Hi guys, welcome to Novum and welcome, finally,
to The Complete Guide to Hereditary. This is a
video I've been excited to make for a while, I know I've had a lot of people commenting
asking me when it's coming so apologies about the wait.
I'm so excited to share this with you guys and I can say
conclusively that you will find answers here, even to big questions that have plagued fans
and gone unanswered since the film's release. I know
it's a long video, I know it's a lot of listening to me talk
but please trust me when I say there's big stuff in here that you will not find anywhere
else online or in print. There's easter eggs and hidden meaning
that up until this point has gone completely unnoticed or unexplained and I think every
major mystery regarding the film will be solved by the
end of this video. There's going to be quite a few tangents where I talk you through exactly
how I went about that which hopefully you'll find
interesting but either way are necessary to proving the
answers right. There's also a lot of misinformation online about this film that sadly a lot of
the explainer articles, guide videos and so on
have regurgitated believing their previous source to be
right so there's a lot of myths to be bust and corrections to be made as well. So if
you've seen me do one of these before and thought wow that guy
is trying too hard, get ready because we're going to
the next level on this one. If you're wondering why it's been eight months since I posted
the answer is I've been writing my debut novel and starting
on the road to getting it published. I'm so excited for
people to be able to read it and as soon as I can confirm where and how you'll be able
to buy it I'll put out a video announcing it. Real quick
before we get started if you're here just for specific
answers then have a skim through the chapter index and you should find what you're looking
for! With all that being said let's Hail Paimon
and get started with Section 1, Foundations. It's become somewhat looked down upon to open
your film with expositional text and to be fair to
the critics I'd say we have set a low bar in recent years. Let's just use the most egregious
example, The Rise of Skywalker's expositing of how
Palpatine is just alive now. It's lazy, it devalues the
material and, nostalgia aside, opening your movie with big yellow letters flying through
space can be viewed as a bit jarring. When I finally sat
down to watch the Eternals I was confronted with five
minutes of homework before I was allowed to see the opening scene. Hereditary still opens
it's movie with expositional text but in a very
different way, and it's crucial that we look at that right
away because it serves as a key to understanding the brilliance of the film. That is to say,
the film takes an existing and well-used trope, something
that would usually be seen as clich , but plays it
out so elegantly that instead of feeling rehashed it feels perfected. There are going to be
many points during this where we'll look at stuff
just like this: an existing trope, likely something overused
in horror, but in every single sense it will be refined and presented perfectly. This isn't
a film that simply reuses tropes, it's a film that uses
them so well it retires them for ever. In fact I want to say this up front right
away, in all of these companion videos I try to unpack what a
film is ultimately doing and saying. In Alien it's a mish-mashed reflection of 1970's cultural
anxieties made crystalline in one brilliant horror motif.
In the Lighthouse it's psychosexual degeneration, the
Green Knight the battle between goodness and greatness and the power of myth. But what
about Hereditary? Well, as we're going to look at
and as the title would suggest there's a large focus put on
family and grief and trauma, the breakdown of the family unit and the idea of us passing
things to those who come after us. Not just illness
and genetics but pain, ab*se, psychological harm,
behaviours and characteristics and grandchildren being occult vessels for one of the lords
of hell. You know, family stuff. And while all that
seemingly remains the films main thematic focus, I think
it's also fair to say it's quite concerned with constructing the perfect horror movie.
That's a big statement and just to be clear, I think Alien
by a narrow margin is a better movie. It is as close as is
possible to my favourite movie of all time. But paradoxically, Hereditary is the perfect
horror movie. And I think as we go through it's going to
become quite clear that this was an intention going in.
Perhaps not as brashly as I've put it, but certainly something close. And even more so
than usual we'll be paying attention to how exactly the
film goes about this and that starts right here with the
first frame, this subversion of opening text by use of the obituary. So looking at it for the first time, I think
the initial takeaway is how subtly the visuals are employed
here. Floating text usually lacks context, it simply is there. Yellow letters flying
through space. Some film makers like to try and get clever with
this in an effort to circumvent the dissonance. James Gunn
is a primary example. Justice Squad 2 Harley Quinn's Boogaloo had expositional text formed
from objects in the environment that the characters
are walking through which to me is even more jarring. But nothing so garish for Hereditary,
just using subtle aesthetic clues, the context of the font
and formatting, the film lets you know exactly what you're looking at, exactly what you're
reading from. It's an obituary in a newspaper column.
Without you having to read a single word the film has
elegantly delivered you exposition through context, despite it following the same trope
of just presenting floating text. Just through one
subtle design decision they have taken a tired trope and
rebuilt it into something that feels refreshing and intelligent.
From choice of wording, to the newspaper column structure and the typeface it's all immediately
recognisable. It's poignant, weighty, chances are you have had someone in your life appear
as one of these before and that's the film not just
trying to remind you of the impact of death but more
specifically death within the family. It could have been delivered via an actual newspaper
page, but I think aesthetically and practically that would
not have had the same effect at all. Instead this
newspaper layout white on black is encouraging you to look closer at what's occurring but
staying very flat and realist about what it shows
you. It encourages the viewer to focus and take
it in and in doing so they introduce the audience to a lot
of convenient exposition without it ever feeling forced. Rather than having information thrust
upon you without explanation, you're presented
with a document you recognise just from visual context
and you make the decision to pull relevant information from it. Most simply we have all
the main character names and their familial relations,
this is exposition that usually has to be delivered at the
start of every movie and often appears via quite clunky dialogue. It also tells us that
Annie has lost a lot of people around her, it mentions her
father's passing and her brothers. This is doubly
foreshadowing that her losses and grief may be too much for her to bear, that she's no
stranger to death, but also very softly introducing the
notion that there's something dangerous and ever
present lurking in her past and in her family. Now as we come to find out this is something
very sinister indeed but with a title like Hereditary
it's a pretty clear lineation to there being some disease
or condition passed genetically that's killing them off, especially given the obituaries
mentioning of a prolonged illness. As I mentioned this is very much about how
death affects a family and a huge aspect of that is the
breakdown of communication and just silent grief that overwhelms them. Silence is an
extremely powerful tool here, especially during the
first act of the film. If we had the mother explaining to the
family about the fact their grandma had been suffering with an illness it would feel out
of place and forced, they should be aware of what's happening
in their own family and talking about it in front of
the audience would give us the opposite impression of this breakdown of communication and the
sombre realist tone the film is going for. Instead, through the use of the obituary,
we get a lot of essential information delivered to us. Really it sets the tone for the whole movie.
It's understated, efficiently and elegantly executed and
most importantly it takes a tired and existing trope and makes it feel new again. I've touched
on it already here so before we go any further,
let's look at why the film is called 'Hereditary'. Firstly here in the obituary we see the broadest
understanding of the title, that there's something malignant within the family, presumably disease,
that is the driving negative force in the film. And
really no matter which explanation we choose to go with from there, all of that remains
true. But clearly there's more going on there and the
film plays on this theme a great deal. So to make things
simple we can break this negativity, this malignance down into three main themes. The
first being the supernatural, the literal, face-value
explanation of the movie's events. Paimon, the demon at the
heart of the film, is through some unknown means, presumably the past invocations of
Ellen's cult, bound or otherwise involved with Annie's bloodline.
He cannot simply enter any vessel, this Hereditary bloodline is essential to him being
able to inhabit a body. When and how that came to be
isn't made entirely clear but we do have some information on it and from that we can glean
a couple of opposing theories. Either Ellen was born
into it and something specific has existed within her and
Annie's bloodline for a very long time, which would certainly fit with the Hereditary theme,
or alternatively this is a decision Ellen has
made and through the actions taken by her and the cult they
have sought Paimon out and in some way bound or promised him to their bloodline, which
admittedly fits much better with what we know about Paimon and still has the Hereditary
aspect of passing down from Ellen to her descendants. Now we'll look at Ellen in much greater detail
but for now just know that it doesn't really affect the
movie so choose whichever you prefer, but for my own speculation I come down hard on
it being the latter. Ellen feels like an orchestrator,
someone who has developed a keen respect from the cult
members, likely even the cults creator and seemingly the driving force behind it's plans
pre-mortem. Not only that but if this had been something
she'd been born into, something that had been taught
to her by her mother, you would think she would have been much better at grooming Annie
into it or at the very least communicated her actual
plans to her. It seems that if this was some long-
running familial tradition then Ellen would have been far more open about it to her descendants.
Instead she sacrificed, or really, gambled with their lives in the short term in the
hopes that they would forgive her once they understood the
extremely long-term benefits of her being Paimon's
queen in Hell. That seems to me very much like a decision she's made and a risk she's
taken not some long-standing plan that's been present
for centuries and for some unknown reason is only
finally possible now. But no matter which you prefer for your head
canon, the outcome remains the same. Paimon can
only be resurrected via Annie's bloodline. This curse, sacrifice, invocation, whatever
you want to call it, is hereditary to them. We're going to
discuss this all in much greater detail when we get to Ellen
and Paimon later on so for now let's move on to the second understanding of this hereditary
malignance. Now while the supernatural explanations are
all well and good and are 100% real and at play in the
movie, it's also crucial to remember that beyond the film initially toying with the
bait and switch that Annie is going crazy, there are real world
parallels the supernatural elements are metaphorical for
and these are what the meaning of the film is ultimately concerned with. And broadly
speaking these are illness or disease, as we see hinted
at in the obituary, and is later made clear in Ellen's case
to be suspected Dissociative Identity Disorder followed by dementia. Now obviously that could
be symptomatic of her relationship with Paimon
that's been recognized as DID and dementia. He is into
literally inhabiting bodies and we see a definite blurring between suspected mental illness
and the actions of Paimon throughout the film. Now,
in terms of anxieties the film is building on hereditary
physical conditions are absolutely a part of it, we see that right away in the obituary.
But ultimately I think the film is far more specifically concerned
with mental illness. Every single member of Annie's
bloodline that is mentioned in the film has issues with their mental health and mental
illness absolutely can be something hereditary, something
that runs in the family. Now again within the
context of the movie this is almost certainly due to Paimon and the cults intrusions, but
again subtextually we're talking about the very
real of hereditary mental illness and mental illness in
general. And hand-in-hand with all of that is this
third theme of what we'll refer to as 'inherited behaviours',
essentially ab*se, specifically cyclic ab*se playing out across generations, and other
inherited negative traits such as deceit, cruelty and
emotional distancing. We can use Annie as a quick
example of what I'm getting at with all of this. Let's start with Annie's feeling, really the
reality, that her life isn't her own, which seemingly began
with her mother forcing her and even watching her procreate, and manifests as her subsequent
depression and desire to rid herself of children and the guilt that follows that. Yes it's
supernaturally influenced within the film, but it's also
very clearly drawing parallels to a woman forced into a life
she didn't want or wasn't ready for due to familial expectations and even societal expectations,
stood in for here by the 'will of the cult'. Her desire to rid herself of children is very
similar to the intrusive thoughts some sufferers of post-partum
depression experience and is even reminiscent of
some female killers responsible for matricide. Even her sleepwalking, her jumbled explanations
of trying to save her children, it's all very
purposefully in line with extreme examples of anxiety and
depression and motherhood in crisis. And that's not just to make first time viewers feel certain
that Annie is just going insane, it's playing into
the overarching theme of hereditary issues, behaviours,
traumas, impacting a family. Depression can be inherited, desires are inherited and forced
on the next generation, just like a father insisting
his son support the same football team or in this case a
mother pressuring her daughter into having children. In the lore of the film the supernatural
stuff is extremely interesting and well put forward,
but it's everything working behind the scenes that brings
it all together, the meaning here is much deeper. It serves as a warning, to pay close
mind to what you pass along to those that come after you.
That things we do and say often outlast us in the hearts
and minds of those around us and that it's our responsibility to stay clear of evil and
never allow ourselves to let it reproduce via us. And
it's difficult to talk about but this is a key point here, a prime
example of this hereditary, or inherited behaviour, and something I think the film is talking
about quite clearly that I haven't seen anyone discuss
yet, is ab*se. And specifically the difficult notion that
ab*se, over time, can turn people that were ab*sed when they were young, into ab*sers
themselves. And I think within Annie's familial unit we
see this happening. In an extremely obvious sense Ellen
invites this evil into their home and subsequently violence is enacted upon the descending
generations of her family. And while that's almost certainly allegorical for the things
we've discussed it is still rooted within the supernatural.
So a better example might be the emotional distance we see
the characters display. We know where this is rooted, Ellen's distant and difficult relationship
with Annie, and we see Annie repeat these same
mistakes with her children, struggling to connect and
communicate and beyond that we see Peter and Charlie as two pretty maladjusted children
that absolutely have difficulty communicating and
strained relationships with their mother. Just like
everything else, it's Hereditary and it's here to demonstrate how negative traits and
behaviours can infect a family unit. So really the best answer as to what the title
means is all of the above: the supernatural bond of
Paimon with their bloodline, as an exploration of disease, ab*se and mental illness. The
film is about hereditary problems plaguing a family and
these are all prime examples explored within the film. But
if we really need to nail it down to one thing, then mental illness is absolutely the best
fit and the main focus. But just to clarify that doesn't
mean 'it was all a dream', it's important to remember that
while the film is hyper concerned with mental illness and Annie absolutely can be considered
mentally unsound, she's not imagining the events of the film, it's not a dream or a
hallucination. The supernatural elements are metaphorical stand-ins
for mental health issues, trauma, ab*se and physical sickness within the familial unit,
but they are absolutely happening within the context of the
film. And really as well as those being the different
meanings we can draw from the title, they are also the
three main themes of the film. The literal supernatural resurrection of Paimon and his
tying to the bloodline, but also inherited ideas, behaviours,
and genetics causing things like illness and mental
health issues. All things that are bestowed upon us without our consent, pre-determined
factors that can influence and even rule our lives. The
tragedy of fate as we'll see alluded to later. And none of
these are comfortable topics but such is the strength of a good horror movie. It manages
to roll our anxieties up into something we can digest
and understand without ever having to face them in their
bleak reality. But to do it as fluently and as perfectly as is achieved here is an extremely
rare thing indeed.
