Peter’s face as he sits in a car, unable to turn around because of the horror that awaits.
As NY Times writer Jason Zinoman put it: “A character coping with the death of a loved one is the new car of teenagers heading to a cabin in the woods.” And at least for the films some idiots are referring to as “elevated horror,” this is true. The difference being that unlike the teenagers going to Camp Crystal Lake despite all the warnings, we do care when a grieving mother starts having horrible sightings that may or may not be a threat to her family. What Leah, Verónica and even Thomasin are suffering resembles what Peter and Annie go through in Hereditary. Who could blame a grieving mother for taking up occultism and trying to conduct a séance to communicate with her deceased child? And who’s to say if that is indeed a gruesome ghost you’re seeing, or just a manifestation of your own grief?
Grief serves as the ultimate horror because there’s no way back from something like losing a loved one. The focus on something as real as the horror that comes after losing a loved one is what makes movies like The Babadook, The Witch, and now Hereditary stay in your mind long after the credits roll. While jump scares are effective in the moment, these films hold to something real that scares you for days after you leave the theater: the fear of failing your family and losing them. You may not be scared when you see Hereditary, but you will be deeply disturbed for a good long while afterwards. Especially when you hear that clucking noise…
Rafael Motamayor (@GeekWithAnAfro) is a recovering-cinephile and freelance writer from Venezuela currently based in Norway. He has written for Flickering Myth, Birth.Movies.Death, and SYFY.
The penultimate season of Tales from the Crypt (1989–1996) aired its first three episodes on October 31, so it’s understandable that at least one of those three stories is set on Halloween.
Sandwiched between “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” (Russell Mulcahy, Ron Finley) and “Whirlpool” (Mick Garris, A. L. Katz & Gilbert Adler) is the most severe episode of the bunch. Maybe the entire series? William Malone and Dick Beebe’s “Only Skin Deep” traded the show’s typical sense of fun for startling amounts of bleakness and kink.
“Only Skin Deep” is, apart from the Crypt Keeper’s intro and outro, noticeably unfunny. There are no considerable attempts at making the viewer laugh. Come to think of it, if those bookends had been replaced, and there was more of a sci-fi element in the story, HBO could have easily squeezed this tale into that successor anthology, Perversions of Science (1997). In Crypt, though, “Only Skin Deep” is much too grim for an audience that had become accustomed to campiness and levity.
What makes “Only Skin Deep” feel dark, among other things, is its protagonist. Showing up to a Halloween party where he’s not welcome, and where his former girlfriend (Diane DiLasco) is attending, Carl Schlag (Peter Onorati) first comes across as your standard bitter ex. You soon realize it’s much worse than that, once Carl threatens Linda (“You know, silly me, thinking I gave you what you deserved. If I’d have done that, I’d have killed you”). Now, I haven’t forgotten that Tales from the Crypt was teeming with vile men who did women harm. Yet Carl’s brand of misogynistic menace hits differently—it borders on being too realistic for this kind of series.
Mike Vosburg’s EC-style comic cover for “Only Skin Deep”, as seen in the Tales from the Crypt episode.
Despite donning a party mask for much of the episode, Carl can’t ever mask his true nature. The invitation did say “come as you are”, after all. That inability to change and be better, however, is why Carl ends up in such a karmic predicament. His outburst of anger at the party attracts the attention of one loner partygoer named Molly (Sherrie Rose, who was also in Season Four’s “On a Deadman’s Chest”). Her bone-white, featureless “mask” and body-bag costume don’t initially register as too strange, especially on a night like this. But at a party chock-full of colorful, cartoonish, and lighthearted ensembles, it does look out of place.
Darkness attracts darkness as Carl ditches the party and accompanies the mysterious Molly to her place. Which, by the way, should have been an immediate red flag. But perhaps she’s so hot, he doesn’t seem to mind the serial killer aesthetic. Resembling a warehouse that has been converted into living spaces, but never then decorated to remove the cold, industrial look, Molly’s home (or lair) is as gloomy as this whole episode feels. It’s like the set of a grungy music video, albeit a tad cleaner. The environments in a typical Crypt episode tend to be small, overfilled, and broken-in. Warm, regardless of any weird goings-on. All that empty space in Molly’s hovel, on the other hand, elicits a creepy feeling that Carl was unwise to ignore.
Tales from the Crypt featured more sex than it didn’t, but hands down, “Only Skin Deep” boasts the steamiest scene in the show’s history. Pushing it over the line, in addition to Onorati showing bare buns and the camera never turning down one of his pelvic thrusts, is the twisted dirty talk. Carl stays in the moment, whereas Molly unleashes charged lines like “the hurt, the anger, give it to me” and “take it out on my flesh like you want to”. It’s all quite kinky, as well as tied into the story’s theme of pain.
How else “Only Skin Deep” differs from other episodes is its twists. Or rather, its lack thereof. Nothing comes as a great surprise here, particularly because the deuteragonist’s ulterior motives are so obvious. By no means is Molly a wolf in sheep’s clothing; her face is a fright mask, she practically reeks of death, and she lives in what can best be described as a serial killer’s hideout. That last-act revelation of Molly’s mask really being her face is also nothing shocking. Cleverness is certainly not this episode’s strength.
A page from “…Only Skin Deep!”, as seen in EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt.
While “Only Skin Deep” isn’t the most universally loved episode of Tales from the Crypt, it’s an interesting preview of William Malone’s future as a director. Most notably, he went on to helm House on Haunted Hill (1999) and FeardotCom (2002), the former of which was co-written by Dick Beebe, this episode’s writer. Dark Castle Entertainment, that genre house founded by Crypt producers Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Gilbert Adler, was instrumental in bringing out Malone’s gruesome, over-the-top vision in House on Haunted Hill. However, FeardotCom and Malone’s Masters of Horror episode, “Fair-Haired Child”, are the most stylistically compatible with “Only Skin Deep”.
As one might guess, this episode is nothing like its source material. The “…Only Skin Deep!” found in the pages of EC Comics is set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and save for its last couple of pages, is pretty sweet in nature. There, a man named Herbert is enamored with a woman he met five years prior to the present-day story. Every year, he has come down to Mardi Gras to see Suzanne, who’s always dressed as a hag-faced witch. Well, this time, Herbert plans on popping the question and marrying someone who is, for the most part, a total stranger. Suzanne accepts his proposal, but with one condition: they stay in costume until they’re officially hitched. You can probably see where this is going…
Once they are married, Suzanne remains incognito, even when she and Herbert have consummated their vows. A semi-predictive nightmare then rattles Herbert; he dreamt that Suzanne’s real face was as wizened as her mask. Finally, in his haste to find out the truth, Herbert winds up killing his new wife. Faceless and well on her way to bleeding out, the dying Suzanne manages to say she never wore a mask.
For more traditional EC-style ghastliness, your best bet is reading the comic. It’s wickedly sad. For something less conventional, as far as Tales from the Crypt goes, the role-reversing adaptation is worth watching. It’s not the best this show had to offer, although Malone’s visual style, plus the sexual abandon, does set the episode apart. If nothing else, “Only Skin Deep” leaves an impression that, even years later, shows no signs of fading.
Season Six of Tales from the Crypt can be streamed on Shudder, starting on June 5.
Tales from Tales from the Crypt celebrates the show’s Shudder premiere by singling out one episode from each season. So don’t even think about changing that dial, boys and ghouls. More spot-“frights” are to come.
Carl discovers Molly’s collection of human ‘masks’ in the Tales from the Crypt episode, “Only Skin Deep”.
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