Let's look now at the opening shot - and to follow up on a pretty perfect delivery of
expository opening text we have an absolutely mind-blowing
opening sequence that really plays with the notion of 'setting the stage'. We begin with
this still shot of the treehouse and the foreshadowing of
the ending sequence of ascension and rebirth that will take place there. From here the
camera moves slowly across a workshop, again delivering
exposition without throwing it awkwardly into dialogue, it's very clear that someone here
builds dollhouses so we get round their obvious creepiness really before they're fully introduced,
a route the film also takes with introducing Charlie's peanut allergy to the audience.
Instead of dodging the issue and building tension first the
film instead just saturates you with them right away. That may sound simple but it's
something a lot of films and television shows get wrong, the
doll-house is a played out trope in horror, it kind of jars
you as soon as you see one and you go 'oh right yeah, creepy dollhouse'. Really anything
that's featured in a Treehouse of Horror Simpsons
episode probably isn't your best bet for creating original
horror. But as with so many other tropes here Hereditary understands, it understands the
trends and techniques of horror, it just isn't deterred
and rather than being diminished by it being a pre-
existing trope it actually lays out such a perfect example of it that really it should
be retired forever. While the film doesn't try to do too much
with the dollhouses plot-wise, they serve as this constant
subtextual reminder of what's actually happening and beyond being a perfectly delivered metaphor
they actually hold the key to a lot of the film's secrets. As with everything else it's
subtle, it's elegant and it trusts the audience to understand.
We see the camera focus in on a particular dollhouse,
which we come to learn is representative of the families actual house. As the camera moves
in to the bedroom of the dollhouse we see it very craftily
become the actual bedroom of the house with human characters walking around in it. And
this extremely clever editing effortlessly kicks off this
creepy notion of our family being puppets or toys for the unseen puppet masters that
are actually controlling events, pawns in a grander scheme
they are entirely unaware of. It also sets up the idea
that what's happening within these dioramas is influential on the events of the real world
and it gives the whole film a disconcerting sense
of unreality as we are questioning what's real right from
the offset just as Annie does through much of the movie. It also specifically draws focus
to the importance of the son, moving as it does from
treehouse to his bedroom, again foreshadowing his
ascension in the former and his sort of pawn or puppet status in the latter. Even the fixed
frame keeping the whole room in shot and Gabriel
Byrne's movement here all work in conjunction to
present the feeling that we're observing little toys in a dollhouse, something the movie is
going to put a lot of effort into achieving. So let's rewind and look at all of that in
more detail because there is so much going on in this shot,
so much so that we can actually figure out exactly why this film is obsessed with making
it's characters seem this way, just with this information. Perhaps the most immediately noticeable thing
is the intense and odd soundtrack. Right from the
opening obituary, all the way through the first act and other later sections of the
film, the soundtrack is a constant unnerving tone, swelling
and declining in a rollercoaster game of tension building. And it's perhaps most noticeable
during this opening shot, which if you were in the cinema
for was especially apparent. As the camera slowly approaches the room we're met with
a rising collection of sounds, which we can call Paimon's
approach. We've got these rising and ominous tones that come to define the soundtrack - cymbals
and trumpets, horns and skittish strings are all
used throughout the film, we've got the clopping of hooves, the nasal expulsion of a fast moving
beast, and right at the end the chittering whine of a buzzing fly. Now the hooves and
beastly exhalation immediately call to mind some cloven-hoofed
minotaur like demonic figure which is right on the money and presumably what you're supposed
to call to mind at this point, but later in the
movie we'll see a depiction of Paimon riding a camel which may be the more accurate answer.
In fact in depictions outside of Hereditary Paimon
is usually seen riding this camel. This is largely due to
the fact that as with many demons, Paimon finds his etymological roots as a Djinn in
Arabic literature and the camel is a remnant of his
middle eastern origins. The deep horn noises are also in
reference to Paimon's deeper lore, he is traditionally shown as being preceded by men playing loud
music, usually trumpets, horns and cymbals and again these instruments pretty much define
the films entire soundtrack, with particular prominence
anytime Paimon is approaching or being reborn or some other critical event in his narrative.
As for the fly noise, you may have noticed the fly
buzzing around the windowsill already and throughout the movie we'll get a lot more
of this fly theme. Now flies are naturally associated
with dead bodies and decay so we've got this feeling of
death and pestilence following Paimon. But we also know he can possess things, and much
later in the movie when he's possessing Annie we'll
see her lithely skitter across the wall just like a fly might.
So there's certainly a link between Paimon and the fly, sometimes thematic, sometimes
literal which we're going to explore in detail. But for
now with that in mind this opening scene takes on a very
different meaning. We can see the treehouse as being representative
of hell, it's where Charlie, or Paimon, is most at
home, it's the location the cult choose for Peter's ascension slash Paimon's full resurrection.
We even see a demonic red glow emanate from it
while Annie is using a space heater. Now given clues
later in the movie we can actually take a stab and say that this could even be representative
of Pandemonium, the supposed infernal capital
city of hell that Paimon may ordinarily call home. We
see a slow zoom out from the treehouse, perhaps alluding to Paimon's summoning by the cult
or his slow encroachment and influence in the beginning.
And as the camera follows Paimon's approach from Pandemonium we see the fly set off moving.
You can see this as literal possession but for me
all this is all very figurative at this point, the fly seemingly just a metaphorical signifier
or stand in for Paimon's approach. Then we see the camera
pan past several dioramas which are representative of
different points in Annie's life. Given we see the fly and the treehouse prior to this
timeline of Annie's life I think it's a fair bet Paimon's
involvement came just before or during her very early
childhood. We know from what we see later in the movie that whether consciously or
subconsciously Annie uses her dioramas as a method of replaying and contextualising
her trauma. So it's pretty clear that none of these are going
to be happy memories. It's also clear that they're
playing out chronologically as we know the end point of this camera pan ends with the
present, the right now, it zooms in on our actual characters
preparing for a funeral and the movie picks up from
that point. So if it starts in the past and ends with the now then really what we're looking
at here is a chronology, a timeline of traumatic events
in Annie's life. That timeline begins with a closed room marked
'Keep Out!' which just screams childhood trauma to
me. I've seen quite a few people on Reddit and Youtube confused by this but to me the
answer is pretty clear. We find out later that Annie's
father, having difficulty dealing with his wife's supposed
mental health issues, began struggling himself, eventually shutting himself away and starving
himself to death, and likely the only place he'd be
able to shut himself away hiding from people in his own
home would be his bedroom. We also know that Annie's brother hung himself in his mother's
bedroom. I think it stands to reason that this room is that location, the place Annie
lost two of her family members to the machinations of her
mother and the cult, the 'keep out' sign likely an
element of her father's efforts at isolation. I think the extremely old-fashioned and frankly
foul wallpaper is also an indicator this was a
house Annie grew up in. It's similar to patterns and
geometries favoured by the cult and esotericism in general as we see in photos of Annie's
mother, in the d cor of Joan's house and in Joan's clothing.
Really anywhere you see triangles and other geometric shapes in this movie, due to their
extreme prevalence in esotericism and majick through
history, just think cult involvement. I think it's also fair to say this wallpaper softly
alludes to fingers poking through the triangular prison or cage
bars which is a very good fit for Annie's father, isolated
and unwilling to eat in fear of the malicious plans of the cult. And when I wrote everything
I just read about it into the script for this video that
was all it was, a good guess. But I've had to come back and
edit in this sentence because I can now confirm this is 100% Ellen's bedroom. More on that
in a moment. The next diorama I was pretty sure about but
couldn't confirm until I found an obscure mention of it
in an interview with the dioramas creator. Obviously it's a school setting, it's not
Peter's classroom and isn't a good fit for Charlie's either.
But Charlie's class does have one notable thing about it which
isn't really dwelled upon, that it's almost certainly intended to be a special needs classroom,
we see a couple of other kids with recognisable disabilities,
the overall age range is a little beyond what we'd expect for a realistic classroom scene
in a movie, the teacher is deliberately passive in getting
Charlie to engage with her work and in the original script we do actually see this confirmed.
It makes sense that for two intelligent over-achieving
parents this would be an especially troubling thing to
deal with. When combined with anxieties over having let Ellen be too involved with Charlie's
upbringing this almost certainly was a source of trauma for Annie. And this diorama IS actually
representative of Charlie's preschool, presumably where she was when Annie first had it officially
explained to her that Charlie was different and perhaps suffering from learning difficulties.
It could be alluding to some other traumatic episode
at Charlie's preschool, she does have big set your kids
hair on fire energy, but I think her receiving some kind of diagnosis is the best guess.
As with many things here, the ambiguity is likely intentional
but always with enough context to still be off-putting
and when we see it later it'll become clear the doorway has bars on it. Which again alludes
to something sinister but could also be a product
of a special needs playgroup where it may have
become necessity. The next diorama is the hospice where Ellen
was a patient. We'll see this in much better detail later
on and I think it's pretty self-explanatory as to why watching her abusive mother die
from a prolonged illness would be a source of trauma
for Annie anyway. And then right before the final
diorama of the Graham household we see blueprints, plans stuck to the wall, driving home this
idea that Annie's entire life has been secretly
manipulated by the cult and the plans they have in store for
Peter; given they're stuck right next to his bedroom and that's where Paimon's focus is
heading. And while we are just in Annie's workshop here
in a literal sense, if we understand the destination diorama as the now, the tangible world the
Graham family is existing in, and the treehouse as Hell or
Pandemonium to be more specific, then this in between space of the workshop should be
viewed as the world outside of the families awareness,
the plans of the cult, the unseen rituals going on
around them, essentially the spiritual unseen, which is why Paimon can easily navigate it.
This is the blurring, or in between space between hell
and reality. And it's a busy, chaotic workshop with signs
of crafting and planning in abundance, signs of all the cults machinations. On the wall
we see two paintings, a strange blue figure representing
Paimon, and a woman in gold with her head cut out of
frame clearly representing the soon to be decapitated Ellen who has been promised gold
and wealth beyond her dreams. They're king and queen,
presiding over this workshop, this in-between space
where Paimon and the cult were able to interact. It's here that Ellen appears as a ghost, standing
right in front of these blueprints, or plans, so again literally this idea of an in-between
space where even beyond death Ellen can somehow still
manifest. And as Paimon rides through it, building in
speed and fervor as the camera zooms in and we hear
this insane fly buzzing through the score, the camera, really Paimon, becomes a literal
fly on the wall camera angle in Peter's room, staring right
at the spot we'll see Annie crawl across like a fly when
she's possessed by Paimon. And keep this in mind because this is something else we'll
look at in detail later on, there is a blurring of the
line between director, or the lens of the film let's say and
Paimon. And here we see the camera, not for the only time, seemingly move through the
fourth wall of the bedroom, just as we come to understand
Paimon can do again later on when he's possessing Annie. Right from the start it's blurring
the line between the demonic powers at work and the lens of
the film. This opening shot not only gives you the entire
plot of Annie's life leading up to the film, it also
demonstrates the relationships of the main groups of the film just from visual and audio
context as well as foreshadowing all the major events
to come, building an insane amount of tension and being
a practical and technical masterpiece. It's perfect. Completely perfect. Just before I move on it's worth pointing
out that there are several key differences between the
Graham household and the miniature. I've seen a couple of youtube videos that pointed this
out and people asking on Reddit. They don't match
perfectly in interior or exterior. Now knowing a little bit
about the production I knew the interior shots were filmed on a set that was changing pre
and mid filming. Steve Newburn, the guy in charge
of the miniature production was quite open about this
during interviews. It simply wasn't possible to get a 100% match because of how quickly
and last minute things were changing on set. So in
terms of interior differences we can put it down to
alterations during filming. But presumably the exterior of the house was fixed prior
to the diorama being built and so as to why that would be
different I just couldn't figure out. In the same interview
with Steve Newburn he'd mentioned taking 400 exterior shots and being meticulous about
getting it right. I couldn't figure it out and that doesn't
make for a very good 'Complete Guide' video so I
actually reached out to Steve directly And as it turns out he is a bloody lovely guy
and sent me a full explainer right back. I'm going to put his
full explanation up on screen so that you can pause and
read it for yourself if you like because I'm sure it will be fascinating to many of you,
but to answer this question about the exterior specifically,
initially they had planned to shoot in interior locations
and then changed to a set. During production the changes to the interior sets were so thorough
that when it came time to make this diorama Steve
realised that the interior sets and house exterior
weren't going to match at all. It wasn't possible to fit the interior sets in the exterior of
the house. Ultimately with the interiors being far more
relevant to the story, the exterior of the house
miniature was adjusted to work to the interior. As Steve points out much of the front fa ade
is left off the diorama and in terms of the actual
building you never see any interior/exterior shots that
would cause you to question this incongruity. And I was going to leave it there because
I really didn't want to bother the guy too much, but fortunately
for us again he's bloody lovely so I did get to ask
him a follow up about the Keep Out room and while he was hazy on the details he did confirm
this was Ellen's room so he was actually able to
solve two mysteries for us and I think really set us a
strong precedent moving forward. I'd just like to thank Steve for that again and I strongly
encourage you guys to go check out their website they
do some amazing work and will absolutely have provided material for a bunch of films you
love and a bunch of impressive stuff you likely won't have
seen before too. We should also touch on Peter's bedroom and
Steve's brief interaction with Peter as it is still part of
this opening shot. There's not too much of note in Peter's room, it's actually quite
sparse which likely made the technicalities of the shot
a little easier, but it does also lend itself to this idea of
being a room in a dollhouse. We see Peter's telescope obscured by clothing, one of many
allusions to Peter not being able to see what's coming,
of his lack of awareness to the spiritual or celestial
machinations occurring around him. Right from Steve's knock at the door we notice
a distance between the family members, a practiced knock used after many arguments over demands
for privacy from a teenage son. Steve is dutifully respectful of Peter while still being authoritarian
and while his character may become an obstacle to
Annie, he is by far and away the more caring parent, the closest thing the film has to
a well-adjusted character that acts sensibly. This is of course
because he is exterior to Annie's bloodline and, for the
most part, untainted by Paimon and much of the films insanity. But even so, given the
context of it being the morning of his mother-in-laws funeral,
Steve is more than a little distant with his son here.
He shakes him awake and throws the suit onto the bed before heading to walk out. It's not
exactly ab*sive but it's also not father of the year
material. And this immediate distance between the family
is compounded by the question 'do you know if your sister slept in her room last night?'.
To the first time viewer this may seem like paternal care
being muddied by the exhaustion of grief, but it's
actually serving as foreshadowing for this malignance within the family by softly demonstrating
this distance and this absence of care and affection.
Peter replies that he doesn't know and we see a
moment of realisation from Steve that no one knows where their youngest daughter slept
last night. And I want to point out again just how tropey
and clich this could be if done wrong. One of the first
lines of dialogue is 'hey do you know where your sister is?' which would be a pretty jarring
intro for even the schlockiest of horror movies. But
just like every other potentially clich or overused motif
we see in this movie, it's done better, it hits home and it works perfectly without alerting
the viewer to the real game that's being played here. During the camera pan across the workshop
we hear a muffled male voice, and while I'm almost
positive it is Steve checking if his family are funeral ready it's worth noting that at
many points during the movie we will hear the activity
of cult members in and around the house. This could be
them talking, or even chanting, but in all likelihood it is Gabriel Byrne here and it's
just encouraging you to listen closely while also making you
less suspicious of other off camera sounds you may hear.
It's also got that sense of muffled voices 'coming from the other side' which again supports
the workshop here as being a symbolic stand-in
for this in-between place. Sort of how the physical realm
may appear to observing spirits and we'll see that same idea played with again later
on. Following Steve's realisation that he's a
terrible parent we see him head outside to the treehouse to
check on Charlie. It's perhaps intentionally covered by the tree here but the treehouse
has a pattern on it resembling the rune of life, which is
a fitting place for it given that this is the location of
Paimon's eventual resurrection. I'm not sure how intentional that is but given everything
else the film does it wouldn't surprise me at all if
it was. The camera pans down and we see Annie sat
alone in the car, not helping her children get ready,
seemingly frustrated at her daughters decision to sleep in the treehouse again or her husbands
lack of awareness regarding it. Now on first viewing
it's tempting to see this as grief, it's Annie that's lost
her mother after all so she has every right to sit in the car blindsided and angry. Quickly
though we realise that this isn't simply grief, it's
more evidence of this malignance within the family, this
distance, lack of communication and lack of affection. And that's never more apparent
than it is in Annie's relationship with her children. It's
apt then that as we meet this character she's frustrated
with her children, distant from them and isolated emotionally, here the car serves as a motif
for her isolation, for the separation and barriers
between them. The persistent and ominous hum that's played
throughout the first few minutes of the movie, briefly
dulls to silence as the camera moves into Annies isolated space. The sound is there
to create tension and a feeling of intense dread but it's absence
is also used to heighten this feeling of Annie's isolation by removing it just as you've adjusted
to it. It's then brought back rapidly as we cut to the
treehouse and we meet Charlie bringing back the tension and ramping the dread back up
so we know all is not quite right with her. Because I think it's fair to say the film
wants us to be a little creeped out by Charlie right from the
offset. As Steve comes up to check on her he looks the wrong way, and gets an extremely
passive jump scare as he turns to see her. Right away
Charlie is being subliminally built as being off, in the
wrong place, doing and saying the wrong things. It's all designed to give us a feeling of
discomfort surrounding Charlie with slight shades of
Damian from the Omen films. Now I didn't want to include this, but given
that it's maybe the number one googled question about
Charlie I should point out that Millie Shapiro, the actress that plays her, suffers from Cleidocranial
Dysplasia, a rare medical condition that affects the development of the teeth, collar bones
and facial structure. Now to be clear, in the Hereditary
script it does not specify that Charlie has any kind of
facial deformity and Millie Shapiro auditioned for the role after reading the script and
feeling like the part was perfect for her. And I'm sure it
being a predominantly hereditary condition wasn't lost on
the film makers. Now while that may be the case it's also fair to say that her appearance
does increase this feeling of otherness in Charlie
and when viewing the movie for the first time one can't
help but make the association of her being somehow in a less than suitable vessel for
Paimon, his demonic nature somehow causing Charlie's deformation
within the context of the film. The script does mention that Charlie is androgynous for
example, and we know this is reflective of Paimon
traditionally being male with a feminine visage to him and again this idea that he's been
born in the wrong body. It's even alluded to in the name
Charlie which can be used as a name for both males
and females. In fact Charlie gets her name from Annie's brother Charles who killed himself,
further alluding to this androgyny and the link between
them having both been selected hosts for Paimon. Now I have seen some critics express discomfort
at this, essentially protesting Shapiro's appearance
in the movie given the context of her character. But I think it's fair to say she was very
aware of what the role entailed going in and seemingly her,
her parents and the director Ari Aster all worked
extremely closely together with a keen understanding of what they're building. In fact Shapiro
even posted a tongue-in-cheek video on social media
pointing to her being aware of how the film would
make her look ahead of time, so I think it's safe to say any concerns for her representation
aren't shared by the actress. Plus I've also seen
critics condemn this film for "literally demonizing transgender people" because of Paimon's desire
to swap bodies due to a gendered bias. And let's
just say that criticism is not going to be a part of this guide. There certainly is a
form of transsexualism occurring, but I do not think
this was built from, or remotely to do with the
demonizing of transgender people and much more to do with the theme of women's bodies
being literal sacrificial vessels for men. Now I understand Millie Shapiro has had a
difficult time with audience reactions in the years
following the films release, but to argue the films case for a moment I think the problem
lies with disabled and deformed representation in general
being lacking on screen and I think it's fair to say
that despite arguably using her deformity as a device to drive audience discomfort,
ultimately it does a good job of not being exploitative to her
in any way. It's not dwelled upon, it's not ridiculed or
made fun of, really it's just one building block to her otherness. Everything else is
down to the incredible script and the incredible performance,
her reluctance to talk, her clicking, her playing
around with dead animals, all of that is what makes Charlie a little bit terrifying. Really
I'd think of it as good casting but yes, if that was a question
you had it is a genuine condition the actress has and a
conscious decision by the filmmakers to go in that direction by hiring her, but certainly
not a prerequisite for the role of Charlie. They
put a casting call out for suitable child actors, Milly Shapiro
auditioned and was clearly the best suited for the role. Back to Charlie in the treehouse and as with
most of this movie the scene is littered with easter eggs.
We see this makeshift workbench set up on crates marked Hercules which will have significance
to Peter later on. This is actually foreshadowing
foreshadowing which may be a first for me. If you're
paying very close attention on your first watch you may notice Charlie quickly close
the shoe box to prevent Steve from seeing inside, as we find
out later this is where she keeps normal kid stuff like
severed bird heads that she might not want her dad to see. Even Charlie's outfit choices
can tell us a great deal. Not only does Charlie hide the
contents of her shoebox but we also see her seemingly
hide her hands away. Now she may have something in her hands she's hiding, again she likes
playing with animal body parts, but I think it could
be these rings she's made herself out of little blue plastic
thread. If you're interested please check out her Etsy. Now as to what these mean exactly it's again
a bit of a mystery online, I think the most common
suggestion is a wedding ring, symbolizing Paimon's marriage to Ellen and I think that's
absolutely one part of it. But I don't think that's the
whole answer, it's actually something a little more complex
tying a lot of thematic elements together. We'll look shortly at colour coding in the
film but for now know that pretty much anything blue in the
film is Paimon or Paimon related, we've already seen the
blue painting of Paimon and there's much more to come. So we've got that general thematic
link, we've got the homemade arts and crafts aesthetic
that defines Charlies artistic creations, essentially
Paimon's subconscious manifesting visions of the events to come. And rings in general
and especially in occultism often represent binding. Like
Ellen is bound to Paimon and like Paimon is bound to the
physical vessel of Charlie and bound to Ellen's bloodline in terms of other possession opportunities.
It's unclear because Charlie is constantly hiding her hands in her sleeves but the number
of rings may change, and the fingers they're on certainly
seems to, but this shot gives us a really clear evidence
that there is at least at this point, three rings. And there are three generations of
women in Annie's family that Paimon requires as sacrifice.
We're going to look at this in much greater detail but for
now just understand Ellen, Annie and Charlie as a trinity. A lot like the holy trinity
but let's not get ahead of ourselves. If we see these three
rings as representative of this trinity, these three sacrificies
that have been requested, these three promises - which are another thing rings represent,
then it starts to make a lot more sense. The rings
represent the binding, this promise, of the three trinity
members lives, or more specifically heads, to Paimon. Two seemed to be frayed, representing
Annie and the original Charlie's unwilling sacrifice,
and one is tied neatly with a little knot that gives it the
shape of an engagement ring, representing Ellen's willing union with Paimon.
But that's not everything, Charlie is also wearing pyjamas with constellations on them
and again this is a purposeful decision to allude to her
subconscious desires as Paimon. As we'll look at later it's
likely within the films lore that Paimon is a fallen angel and even though the film will
never say it out loud I think the links we see to the celestial,
the stars, the heavens, are because in the deep lore of
the film and supporting Christian literature, namely Paradise Lost by Milton, this is something
the followers of Lucifer crave after their failed
war for heaven, to be back amongst the stars and ruling in
heaven. So again we see this subconscious desire playing out in Charlie's choice of
pyjamas. Now that's my theory and we're going to get to
all the demonic lore and Christian history when we look
at Paimon but there is another much more obvious link which is stars close kinship with pentagrams.
Pentagrams are perhaps the most ubiquitous symbol in witchcraft, wicca, satanism and
all the surrounding fringes. A pentagram quite literally
is a five-pointed star symbol and one of the oldest
drawn symbols we have knowledge of. And if we think about the other most frequent occult
and religious symbols they're almost certainly
the sun and moon so again we have this idea of the
celestial somehow powering or being in league with the magical. This goes back to our most
ancient beliefs, the sun is traditionally linked with
the holy, the pure and light and good and subsequently
becomes a religious motif. The stars and moon represent it's opposite, the night, darkness,
the unknown and subsequently are linked to alternate
schools of belief like occultism and majick. Throughout history the pentagram has meant
a great many different things, for example in my
Complete Guide to Green Knight there's a big section on it's meaning to medieval chivalry
and knightly codes of conduct. But one place that
it's really stuck is the occult and the esoteric. A great
example comes from the Lesser Key of Solomon, the book where we and the filmmakers draw
a great deal of our knowledge regarding Paimon.
It's cover and inner illustrations are littered with
pentagrams, or stars. The text also makes several mentions of stars with some of Paimon's
demonic colleagues even being described as having
their faces adorned by stars. So there's a clear link there,
and whatever part of that we ascribe to there's still some very clear visual storytelling
occurring here. In one shot we have Peter's obscured
telescope unable to see the stars, in a quickly following
shot Charlie's leggings have constellations on them. Clearly, he is blind to Charlie's
true nature, as the rest of the Graham family seem to be.
And that seems true in every interaction, Steve reprimands Charlie for sleeping in the
treehouse, saying she will catch pneumonia and she replies
with the terrifyingly blunt, "That's okay." And I
won't dwell on it but Charlie's dialogue is perfectly written and perfectly delivered.
Here we have a schism between what we on our first watch
and Steve hear: that she's an awkward child trying to
downplay the danger to avoid getting in trouble, perhaps she has some difficulty communicating.
And on the flipside the real meaning that one might understand on their second watch,
that it is okay, that this vessel is meaningless and
that death is not only not a threat to Paimon, but
something subconsciously, if not actively, being sought out by him so he can switch bodies.
One last thing before we move on, the other big question people generally have about Charlie,
at what point did Charlie become Paimon? Has
this been a recent change or was Charlie Paimon in the
womb, was there ever such a thing as the real Charlie? And this has a really clear answer
from the director Ari Aster: Paimon has been in Charlie
from roughly the moment she was born. There was a
Charlie Graham, but right at the point of birth, or more likely in the immediate days
that followed as Ellen was able to get her hooks in, Paimon
entered and completely displaced Charlie. Now while it's great that we get such a clear
and concrete answer out of him it does lead to some
puzzling inconsistencies in Charlie that may alert even first time viewers. I'll discuss
a couple of them as we go through but we already have a great
example right here: if Paimon is saying 'that's okay'
regarding pneumonia and seemingly ambivalent about his own death, then why do we see Charlie
freak out and lean out of the window trying to save her own life? Why is Charlie seemingly
unaware of what the cult is doing if Paimon is the
one who's made the agreement with them for this to
happen and so on. One thing we can say it is 100% not, is the real Charlie resurfacing
in these moments or some kind of personality blur between
her and Paimon. That is confirmed by the director to not be the case. It's Charlie's
body but it's Paimon driving. So in the case of choking in the
car we can put it down to his vessel dying from a peanut allergy being a confusing and
uncomfortable experience for Paimon. But the real reason for all these inconsistencies
has to be put down to Paimon's addled and only partially
alert mind, and this loss of awareness and understanding
he's suffering from is caused by two things. Primarily the act of being born into a child's
mind and body, a human female child no less, essentially
sets Paimon back to square one for a few years as
the brain and body he's inhabiting begin to develop and stemming from that the fact that
he's in this unsuitable female vessel. He's scared and
disconnected from the world, consciously unaware of
what's happening regarding the cults plans but perhaps subliminally aware of what he's
signed up for. And later he may feel confusion when
he is born or transferred into Peter's body as this process
is likely still disorientating for Paimon, but both of the main problems are essentially
removed. His brain is more developed in a young adult body
and most crucially he's in a more suitable male body.
While there are times this may be a little dissatisfying when it comes to how Charlie
behaves and what Paimon knows, these moments are essential
for the tone and pacing of the film. For example if
during the scene where Charlie gets lampposted she was waving her head out of the window
begging for death then we would essentially view Peter as guiltless and never have any
reason to doubt Annie's sanity. We would just know the
child was possessed. Ultimately we can't read Charlie's mind, but all of these inconsistencies
in her behaviour can be explained away by Paimon's
confused and lacking mental state. And his tendency to physically construct things that
we'll see happen in the future can be put down to his
subconscious desires playing out in the things that he
builds. Both because he can literally see the future, and more specific to the film
that somewhere underneath his confusion he remembers the
plan. This fascination with dioramas and miniatures is
obviously mirroring Annie, except she uses it subconsciously to process trauma in the
past and Paimon's uses it to subconsciously act out
his visions of and desires for the future. Which is why we
see him display seemingly god-like knowledge of events that haven't happened yet while
at other times acting like a confused child that doesn't
understand the plan he's central to. We're going to
look at Paimon's lore and power set in much greater detail later on but I wanted to clear
up that initial confusion regarding Paimon and Charlie's
motivations early on because it's another big
question people usually have! From the treehouse we move straight to the
funeral and we open to this still shot of Ellen's
memorial photo. Now again, we are delivering exposition here, the audience needs to know
who's being mourned and this is a pretty common
trope for funerals on film. But as you may expect there's
a great deal more going on with this shot. Most relevant to the plot we see Ellen holding
a book, now it's tempting to say this is the copy
of 'Invocations' we see Annie find later in the film, but the
cover colour does seem slightly more yellow than green. Now that could be to do with how
this scene is graded but truthfully it doesn't
really matter. It's an old book alluding to attained
knowledge, perhaps hidden or occult knowledge that's designed to generate a feeling of unease
around Ellen. What's really crucial here though is the colour of everything and it gives me
a great opportunity to present the colour coding of
the film. As I've already mentioned everything blue,
specifically turquoise but really any kind of blue, is related to Paimon and everything
gold or yellow is generally related to Ellen, seemingly the
matriarch of the cult and the prime benefactor of
Paimon's promised riches. Although how she plans to spend them in hell is left up to
the imagination. And here we see Ellen sat on
a blue sofa, essentially a throne related to Paimon, her
seat as his queen. She is dressed in yellow and gold signalling her profit from this position.
There's also a sinister band of red behind her giving
off relatively creepy vibes and that's matched with the
white of the flowers and the white of her trousers. White and red as a colour combination
generally alludes to birth, life and death and if you're
interested in that I do a big explainer on it in my Alien
Explained video. But within the context of this movie red is a signal of the cults involvement
and the satanic magic they are making use of. Not
seen here but the other main relevant colour would be
orange which is attributed to Charlie or Paimon within Charlie's form depending on how you
want to look at it. Following that we see Annie take to the podium
to give a eulogy to her mother. And at first we're
really not supposed to know what Annie is feeling. We've had confused emotions between
Steve and Peter and Annie sat alone in the car looking
frustrated. By this point we're probably aware that
all is not quite right but we also have little reason to assume Annie isn't in the midst
of extreme grief. And so as the eulogy begins we get
this slow panning shot of the back of Annie's head, refusing
to show the audience what she's feeling. As her face comes into view the speech starts
to give us a little more of the discomfort driving Annie,
suggesting her mother would be suspicious to see this
kind of a turnout and saying "it's heartening to see so many strange new faces here today".
I think we can safely presume that Annie is a little
suspicious at the turnout given that it's frequented by
many of the cult members. And her entire speech runs in this form of double-speak for what
she actually feels towards her mother and the
situation and what is proper to say at a funeral. She's not
happy about it, but she's playing her role as she has done her entire life. We see Peter
and Steve giving slightly off reactions to what Annie
is saying because they understand it's double speak even if
they have no inkling towards the supernatural workings of the cult yet. And that kind of
a close lens on language is extremely important in this
film, the script is super sharp and wrought with hidden
meaning disguised as plain speech. As the camera continues to move round we see Annie's
face and her quite cold demeanour and we begin to hear
something closer to the truth about Annie's mother
describing her as a "very secretive and private woman", saying that she had "private rituals,
private friends, private anxieties" and again we can
see clearly how these all apply secondary meaning. The
rituals are obviously the satanic practices of the cult and things like we see Annie dabbling
with following Charlies death. The private friends
are the other cult members and private anxieties can
easily be applied to her ultimate goal of summoning Paimon and getting him in the correct
vessel and the trauma this imparts on their family
unit. Upon first watch however all this is really doing is
building tension and providing a grounded reason for this distance and coldness within
the family. Grandma was a private and secretive woman
and this seems to have heavily impacted her daughter
and subsequently her daughters relationship with her children. As the speech continues
it's this secrecy and coldness that Annie focuses on
and while it continues focus shifts away from Annie,
firstly so we can't really get any measure of how upset she is but more importantly to
keep this obvious double speak only on the edges of
the audiences awareness. It's a very clever few seconds
of film making as the film does it's best to distract you from what's being said in
the speech. The camera cuts to Charlie hovering over grandmas
coffin and while the continuing speech is about
Grandma within the context of the movie, we're almost certainly supposed to apply it to Charlie
because it clearly suits her to a tee. "She was a very difficult woman to read. If you
ever thought you knew what was going on with her, and god forbid
you tried to confront that..." And as the camera
rips away from Charlie the thought goes unfinished, essentially reinforcing that while it applies
to grandma this ominous description is now perhaps
better suited to Charlie. Annie cuts the thought off to say "But when
her life was unpolluted", suggesting very clearly that
something Annie did not approve of had come into her mother's life and polluted it. And
pollution is a really clever word to use here because it
ever so softly hints on something dark or poisonous or
malicious slowly creeping it's way in and sullying what it touches. It's quite a damning
and passive aggressive statement but it's obscured from
the viewer by what's happening on screen as Charlie
notices her Grandmas necklace, the symbol of Paimons cult in the movie and something
that in real life is known as the 'Seal of Paimon'. During
her speech Annie is wearing the same necklace and it's
important to point out that full knowledge of the cult has been kept from Annie and that
she's presumably wearing the necklace here simply
because her mother gave her it and was insistent on
her wearing it and ultimately it's her mothers funeral. She may be familiar with the symbol
as relating to her mother but she does not understand
it's true meaning at this point. Outside of the
movie however, the real life 'Seal of Paimon' as seen in the grimoire The Lesser Key of
Solomon isn't an exact match to this. It's actually been
modified slightly so instead of these four shapes central to
the design there's actually just three. This is because in the film they're using it to
represent the three heads that Paimon is demanding from
the family, Ellen, Charlie and Annie so they present this
very slightly altered version. A happy by-product of this is that these little squiggles here
then become representative of a 666. Another thing
worth pointing out about this necklace specifically is
that it's gold, gold jewellery traditionally being a sign of royalty denoting Ellen as
both queen of the cult and Paimon's queen or bride. Following
the shot of the necklace we see Charlie snap round as if
being alerted to something we don't hear and we're treated to scary face cult man grinning
at her. As the speech continues we begin to hear Charlies
clicks interrupting over it and we see her loudly
sketching out her mothers grief. Now on the face of it we're being confronted with an
odd child that doesn't seem to understand social cues. She
shouldn't be making noise, she shouldn't be drawing at
a funeral and upon being confronted with her own grieving mother her first thought shouldn't
be to break out the craft supplies and try to capture
the moment. Not understanding social cues goes a
little further than that still because in the drawing Annie is weeping. And while Annie
may not be shouting with glee at her mothers passing,
she's also very clearly not crying. So we're really being
shown a child that either doesn't understand human social norms or is focusing down into
the small amount of grief Annie is feeling because that's
what she's getting a kick out of. And as we know
Charlie is actually Lord Paimon and I think the idea that this focus on grief, or trauma,
that it's something he enjoys and burrows into is absolutely
spot on. As a first time viewer we're supposed to
presume the answer is a deeply troubled child, but really all the clues are there that this
is a gleeful demon biding it's time, revelling in the misery
of those around him. However, it may go deeper than that still
because according to Alex Wolff, the actor that plays Peter,
rather than being gleeful and willing Paimon is scared and confused, sad even, at being
used for the machinations of the cult. He even likens it
to mental illness, our central theme, with Charlie having
this literal demon within and outwardly coming across as just a creepy little girl. And I
agree with that to an extent, certainly while Paimon's
trapped in Charlie's body and unaware of what's happening. So if you choose to you can see
Charlie's drawing as an attempt to connect with Annie,
or connect with anything emotionally and misery is something they recognise due to being currently
miserable themselves. And while that may be entirely accurate I think ultimately his horrible
little drawings and all the other examples of Paimons
scribbling are demonic impulses starting to come to
the surface and reemerge in his waking mind. While we may find sympathetic routes to humanize
him he's still a high ranking member of hells hierarchy that takes payment in the form of
human sacrifice. I think it's also worth mentioning
that again we see another overdone horror movie trope
of creepy kid and demonic drawings being absolutely perfected by Ari Aster here. Because while
this sort of thing is ultimately familiar in the
genre it's done so well, so subtly and so deeply here that
really it can be retired forever. And that may seem like an overreaction to one doodle
but I assure you as we go through there is a wealth of
cool and creepy hidden meaning in Paimons sketchy
vandalism. And as well as the drawing we're also introduced
to the clicking here. Something that really came to
define the movie upon first release with a kind of viral popularity. It's simple, it's
unnerving and it works beautifully well to separate the movie
almost right away. In lore I think it's very tempting to
view this as part of Paimon's discomfort at his host body or vessel as well. In the script
it's described as a tic that Charlie has but it's left quite
nondescript beyond that. However, towards the end of the
film when Paimon has entered Peter's body, we see Peter click also. So we're left with
two options, one that this is from Paimon's discomfort
simply at being in a human body, even one deemed as
suitable for him like Peter, or more likely that this is some natural tic of Paimon's
demon body, not the androgynous humanoid we see him depicted
as on earth. Paimon requires a human form to exist
in this realm so we can say with absolute certainty that his traditional form is not
human. On top of this we know from Paimonic lore that he has
a non-human tongue or dialect somewhat like a croak
or a groan and must be commanded by the conjurer to speak in a recongnizable tongue. So this
idea that he's got an alien, unrecognizable voice
and possibly non human speaking equipment in his true
form is already present outside of the movie. To go a level deeper the clicking initially
reminded me of certain insects, certain kinds of beetles
for example that make clicking noises as a defense
mechanism. And we do have this association between Paimon and flies and buzzing insects
and so on, and so to me at first it seemed likely
that this was a product of Paimon's insect like mouth that's
unused to communicating with regular speech through human anatomy coming out in moments
he's anxious or just forgets his surroundings.
And that's very close to the truth, but in reality I think
what's become known as the click, is actually a cluck. And that rather than being insectoid
in his true form, perhaps what we're hearing with the
click, or cluck, is an innate tic of his true, more bird-like
form. We'll look at exactly why that is in more detail shortly when we get on to the
bird imagery at work in the film but for now know that even
if I refer to it as a 'click' for simplicity I'm almost positive
it's a cluck. The last important piece to Charlie's character
is the nut allergy, something we also see introduced
at the funeral. And I think everyone's first takeaway should be that eating a chocolate
bar like this is a clear sign of possession. Now as with the
not knowing where Charlie is in the first first lines of
dialogue, in another directors hands immediately foreshadowing her nut allergy would absolutely
feel jarring and tropey. You may be aware of Chekhov's Gun or Alfred Hitchcock's rule
of three, essentially the idea that if you need the
audience to remember something important, you're going
to have to show it either blatantly or repetitively and that details introduced to the plot should
always pay off, there shouldn't be any dead ends. And as audience members we've got quite
savvy to rules like this, it often becomes groan
inducing how transparent this is when you see something
and know it's only being introduced to you so you're not unclear on it later. So again,
as with Charlie being missing at the start and the dollhouse
theme, we see Ari Aster choose to saturate the
foreshadowing right away. First by creating a situation with risk, that being Steve seeing
Charlie with the chocolate bar and asking about nuts and
then immediately doubling and having Annie ask the
same thing. If we're following Hitchcock's rule of three then we've just given the audience
two out of the three necessary warnings regarding
the allergy in the same piece of dialogue. Not only that
but Annie follows up with saying they haven't brought the epi-pen. And this is a really
clever piece of misdirection because at this point it's much,
much likelier that you think Annie and Steve aren't
great parents rather than Charlie is a demonhost for the eighth lord of hell. Literally the
second you're saturated with it you're given something
else to make you feel as though you've cracked the
case. This child has been left alone in a treehouse all night, has been left with chocolate
that may kill her and her mother has sat in the car oblivious,
forgetting to bring the thing that would save her life
right after she's just lost a close family member. That's just the information you have
at this point on a first time viewing. So really what you're
most likely to focus on here is that Annie is lacking as a
mother, while quietly noting to your subconscious that the treehouse child has a nut allergy
and that is a masterclass in how to deliver expositional
foreshadowing. The setup we needed has again been
achieved in one quick movement, our characters are further developed and the audience are
only wiser in the way the film intends for them
to be. There is a slightly different reading available
here too, Annie's mention of the epi-pen does show us
that her mindset, and we see this with the rest of the family too, is very focused on
mortality. We don't see her hug Charlie, really she would
probably have snapped if Steve hadn't already verified it
was nut free, instead just caring about the life and death binary of the situation. We
can presume that this is a product or signifier of extreme
grief resulting from loss of close family, they -
specifically Annie but Steve too, care about their family, but recent events have twisted,
or forced their perspective to something more fatalistic
and less everyday. Put simply they're hyper concerned
with issues of mortality while trailing further away from closeness and care as their grief
overburdens them. And if you've suffered from something similar I'm sure you know what I'm
talking about. Grief like this can lead to an obsession with death and that's essentially
what we see Annie spiral into albeit using this supernatural
metaphor of afterlife and resurrection. And that's
how this metaphorical relationship is going to work throughout the movie. Grief and mental
illness are used as a mask for the actual demonic,
supernatural narrative at work here BUT crucially that
demonic and supernatural narrative is itself a metaphorical stand in for grief and mental
illness. It's very circular in that respect. Now I think the biggest question surrounding
the funeral scene, mostly because people have been
unable to answer it, is the ointment or oil that Charlie observes one of the cult members
rubbing on Ellen's lips. I've seen a lot of different
half theories on this but none that I fully agreed with or that I
considered to be complete. A lot of people suggesting this is Annie rubbing the ointment,
or even Joan, but that's not the case it's definitely
just an unnamed cult member. Before we get into this I should point out
that the use of herbs and oils in satanic rituals is just one
example of the film being influenced by and referencing or giving homage to Rosemary's
Baby. I thought about doing a whole comparison throughout
the video but ultimately it would spoil Rosemary's Baby for people who haven't seen
it, it wouldn't add anything I'm not going to explain
about Hereditary anyway and also it is a film by Roman Polanski and quite frankly f*ck that
dude. But it is worth noting that at a lot of points
throughout the movie, this being the first, it is alluding to
themes and motifs present in Rosemary's Baby. Now in the script this lip ointment is described
as an oil and at other key moments, like when Annie
explores her mother's belongings, we see her stumble across potions and herbs that have
been used as part of the cults rituals that are also
referred to as oils in the script. So that's the most obvious
answer and the one people usually run with, just like the book ellen was holding, this
is some non- specific element of the occult ritual the
cult are engaged in. And wherever you go from there that
much certainly remains true. But there is more we can say about it. Firstly, we can't
rely on the script for anything more than guidance. The funeral
scene has the same bones in the script but is ordered
differently and several key elements have been changed either on set or prior to shooting.
For example this woman is supposed to be concerned
as to what's being rubbed on Ellen's lips and
clearly they instead decided to make her a knowing participant trying not to give too
much away. It also says this guy is looking at Charlie with
an "overly sentimental look in his eyes" which.. Let's just
say I think it's clear they were experimenting a lot on set. It also suggests Charlie looks
away because she's unnerved by the corpse and not because
she senses this guy looking at her so overall we can
say that the script and the film are not the same exact story and for that reason we'll
really only be looking to it for confirmation where is absolutely
necessary. Even more relevant to us though, a lot
of key details regarding the background lore, the machinations of the cult and the specifics
of the occultism are left out. Either because these
were things that were improvised during production or,
more likely, because these key elements of meaning were deliberately shrouded, personal
to Ari Aster himself. And truthfully, that's what
we're interested in here. So for me at least, saying this is
simply an oil the cult uses isn't a particularly satisfying answer. Now there is going to be
a particular herb mentioned quite a lot in the background,
that being 'Dittany of Crete' - which again does not
appear in the script, but we can say for certain that that is not what this is. We're going
to look at that when it comes up but for now we can rule
it out firstly because it's black not clear and
furthermore because we know it aids in facilitating demonic possession and Paimon getting his
claws in essentially. That really makes no sense
in Ellen's case, she's literally dead and possessing her
would presumably be as gross as it would be useless. It would be a very dumb movie if
it did something like that. So if it's not Dittany
of Crete, if this isn't about possession then what is it about?
Well, I think I have an extremely satisfying answer. The first thing I thought of here
was essentially paganistic rites of the dead, think things
like putting coins in the eyes to pay the boatman and other
such supernatural beliefs enacted on the body post-mortem. And when it comes to these rites
and specifically anointing the lips with oil we
essentially have two main reasons this has been practiced
through history. The first being a tradition within royalty to have the lips anointed prior
to burial. Now there's a great many reasons why this
may have happened, often tied into beliefs of their
journey in the afterlife but presumably and practically because the body had to lie in
state and preserving it and making it smell nice were
of prime importance. And you may have already made
the connection, we're discussing Queen Ellen's lips here, so not only are the cult anointing
her as royalty in death but it's a subtle visual
clue to the audience as to her status. But that's not all,
because while that is a nice fit for what's going on here it's also really quite Christian
and this is coming from a distinctly opposed to Christianity
type cult. At the end Joan literally rejects Christianity in front of Paimon so to me it
seemed off that they'd be engaging in a practice that has
predominantly, but not solely, been Christian. But, this practice of anointing the lips with
oil hasn't solely been related to royalty, in fact if
we look at early Pagan esoteric beliefs, it was actually quite
common to oil the lips to ease the escape of the soul from the mouth. They're lubricating
your soul hole so to speak, later when we see Paimon
leaving Charlie and trying to enter Peter multiple times,
it will always be through the mouth. And this is something that 100% needs to happen for
Ellen and the cults plan to work. She has to appear
to Annie to jumpstart Annie's belief in the supernatural
and to do that she has to ensure her soul is free to roam. So while we can say there's
absolutely a visual allusion to Ellen's status as queen,
I think what's actually happening here (to answer 100
different reddit threads from the last five years), is that they're easing Ellen's soul
from her body so that she can essentially still frequent the
home, enact and observe the plan. And again, that space
she's going to appear in, the workshop, has already been metaphorically built as this
inbetween space between the encroaching supernatural
and the Graham family, a quasi-spiritual realm. As far
as I'm concerned it's this anointing of the lips that makes that Ellen's appearance there
possible. Lastly for the funeral, and I have already
mentioned him, why is the creepy cult member smiling at
Charlie? Now I think this is actually pretty obvious compared to what we've just gone over
but this is also another big question people have: the
answer is simply that they've been successful in
summoning Paimon to a human body. This is the look of a man who's staring at a demon
he knows he's brought into the world. Maybe he's trying
to get in Paimon's good graces, maybe he's simply
unable to contain his glee. Whatever the case he's extremely happy with how things are going
and ultimately how he knows they will end. It's
very important to view the Grahams as sacrificial lambs
unaware of what they're walking into, but pretty much everyone around them is. This
was essentially Ari Aster's mantra going in to
the movie, it's also something I kept to heart when writing
my novel because I think it's an incredibly powerful suspense tool in character driven
horror. And while the Graham family may be unaware of
it, this is the first clue to the audience that something
very wrong is going on around them. Following the funeral we see the Graham family
return home and just before they walk in the door
we're greeted to an interior shot, itself designed to give this feeling that we're in
their home without their knowledge, just like the cult we're
there before them, watching for their arrival and just like we
see with the opening shot we have this blurring between the lens of the film and the lens
of Paimon and the cult that's going to be extremely
important later on. And to cement that to the audience we
have the sound of shuffling footsteps as the cult members present in the house hurry away
to hide themselves from the family. Getting ready
to wait and watch them just as we are doing. We also see
the family dog Max come out to greet the family, presumably because he's been hiding from the
noises of the cult members and wants to alert them. If you watch way too closely you can
actually see the dog waiting for it's cue to move forward,
clearly a very well trained dog, but it does give off
the impression that he's literally just been let go by a cult member hidden in the cupboard.
It's also worth noting that Steve is the only family
member to show the dog any attention and he does so
quite lovingly, he also reminds everyone to take their shoes off. He's subtly being set
up as the caregiver of the family, his biological distance
from Annie's bloodline meaning he's not as impacted
by the machinations of the cult and the repeated trauma that follows them. And while that is
happening we see the exact opposite with Annie. As soon as she's alone with Steve we see her
say "It does feel weird. Should I be sadder?" and again
we're subtly building Annie as this uncaring and perhaps mentally unwell person, because
as the audience we do expect her to be sadder. Annie
asks Steve about this because he's a psychiatrist, she's not so much confiding here as asking
for a professional opinion. Again building her as
somehow having improper feelings in the face of quite a heavy situation and Steve as someone
who's more emotionally connected and present. So subtly we're building up that bait and
switch between Annie being crazy and actual supernatural
events that define the latter half of the film. But
beyond that we are portraying quite a complex image of grief, it can be confusing - you
don't control how you feel or react to things and
everyone reacts differently. But for middle-aged people
that have been caretaking elderly and particularly terminally ill parents there can be this sense
of guilt at the relief they may feel when it's
finally over. And right here we can see how the film is using
supernatural elements, Annie's distant relationship with her mother due to the cult and the
invocation of Paimon and blurring the lines with what it's actually saying about the trauma
and illness and bereavement within the family
unit. Following the families return we get a glimpse
of Annie's career. We get this full screen of her
exhibition flyer, but just before that in the hallway we get to see two of her display
pieces. And while the movie never shows us them close up they
are phenomenal pieces of art, especially the 'Quicksand' model which was designed to show
the passage of time according to Aster and Newburn. We see three houses of different
eras, from the bottom up Colonial, then Victorian then
Modern. And we can see that the previous houses are buried underneath, it's a creepy model
and it sums up perfectly this idea of those who've
preceded us still being with us, still haunting us in a way,
as we build our lives on top of their influence. It's a metaphor for Hereditary passing essentially,
generations of a family demonstrated in the most eerie way possible and it speaks to Annie's
feeling that she can't escape her past and the things
her mother has done to her. It's also a trinity of houses,
a trinity of generations and that's going to be extremely important later on. And while
I don't subscribe to the idea it's a good piece of
evidence, perhaps the only evidence that this condition
within the bloodline preceded Ellen. As I said this model goes back to the victorian
era which is more suggestive of Ellen's parents than Ellen herself. The other model is given pride of place right
in front of the door but is even less clear to the viewer
in what it's representing. Unless you're looking very closely this will probably just look
like an everyday dollhouse. It's actually a house
designed to feel like it's trapping the residents within,
which should give you some idea as to how Annie feels about her home. And this won't
be an explicit motif in the film, it's building
on the subtextual mental illness and disquiet Annie has about
her life. That Annie is literally and metaphorically representative of a woman who feels trapped
in her life and that was pressured to start a
family. We see bars, chains, steel plates even vault doors
according to the diorama's creator, covering all the exits and trapping the owners inside.
Another thing of note about the model coming from
Ari Aster's reddit AMA is the deliberate obscuring of the
attic window where Ellen's body will be placed and Charlie's room in reference to their positioning
amongst the darker, supernatural elements. You can actually see this in action near the
end when the dollhouse becomes illuminated. As for the miniature flyer, most of it we
already covered during the opening shot but there is one
image that is new in the top left. This was almost certainly Ellen's living room or parlour,
where she met with the cult essentially. The walls are
yellowy gold and all the armchairs and sofa are blue, just
as we saw in the photo of Ellen at the funeral. The armchairs are all pointed towards the
sofa also, suggesting the groups focus towards Queen
Ellen. The name of Annie's exhibit, small world, is
usually used to react to a slight coincidence or finding a connection where one might not
expect. But here it's verging on simulacra and simulation
territory. If you don't know what I mean by that please
don't worry, it's a very complex way of discussing relatively simple ideas that generally university
lecturers loathe teaching because of this unnecessary complexity. It was a core influence
for the post-modernist movement and more crucially
the matrix which I think demonstrates it's concepts
quite fluently. Another great example is a prison - a prison convinces us we are free,
we're not locked up like criminals, but through the
prison, what it symbolizes, we come to understand we
aren't free. We can't do what we want because of laws, because of the prison's very existence.
And from that we realise we exist in a larger
prison, that it's been true all along just not in the way we
first assumed. The prison is a signifier of our wider imprisonment. So to put it simply
here Annie controls a small world of miniatures but through
that we come to understand that to Paimon and
the cult, Annie lives in a small, controllable world - that she has no control whatsoever,
she is completely unaware of the cults machinations
until it's too late. And that shows us that this initial
thing we felt about the dollhouses being these small controllable spaces with unaware participants
is true just in a deeper and darker way than
we first thought. A truth hides the lie through which we
see the truth. It's building this feeling of the families lives not being their own,
of them being dolls on a set, unable to see the bigger picture and
subtextually layering the realities we're aware of during
the film. And this is confirmed right after where we get one of several shots of Annie
wearing her monocular. This is very similar to Peter's
covered telescope. While Peter may be entirely unaware
and oblivious to events, Annie is watching, she is focused, she just has an extremely
narrow view, tunnel vision that eventually leads to the
damning of her and her family. She's in a small world,
unable to see the bigger picture, convinced she has some measure of what's going on. And
we see as her grip on reality falter her ability to
control and produce her small world falls off as she realises
she's not in control. There's one more thing of note regarding the
flyer and that's Annie's decision to use her maiden
name for her work. Now firstly this made me think of 'maiden, mother and crone' which
is another descriptor for the three states of womanhood
seen in the triple goddess or pagan trinity that we're
going to look at in detail later. I'm not sure if this is intentional but it's certainly
apt given it's a keen focus of the film. But beyond that I think
it's clearly demonstrating, really the whole exhibit is
demonstrating, that Annie is stuck in the trauma of her past, trapped and unable to
escape her mother's shadow. Even the scene behind the
laptop is lit with gold. Annie's mothers presence is
every where in her life and soon her presence is about to literally be in the workshop. Now I've already mentioned Annie using these
dioramas as a method to at least showcase but
hopefully process her trauma. Later when we see Annie creating the diorama of Charlie's
death she'll claim this is generating an objective
view, we can certainly say that even prior to the events of
the film she is doing this and considers it to be normal. But really here is the first
time the audience are seeing that as she's creating a scene
clearly very reminiscent to her mother dying in hospital. It's
not made 100% clear that this is Ellen, although it absolutely is and it's worth noting the
tightrope the film is walking as viewers become unsure
as to whether this was a request that feels uncomfortable and untimely for Annie to have
to complete, or whether this is something she's
decided to create. How the film presents Annie through the first and second act is probably
the most intelligent character work I've ever seen
on screen. I don't know anyone who heard Annie chanting
in that room on the first viewing and thought she was anything other than batshit insane
and that's because the film lets you think you're uncovering
the mystery in this being all Annie's mental illness
and in doing that it's got you unknowingly exploring the subtextual themes the film is
focused on, the things the supernatural devices are a
stand in for. It's genius and I really don't use that word
lightly. Media usually has two speeds in delivering subtext, either it's completely out there
and up for interpretation like The Lighthouse, or
it's something like 1899 or The Purge that is going to beat
you around the head with it shouting look how clever we are. Ari Aster presents a legitimate
third way to getting your audience to become aware
of your subtext and it's nothing short of genius. Like
with a lot of this movie I'm not even sure it's something you could replicate. Following our proper introduction to Annie's
miniatures we see Steve making the rounds and
checking on the family, for the most part being presented distance and dismissive answers.
We see Annie let out a sigh as she enters the conversation
whereas Steve greets her with a warm smile. He
acts interested and clearly demonstrates care for her and her work, interest and care that
she does not demonstrate back. The conversation is
left without her reply and we even see her getting
frustrated with the conversation continuing through her raising of the monocular and her
finally fully acknowledging Steve. While it's definitely
ignoring him out of frustration and distance in this case,
it's worth pointing out that nearly every time we see Annie painting on her miniatures,
it's a fine line between professional focus and full on vacant
fugue-like state like we see during her sleepwalking which again suggests that she's 'in her trauma'
so to speak while working on her dioramas. We also
see her grow increasingly irate as this state is repeatedly intruded upon and she becomes
less and less able to work and subsequently escape
from and process what is going on through this
displacement activity she's created for herself. After that Steve goes to check on Peter and
we do see a more loving relationship here, possibly the
healthiest bond in the whole family. But even still Peter does have problems communicating,
he is Annie's son and victim to the Leigh bloodline
and subsequently racked with his own troubles. Just
like Annie he isn't feeling any kind of genuine sadness to have lost his Grandma. Now we know
Grandma loves Charlie because Charlie is Paimon but she may have also kept a distance from
Peter knowing he was going to be entirely displaced
come Paimon's full ascension. It's equally possible
that he was privy to more of Ellen's behaviour than Charlie and just like Annie feels a sense
of relief with her passing. Steve seems to understand
entirely, likely feeling the exact same way although he's
far more tactful about it than Annie. Steve tells Peter he loves him and we see Peter
clearly struggling and unwilling to say it back, and
while that is very normal for a teenage boy it also finalizes
for the audience that Steve is the voice of reason and compassion here and perhaps the
only functional member of the family that's at
least attempting to openly communicate. In parallel to this we then see Annie go to
check on Charlie and on the one hand this is maybe the
most emotionally connected, good parenting we see from Annie. On the other it's at times
passive aggressive, absentee and she fails to reassure
or connect with her child. On a side note and I
probably won't stop mentioning this throughout, look at Toni Collette's range in this scene
alone. Not even nominated for an Oscar. Annie immediately
picks up Charlie's sketchbook to see a picture of the deceased Ellen, in comparison to her
drawings of everyone else where they look as bad as
possible, Ellen looks relatively peaceful and normal. We can assume Charpaimon had a
better relationship with Queen Ellen than the rest
of her family then and she certainly does seem the most
upset. And that's confirmed by Annie telling Charlie she was Ellen's favourite and that
even when she was a baby Annie wouldn't feed her because
Ellen insisted on it. Now we know why this favouritism exists from Ellen, but the feeding
aspect is an essential part of getting Paimon in to
Charlie's body. This process of possession at birth occurred through the feeding process,
something we'll actually see photographic evidence of.
There's again clear double speak with everything Annie
is saying here and while a first time viewer may see this is a failed effort to reassure
Charlie it's actually thinly veiled resentment towards
her mother and Charlie's closeness and her distance from
both of them. She never got the love from her mother that Charlie did. Charlie responds
with the quite worrying statement 'she wanted me to
be a boy' which we know means she wanted Paimon to
inhabit a male form and be able to achieve full power. Annie clearly takes in the weirdness
of the statement but rather than addressing it or
questioning it she circumvents it entirely by saying she
used to be a tom boy when she was growing up and that she hated dolls and dresses and
pink. And this could just be a change of subject and
again an effort to reassure Charlie but in double speak I
think we're seeing the same thing in Annie that Charlie is feeling now. Ellen made her
feel less than because she needed a male host, in Annie's
case her suicidal brother, and so Annie acted male in an
effort to win her mother's affection. The mention of hating dolls is also significant
given Annie's choice of career that could be, in a way seen
as dollmaking. Charlie asks Annie "Who's going to take care
of me?" and Toni Collette beautifully just lets an edge
of crazy into her performance, clearly again ostracised by her own child and feeling more
than quietly annoyed that Charlie saw Ellen as
her primary caregiver. What she's missing of course is that
Charlie knows there's something more going on, that Ellen has likely hinted about these
plans to her and again this idea of Paimon's confused mental
state not really being able to process what's going
on or what he is supposed to do. He feels isolated, lonely and confused and Ellen was
the only link he had to being able to understand. It's also
an extremely normal reaction for a child to be having
following a bereavement, this is likely Charlie's first encounter with it and again all of this
clever subtext is woven underneath a very realistic
expression of grief. From this point in the conversation Charlie
shuts down completely and Annie gives us the extremely
strange information that Charlie hasn't ever cried and despite seeming like she's being
caring here really she's using the opportunity to see
if her child will be normal, will break free from this distance
and numbness and connect emotionally. And maybe Annie only does have Charlie's best
interests at heart here but for me when she says "that
might feel like a relief" she's talking about for herself as
much as Charlie and it's clear that Charlie's otherness bothers her a great deal. As Annie
leans in to kiss Charlie she notices the word Satony written
on the wall. A lot of people have taken umbridge with Annie and Steve not reprimanding their
child for drawing on the walls or enquiring what this
wording might mean. I think it's worth pointing out that from one look at Charlie's bedroom
we can see she's won the battle on clutter and weirdness
in her room and her parents have been doing everything possible to encourage the one thing
she's interested in. It's also worth noting that just as
we're seeing here when Annie notices it, Charlie will just shut down when challenged. It's
clear her parents know this and don't push her too hard.
Beyond that Annie not mentioning the demonic vandalism can be seen as one of many examples
of Annie ignoring, or being blind to, the clues that
are right in front of her. As for what 'satony' means it's time to go
full occult mode here. Now if you do a quick google search
of this you're going to be told it's a word of power used for raising spirits of the dead
and it also bears phonetic resemblance to the word Satan.
So in the context of the film this is a word Paimon
remembered and may be using to call Ellen's spirit forth, perhaps not with full knowledge
of why, more just because he misses her. I think most
people associate the raising of the dead to erroneously mean the raising of Paimon from
the underworld but that doesn't make any sense, he's
already here. And when we combine this with the lip oiling and Ellen's apparition right
after it seems pretty clear this is directed towards her.
But interestingly the part of the spell this invocation is
always used in is actually banishing the spirit at the end. That is to say Satony is a word
used in Necromancy, but it is a word used to banish
demons and spirits at the end of a rital, not summon
them. So maybe this isn't part of the ritual to free Ellen's spirit and call her forth
from the land of the dead. Maybe this is Paimon's childish effort
to banish himself from the body he hates using a
barbarous word he remembers. And this is somewhat corroborated later by Joan yelling these words
at Peter in an effort to somehow weaken his souls grip on his body, to banish him so Paimon
can enter.
But if you try to go deeper than that in terms of where the word has actually come from it
becomes a bit muddled and in that mess of sources
I think the main articles you'll find online have missed
entirely where and why this word is relevant. In fact I have to go as far as to call out
SignalHorizon.com who were first out with their article regarding the meaning of these
occult scribblings you see in the film. Every other
article, even major film theory websites like 'Bloody
Disgusting' will give credit to SignalHorizon.com for finding this and from what I can tell
that journalist wasn't just mistaken, they were
outright phoning it in. Perhaps they weren't expecting
anyone to follow up on it, they certainly weren't expecting to become the top result
if you googled the term five years later. But for pretty
much the entire time since the films release the explanation
of this word, despite having kind of the correct answer, has just been garbage and lies in
terms of it's origin. So here's the quote from the article
that seemingly everyone has relied upon until now: Firstly they say it's a surname, which is
true, it is a surname but that has absolutely no relevance to
anything. They then identify it as a word of power involved in necromancy which is predominantly
true but far too vague to work as an explanation. They also make mention of a site called
spellsofmagic.com which looks exactly like you'd expect it to, they say the site 'lists
it' but I'm pretty sure they're just talking about this user
post which is copy/pasted at various points across the web.
You can also find it on angelfire.com, the next place the article mentions. Now because
the journalist in question hasn't realised or doesn't care
that angelfire is just a very old internet hosting service
this is entirely unhelpful. But through googling the terms I was able to locate this post on
Angelfire with the exact same ritual for necromancy.
You can actually find this in a few places around the web
and all of them seem to erroneously list a certain Grimoire known as The Grimorium Verum,
ironically meaning 'The True Grimoire'. And that's the conclusion SignalHorzion's article
comes to. That it's a word of power originating in the
Grimorium Verum. Which, if you'll excuse my language, is
complete b*llocks. It's also worth mentioning that in the article they admit to not knowing
who Alisteir Crowley is, which is pretty much
modern occultism 101. Let's start with that Grimoire itself. Like
most grimoires and magical texts it claimed a lineage, or
tradition stemming from King Solomon. Now this particular grimoire is interesting because
at it's time of publication it was undeniably fraudulent,
citing itself as being produced in 1517, a full three
centuries earlier, supposedly by a man named Alibeck the Egyptian of Memphis. Memphis of
course being the historical home to the mystery schools
and subsequently a location that would provide a
degree of legitimacy. This was also a lie as the book provably originated in Rome. But
not every scholar at the time was aware of that and
in certain versions of The Lesser Key of Solomon, the text
where we get a lot of our lore regarding Paimon, this Grimoire was actually included. Now it
has been removed in modern versions because it's
a proven fraud - but it's worth pointing out that for a
brief moment this grimoire had a degree of legitimacy. I have read this grimoire cover
to cover, there's not a single mention of Satony and
only minor mentions of necromancy. It certainly didn't
include the necromancy ritual that seemed to be pasted everywhere online, crediting
this very grimoire. So naturally I had to ask the question,
if no one actually knows where it came from, where
did it come from? And while I was researching I found a PDF that did include the word Satony
and a far more detailed explainer for the same ritual
for necromancy I'd been seeing everywhere. Ironically I found this on an old link from
Angelfire.com but I'm not giving any leniency to signal
horizon potentially getting mixed up here as this book makes zero mention of The Grimorium
Verum and the other copy pasted user posts absolutely
do. The book in question is Mastering Witchcraft:
A practical guide for Witches, Warlocks and Covens by
Mr Paul Huson. Now some of you may be aware but there was an explosion in popularity of
occultism during the 1970's, in the UK where I live it was largely expressed as satanism,
and while there is still a whole satanic movement we
can say that witchcraft predominantly became the trend
that lasted. And a large portion of that popularity has to be put down to this book. It was extremely
influential and truly did become a handbook for budding witches and warlocks. I cannot
say for certain but I'm 95% positive this is where
Ari Aster took inspiration from. And I say that because I
didn't stop there, I wanted to find the origins of the word to be able to find the real meaning,
so I know with certainty that when the word appears
prior to this chronologically in other publications it's going to be spelt Sat-an-y not Satony
as we see in the film. For that reason I'm pretty sure it's this
exact book, or digital repostings of it that Ari Aster took inspiration from. But as I
said, knowing that doesn't tell us much about it's actual meaning
and if this is an old word of power then where did
Paul Huson get it from? Or the whole ritual for necromancy for that matter? Why did he
spell it differently? Well to answer the second question
first it's very similar to a lot of these words of power
that use similar constructions, it may have just been a typo, I think it's more likely
though that satony sounded less on the nose than satany
to a 1970s audience hyper concerned with satan. As for
where he got it from, I was entirely stumped. And I mean like really stumped to be brutally
honest with you. I knew that Paul Huson's book had
a bibliography that for some reason was excluded from
digital versions. Without someone who had an original copy I was pretty much out of
luck. It was clear what I needed, and what I needed was
a warlock. And quite frankly I went looking for copper
and found gold in this regard. Enter u/Mickle-Caunle who not only had a copy of the book to hand
but had a terrifying and impressive library of knowledge on the occult. He was able to
confirm for me that Paul Huson had not included any kind
of citation for his ritual of necromancy, nor did his
bibliography make any reference to The Grimorium Verum so we were able to rule that out entirely.
With that fully debunked the challenge became then where did all of this come from? And
Mickle was able to find another essentially handbook
on witchcraft and spellcasting from the turn of the
20th century, that being A.E. Waites The Book of Ceremonial Magic, written in 1913. A.E.
Waites is a relatively well known figure, a British poet
and scholarly mystic that was a member of the golden
dawn and the freemasons who garnered a good amount of fame from his work with tarot cards.
Now here is the part of the spell we're concerned with from Paul Huson's book and the many online
posts, I'm not going to read it outloud because obviously I don't want any dead relatives
popping up to say hello. And here is essentially the
same invocation from A.E. Waites text, from the final
chapter: Concerning infernal necromancy. Now there are a lot more things we had to fact
check, it's a two page ritual and the details are often
slightly different between authors, but here we found an
exact match and finally we were getting somewhere. Now Waites Book of Ceremonial Magic is essentially
a mish-mash of different, older grimoires brought together in one text. And at the bottom
of the chapter concerning infernal necromancy there was a citation which I'm going to put
up on screen. This not only gives us likely the earliest
mention of this spell but also a better explanation as to what the word is, not simply a word
of power, but a barbarous word. The original
grimoire in question is the Verus Jesuitarum Libellus, or
The True Magical Work of the Jesuits. And this particular Grimoire, likely written in
18th or 19th Century Berlin was translated into English
a few decades later, and the person in charge of that
translation was A.E. Waites, the same guy that would go on to write the Book of Ceremonial
Magic. It's also worth pointing out that following
his possession of the Grimoire it was gifted to the
Cleveland Public Library and most of the information we could find on it was from an archived page
on their website. And within the grimoire we see the exact same invocation we've seen
everywhere else, almost certainly in it's earliest form.
So now we know everything we need to know about it's
etymology what can we say for certain? Well it's not just a word of power, that's a broad
all encompassing term, it is as I mentioned a
'barbarous' word. Which were words of power popular in
European magic that were names, pronouns of demons and lesser demons, that still evoked
them even if the original meaning of the name had
been lost. And that's mostly accurate, if I say to you
Ferstigon or Segok chances are they won't mean anything to you. But Satan has really
stuck around, in fact it's become one of many names simply
rolled in to mean The Devil. In occult history Lucifer,
Beelzebub, Astaroth, Satony - these are all different beings, but today we've kind of
streamlined it. So truthfully, as obvious as that may have
been from the start, it's the name of a demon and it's
used pretty much solely in spells involving necromancy. So to quickly sum that all up:
no this word did not originate in the Grimorium Verum as
every article online seems to think, it was first
published in the Verus Jesuitarum Libellus, brought to wider attention by AE Waites Book
of Ceremonial Magic and modernized in Paul Huson's
Mastering Witchcraft. And if it seems like all of
this is splitting hairs to you I do apologize but when we look at the definition everyone
has been following there's almost no part of it that's
accurate. I just want to thank u/Mickle-Caunle again for
all of his help and hopefully we've been able to bust that myth wide open.
To go back to Charlie's room and Annie failing to connect for a moment I just want to draw
your attention to this shot: as Annie gets up to
leave we see the camera focus on Charlie's desk to give us
a better view of what's going on. Here we see the theme of dolls continue in the extremely
worrying clutter filling Charlie's room. In this case
it more seems like she's trying to construct symbolic
representations of Paimon or perhaps his cult. This is clear from the focus on crowned figures
which is a key part of Paimon's aesthetic. It's
more follower worship and idolatry than dollhouses and art
shows, and is absolutely connected with the satanic magic at work in the film. So again
we have another example of a hereditary practice at
work here, Annie makes dolls, daughter makes dolls - I
think we can safely presume that dead Grandma made dolls, she certainly made doormats but
from Annie suggesting she hated dolls we know they
were at least somewhat pushed on her in her youth.
So Grandma was very clearly aware of the relationship between dolls and satanic forces, but Annie
isn't. The meaning may have been lost but the tradition hasn't due to the hereditary
passing. The film is saturated with it in fact: Charlie
has just drawn a picture of Ellen, Annie has just finished
painting Ellen. In the next scene we'll have the exact same mirroring with Annie's bedroom.
There's clearly a relationship at work between the
real world and these representations, in Annie's case
processing the past and in Paimon's case orchestrating the future. Both are acting out subconscious
thought but one is based in trauma and the other desire.
There's also an upside down glass on the desk with what look to be cobwebs inside, the presumption
being that Charlie has trapped a spider in there. And this idea of a trapped insect is
to me at least a clear metaphor for how the potentially insectoid
Paimon is feeling at this moment. Trapped and
confused and wanting to escape so it's not a big reach to say Charpaimon has trapped
it there in a weird form of kinship, they see something
in it they recognise in themselves. Which again could be
quite humanzing until you realise Charpaimon just wants the insect to suffer as they are.
In terms of narrative progression what happens in the next scene is perhaps the most crucial
in the entire film because it's here where Annie
is jumpstarted into supernatural belief. We see Annie
enter her workshop to close things up for the night and when she does she notices a
box of her mothers belongings. It's unclear throughout
this scene exactly what Annie is reacting to, this could
be a spontaneous decision to look through a box that's always been there, it could be
that certain things have moved position or been introduced
while she was out of the room. What we can say for
sure is that the layout of dioaramas in the room has switched in the short amount of time
since we last saw Annie in the workshop. She may have
just tidied up before finishing work but I think if you
watch her expressions throughout this scene there's certainly an inkling that some of
these things may have been moved or altered. She briefly flicks through a photo album,
seeing childhood photos of Peter and Charlie before
seemingly getting upset with it. She then moves to a yellow gold covered book which
as we know is an indicator of Ellen and the cult. It's titled
'Notes on Spiritualism' and is clearly designed to draw
Annie's attention as it has a note for her sticking out from under the cover. Really
this is the bait designed to draw Annie in to investigating
the supernatural, something necessary for the cults plan
to succeed. They need her and Peter worn down and open to these ideas, not just so that
the next stages of their plan will come to fruition
but also so they're mentally weak enough to be possessed
by Paimon. Looking at the note itself something about
it is extremely wrong to both Annie and the audience, not
just the eerie foreshadowing but more the overly loving tone. This is entirely separate
from everything we've come to understand about
Ellen, who by all means was a cold and private woman
that played favourites and mentally tortured her loved ones. And obviously we can pull
out some pretty clear hints here: "Forgive me all the
things I could not tell you." Is clearly Ellen's lamentation
that she hasn't been able to share her plan with her daughter. "Please don't hate me and
try not to despair your losses." Is clearly in reference
to what Annie is about to lose to the cult, first her
daughter and her sanity, then her husband and her own life and finally her son. And
lastly "our sacrifice will pale next to the rewards" Which
is in reference to the riches and knowledge the cult
will gain from Paimon and the families rewards in the afterlife now Ellen is his queen. And
all that's pretty straightforward but what I really want
to draw your attention to is how staggeringly loving
and out of character Ellen is acting here because that's the deeper takeaway. I truly
believe that this is the real Ellen, which is to say, how Ellen
really felt about Annie. She just was, above all else, keenly
motivated to accomplish her goals, at the grand sacrifice of everything else. She knew
she was right, at least in the sense that what she believed
was real, and she would stop at nothing to get that
eternal privilege for her family, even if it meant lying to them, manipulating and torturing
them for years and ultimately orchestrating a situation
that would lead to all of their deaths. By the time
Ellen's plan is done there isn't a single member of the Leigh or Graham family left
alive. And as misguided as that was, all the ab*se and strained
relationships it lead to across three generations, perhaps the most haunting part of all of it
was that Ellen deeply loved her family, and yet was so
motivated to see the plan through she kept it all far down. This could be a lie, it could
be a manipulation of the cult, they tell sicker
lies during the film, but I honestly believe here is maybe the
only time that Ellen has ever spoken to Annie in a way which she really felt. When she says
"please don't hate me" it's an admission of her fears
that Annie won't appreciate the bigger picture once she
finally sees it. She wants them to have a future together. And as f'd up as that may
be it's a recurring theme throughout the movie: that we'll only
really demonstrate our full emotional care for our
loved ones when we lose them. Annie acts entirely distant from Charlie for the majority of their
time together, until the extreme outburst of grief
at her death and burial and the second half of the
movie where she becomes obsessed with summoning her dead spirit. Annie acts as though Steve
is a millstone in a lot of their interactions,
but it's his bursting into flame and subsequent death that
push Annie fully over the edge rendering her weak enough for Paimon to possess. It's not
terribly dwelt upon but this is another realistic hallmark
of grief that the film is very concerned with. It's
honestly maybe the closest thing it has to a positive message, don't leave it too late
to tell people what they mean to you. And with that Annie puts the book back and
we get to my favourite shot in the entire movie. And I
think it's my favourite shot because it's just so impactful for how cheap it must have
been to film. Again it's one of those things where it's
very overdone, lightswitches in horror movies are essentially
a jumpscare trigger. But here once again it's done so elegantly, so minimalistically that
it makes you wonder how no one ever did this before. And
when you really look at it it's actually a reverse
jumpscare with the jumpcut happening as the ghost disappears rather than appears. When
we do cut to Ellen she's standing there calmly,
wavering slightly, staring happily at Annie. Right in front of
those blueprint style plans. If we view it in context of the note we just read it's difficult
not to see it as a loving visitation, but given what we
know about the plans surrounding Annie chances are it is
designed to terrify her and push her more towards belief in the occult. I do not think
for Ellen that's mutually exclusive with loving Annie, so I
still see Ellen's smile as a loving one here, despite
everything. And then Annie flicks the light on and Ellen disappears in the same frame.
The camera doesn't need to move, you just have Ellen
standing there in one shot, have her move out of shot and
then keep shooting, stitch the scenes together on that frame and there you go. It's terrifying,
beautiful and perfectly executed while never risking the realist aesthetic of the film
and likely never costing an extra dime. I mentioned Rosemary's
Baby earlier as being an obvious influence on the film
and I think here, and at several other points during the film we see visual allusion to
another one of my all time favourite horror films: Don't
Look Now. I don't want to dwell on it too much but if
you have lost someone close to you you may recognise
this strange level of hallucination. It's reasonably common to see faces in the dark,
or recognise the deceased on faces of strangers as your traumatised
mind airbags itself into the loss and I think Annie's softly croaked call out of "mom" is
exactly in line with this. Exactly in line with this feeling of
losing grip on your sanity during extreme grief, exactly in line with this eerie feeling
that someone we've lost is somehow present with us. It
feels silly almost to acknowledge it outloud, insane even,
and without letting this become too personal I think I recognize some of that in Toni Collette's
performance here. She may be scared, but at this point she feels more ridiculous about
her own traumatised perception than anything else. We then see Annie notice the diorama of her
mother trying to involve herself in the breastfeeding of
Charlie. As we'll come to find out this process was essential in installing and maintaining
Paimon within Charlie's body. But beyond the literal
explanation of the supernatural we can again see this as
being representative of a dysfunctional family unit, an overbearing mother and her daughter
who has subsequently felt as though her life was
not her own. It's unclear from Annie's reaction whether
this diorama has been turned round for her to notice, or if she has a sudden discomfort
with it after seeing the ghostly apparition of her mother.
And you'll notice that this diorama is Annie and Steve's
current bedroom so we again have this mirroring between the dioramas and reality as we move
from this shot to Annie and Steve in the same room. There is one key difference which is
the colour of the lamps, which change from a Paimon blue
to an Ellen gold. On the surface it's a cute moment between
the two as Annie decides not to bother Steve with
what's just happened, but the real takeaway into this very brief glimpse at the supposedly
loving side of their relationship should be the alcohol
and pills they're self-medicating with and Annie's
ultimate decision to keep her experiences private from Steve, something that will prove
essential in their undoing. Next up we see Charlie and Peter in their
respective classrooms. They attend West High school, I
have seen a few people getting this wrong online and calling it North West High School
and it's likely because North West is so leaned on everywhere
else. And it is actually a real school, actually the
oldest public high school in the state of Utah. And it's not just used in name - this
is where they filmed also, and this choice of school is
significant as Paimon is referred to in the film and in existing
lore as The King of the North West and the film goes to some crazy lengths to sneak references
in there to it, this being the first and most
blatant. And yes I do think this association with Paimon
means there's a very good chance that the school is under the influence of the cult.
This association with the North West comes from the Pseduomonarchia
Daemonium, or 'False Monarchy of Demons' by Dutch Occultist Johann Weyer. Written in
1577 this is one of the earliest grimoires to include
Paimon as we now recognize him, that being a demonic entity tied to the Christian mythos
rather than the earlier djinn figure. It makes mention
that when summoning Paimon the sorcerer must "look towards the northwest, because there
is his house". In later Grimoires however he would be
referred to simply as the king in the west and there would be some degree of back and
forth over whether it was better to look north or west
when invocating him, with west being slightly more
common. So while north west has stuck around and is what Joan refers to Paimon as in the
film, the name West should be viewed as being essentially
synonymous here. Both West and North West are
referential of Paimon. And we can say that for certain because when Annie is chanting
the summon ritual later on she will use the phrase REX
OCCIDENTALIS which is latin for king of the west so even
within the lore of the film they're acknowledging this fluency between the actual direction. First up is Charlie's classroom which as I
mentioned earlier is a special needs class. We see that much
like Annie the teacher has likely learned that Charlie requires a gentle touch or she'll
shut down entirely, and that seems like good advice
because even this relatively passive intrusion is enough to
incur a bird killing itself against the classroom window. Now a question I had when watching
this is does Charpaimon psychically will this bird
into suicide so that she can continue with her plan or is
this bird somehow just attracted to the evil and kills itself without meaning to. In the
script it's left deliberately vague but we do see the acknowledgement
that Charlie is unfazed by this interruption which is perhaps our best clue that she had
prior knowledge it was about to happen. I think
ultimately that's what I side with, maybe not necessarily that Charlie just understands
she can psychically control birds, but that she was
willing for something to distract the teachers attention
away from her and through this grand supernatural power Paimon holds that manifested in a way
where it got her precisely what she wanted, a bird carcass to play with. And of course
we see Charlie focus down on the scissors getting ready for
the next step of the plan almost immediately. So maybe
not too much of a mystery but a little bit open to your interpretation of just how conscious
Charpaimon is of all this. But this does begin the larger question of what's the deal with
Charlie and birds? We see multiple references to this,
from her use of the decapitated bird as a head for her doll,
several different bird and bird like figures in her room, to the birdcages we see in the
tree house, or bird house as I've heard it referenced. So first and foremost, like with the flies
and insectoid images called to mind, I think it's fair to say
that Paimon feels a certain degree of kinship with the bird, likely even more so. And as
I mentioned I think this could have something to do with
his real, demonic image as he exists in hell. Alex Wolff's
performance as Paimon is distinctly bird like and just as with insects there are several
birds that do make clicking noises. But perhaps the best
evidence from this comes from Ari Aster, who, only one
time as far as I can tell during his reddit AMA, referred to the click, as a cluck. And
insects do not cluck, but birds sure do. So with a reasonable
degree of certainty, I'm going to say that within the
context of the movie we can see Paimon in the underworld as a bird-like figure surrounded
by flies and pestilence. Remember he only takes a human
form as a mode of possession. We see a good amount of evidence for this kinship with bird
forms, most notably in this bird Charlie decapitates and
uses in the central piece of her diorama of Paimon worship. Ari Aster has confirmed this
functions as a metaphor for the cult and Paimons goals
for the family and the ending scene in general where we
see Charlies head mounted on an effigy in the exact same way so we know that Charpaimon
has chosen the bird to represent themself. Aster
describes Charlie's bird-head diorama as being "not too
far away" from what we get in the ending scene where Paimon is being worshipped by the cult.
Even the beak like bandages Peter gets towards
the end, an injury that Paimon goes out of his way to
inflict on Peter, can be seen as an effort to make him look more 'birdlike'. Let's come back to that ending in a moment,
but first we need to look at what specific birds are used
during the film as birds almost always are used on screen for their applied meaning.
We have the pigeon that flies into the window, the dove
chocolate that Charlie is so fond of, and then the
Whipoorwhill which featured more heavily in the original script where they were intended
to be shown roosting during the funeral. We actually
see the whippoorwill on screen right at the end, sat
in the bird cage hanging from the roof of the treehouse. At least I think it's a whipoorwhill,
it's not particularly easy to make out and my knowledge
of birds isn't great, but the script says it's a
whipoorwhill and I'm not aware of any reason to doubt it.
So firstly pigeons and doves, in biblical terms, are both related to sacrifice, both
seen as animals worthy of being accepted as offerings to God.
And what's interesting here is we kind of have a stand-
in for a stand in. If you remember earlier I mentioned Ari Aster describing the family
as a sacrificial lamb unaware they're being sacrificed. And
in biblical terms if you didn't have a lamb that's when
you might sacrifice a dove, and if you didn't have a lamb or a dove, that's when you might
sacrifice a pigeon. And whipoorwhills, like almost every
black furred or feathered animal is thought to signify
impending death. Which honestly is pretty cut and dry whichever way you look at it,
five people have died just bringing Paimon into the world
in this form, I highly doubt the deaths are going to
stop there. Not only that but when we see the Whipoorwhill at the end it's trapped in
a birdcage, symbolizing Paimon this embodiment of death
trapped in the improper vessel of Charlie, preventing
him from reaching his true and terrible potential. As I've mentioned the film makes a habit out
of taking tired tropes and making them feel fresh
and new. And perhaps one of the most overdone metaphors in literature is the birdcage, specifically
in relation to a girl or woman trapped by society,
the patriarchy and so on. The bird is the woman, the cage is her imprisonment under
her husband or in her stately home et cetera. But not here,
here we see an inversion of that, the cage is the girl, the
empty vessel of Charlie, and the Whipoorwhill, the sign of impending death is Paimon, trapped
within. There are some more widespread meanings to
these birds that are worth mentioning, I'm sure most
of you would relate doves with peace, but perhaps also purity and innocence. And pigeons
are known to symbolize prosperity, fertility and
transformation. All things that Queen Ellen was hyper-
concerned with. She's been promised riches to the conjurer, she meddles and involves
herself directly in Annie's reproduction and she's
keenly interested in transforming members of her
bloodline into vessel's for Paimon. And Charlie, the original Charlie, the Charlie that was
sacrificed can be seen as our pure, innocent dove that
never had the chance to sin. So if you're looking to
attribute this trinity of birds to accompanying characters we can do pretty simply, the whipoorwhill
represents Paimon, a caged embodiment of death, the dove that's not even really seen on screen
is the original Charlie that was displaced and
the Pigeon represents Ellen providing Paimon with the
spiritual assistance he requires like birds flying into windows at opportune moments or
ghostly apparitions in an attic. Shortly after we see Charlie on her way to
decapitate the pigeon, decapitation of course is
something we know Paimon has a real fondness of. At that point we see this creepy cult
lady doing her best to encourage Charlie and I've seen
some people suggest she may have sent the bird at the
window. And I guess if that's your head canon it could be true, but she'd either have to
have a very accurate throw or a whole lot of pigeons.
To me she's just there to up the creep factor and provide
this feeling that the cult are watching the family even when they think they're entirely
alone and unobserved. Next we get to see Peter's Classroom where
they're discussing Women of Trachis, an ancient Greek
tragedy written by Sophocles, focusing on Deianeira, the wife of Herakles. As is relatively
apparent from what's discussed it's concerned primarily
with the binding of the characters to their fate, the
idea that their destiny has been predetermined by their decisions long ago, the ultimate
tragedy being that the events had always been inescapable.
And that of course, is why it's given such clear
attention by the film. This is exactly the same for the Graham family, they are bound
to their fate, bound to the path that Ellen has put them
on, entirely unaware that their fate is closing in on them.
It's a clear parallel between the two stories. Bridget, the girl in front of Peter that he's
entirely infatuated with, describes Herakles fatal
flaw as arrogance, that he "literally fails to see the signs
handed to him literally throughout the entire play" and as she says that the camera focus
on Peter, giving us clear indication that he's oblivious
to the signs around him too. In fact as the teacher is
informing us that the Herakles was undone due to his fatal flaw we see Peter engrossed
on Bridgets butt, and it's his pursuit of Bridget that
ultimately leads to Charlie's death and the subsequent
tragedies that follow. And while this blindness to what's coming is emphasized in Peter's
case it is true of the entire family with Ari Aster saying
outright "This is absolutely inevitable. The family has
absolutely zero agency." But this is Hereditary and we also have to consider that the film
makers are having fun with the audience too, the signs
as to what's happening are littered throughout the
movie, there's even a couple in this scene that we're about to look at. So again we see
this layering where we know the family are pawns in a larger
game, but through these meta tricks the film is
playing we start to feel as though we are too. It's also worth noting that this scene
is a nod to John Carpenter's Halloween, where we see a similar
high school class discussing similar themes of fate
and pre-destined tragedy. The film poses a question to the audience
here, does the tragedy being predetermined make it more
or less tragic, and while it invites you to draw your own conclusions on that, the film
almost certainly comes down on the side of it being more tragic.
And it's difficult to not pair that with the Hereditary
theme of things being passed from generation to generation, it all seems like a pretty
clear metaphor for predestined or genetically pre-determined
factors like mental illness and so on, as well
as negative inherited behaviours like we discussed previously. Essentially the tragedy of things
we cannot avoid, the vast majority of which stem
from hereditary factors. All of this is obscured from the audience
so as to not be too on the nose, we have Peter staring at
Bridget's butt, his friend asking if he wants to smoke weed later, the class clown derailing
the lesson, and this being bookended by Charlie's pigeon
surgery, it all works together to put this relatively on
the nose foreshadowing regarding predestiny into the background and away from the audiences
attention. Now a big question people have here is regarding who is and isn't a cult
member. For most of the extras in the scene we can't really
say for certain because we just don't see enough of
them. But the characters that see continued involvement in the film, namely Brendan, Bridget
and Mr Davies absolutely are involved in the cult.
Truthfully I think the original version of the film as it
existed in the script had non-cult side characters, but the film as it exists today I think every
side character, every background extra could be
a cult member and I don't think there are any speaking
characters that we can say are definitely innocent.
And Brendan and Bridget don't just share similar names, they also have this slightly Aryan
slightly Midwitch Cuckoos, children of the corn vibe
that we see from other cult members. I'm not saying
there's anything necessarily racial or even uniform about the cult members, I just think
the film plays with similar aesthetics to suggest continuity
and people working together behind the scenes. As to
how we know they're involved with the cult, In Brendan's case it's because he's seemingly
the guy getting Peter to smoke weed, and we know with
reasonable certainty Peter's weed is somehow mixed or laced with Dittany of Crete, the
herb Ellen and the cult use to better facilitate possession.
In Bridget's case the links are a little more hidden, first and foremost Peter's attraction
to her is the reason he dismisses Charlie. It's another
pivotal moment that needs to happen for the cults plan to
be successful. The room she takes Peter in at the party has kids watching a decapitation
clip on their laptop. We see her wearing a bracelet that's
a similar style to jewellery worn by a woman we see at
Annie's meeting who's known to be a cult member. We also see her wearing the red of the cult
and the turquoise blue of Paimon. But all of that
is somewhat flimsy, luckily firm proof is found in this
shot of Bridget's facebook page. I've seen some people suggest that these two photos
are both somewhat reminiscent of Paimon's sigil and
I think this image of a dog wearing what looks to be a
little crown is definitely reminiscent of the crowned Paimon and his crowned camel and
the crowned bird head we see. The second photo also looks
a little bit like Charlie on the movie poster, also
perhaps like a child staring in a terrarium or a fishtank which we'll come to later. But
the most clear evidence comes in this hidden reveal of her
second name, 'Molpe' which is latin for Siren, the
mythical creatures that guised themselves as beautiful women and lured sailors in with
their hypnotic song. This is fitting too given the
focus on Greek mythology in their classes and this
somewhat Grecian aesthetic to her jewellrey. The meaning is clear, she's the cults siren,
sent to lure Peter in with her beauty and give him tunnel
vision while they scheme around him. And lastly we have Mr Davies, the teacher.
There's only really one solid bit of evidence for his cult
involvement, although there is an outside chance he's one of the naked figures at the
end. It comes much later on when Peter is essentially being
led by the light blue energy through the school. We
see the energy hone in on his classroom door and through the window, Mr Davies in a red
sweatshirt, red being a colour that seems to suggest cult involvement, beckons Peter
inside, right in the centre of the light. So it doesn't outright
confirm it like Bridget's name, but given how subtle the
film can be I think this should be taken as a pretty obvious sign. Following the sequence at the school we get
this shot of Annie's laptop that shows us her recent
experience with Ellen has had the desired effect and her mind is opening to the idea
of the supernatural, weakening her mental state and
allowing for events to unfold, up to and including her
becoming possessed herself. Upon leaving her workshop she sees the door to her mother's
old room open and on walking in to investigate it notices
a large triangle marked into the floor, we know from
the script that it's pointed towards the northwest. Annie is clearly a bit creeped out but sees
the unlocked door as the problem rather than the
triangle, again we see this idea of Annie being blind to
the machinations of the cult, signs that have been around her her entire life. We see triangles
used at multiple points by the cult in their invocation
rituals, this is almost certainly the one Ellen used to
summon Paimon into Charlie. Triangles are extremely popular in occult rituals and esotericism
in general, going as far back as stars and other
celestial objects as far as their first appearances in
mystic rites and texts. In the necromancy spell we mentioned earlier for example a triangle
is used specifically to house an image of the person
you intend to summon and we see that exactly later
when this spell is used on Peter. Annie enquires about the open door with Steve and we see
he has no idea about it either, we'll never get actual
confirmation but it seems almost certain that this is the
cult members doing this, attempting to further drive Annie's belief and investigation of
the supernatural. And as they go to make sure it's secure we
see Steve get the call from the cemetery telling him
Ellen's grave has been vandalized, which is again the work of the cult. While that will
be crucial to the ritual later on what's important in this
scene is both Annie and Steve's decision to lie to the
other. Steve does not want to concern Annie with such morbid news so soon after the funeral
and Annie seemingly doesn't want to share her
vulnerability in attending grief counselling with Steve,
which is odd given Steve's a psychiatrist and hints towards this distance that exists
between the family. He is more than qualified to listen
to her but for whatever reason she's decided she'd be
more comfortable sharing it in front of strangers. Neither of them are lying maliciously but
it's the first real crack the film presents between
them. And this distance, Annie's lying to Seve about where
she's going, him keeping her out of the loop about the grave is essential to their later
arcs, Annie will dive too deeply into powers she doesn't understand,
leaving it too late to convince Steve of the supernatural and Steve will eventually come
to suspect Annie of stealing Ellen's body herself and
placing it into action. Their fates are bound by the decisions they have made and the decisions,
this encroaching negativity is all due to the hereditary
influence of Ellen and the manipulative actions of
the cult. The last character we really get to know is
Annie. By this point we know there's something very
weird going on with Charlie, we know Peter is a somewhat troubled teenage boy motivated
by blondes and buds and Steve is a stoic and
patient paternal figure somewhat disconnected from his
family, though not through lack of trying. Perhaps too passive and not authoritarian
enough. We've even seen two very different sides to Ellen,
the side we see Annie and Steve make reference to and
the side we see from a more caring Ellen in the note. But Annie has been someone the film
has closed off from us, it's difficult to get
a read on her by this point. This is of course intentional as the
first two acts toy with the audience, refusing to tell us plainly if Annie has gone insane
or if she's right about the supernatural occurrences.
But here for the first time the film really lets us meet her
on an emotional level. The building Annie arrives at for her meeting
has a red painted front, we see a similar choice of
colour on the Grief Recovery Group sign, all indicators that the cult is involved here.
And as I mentioned we see group members here that we
know for certain are part of the cult as well as Joan
of course who is perhaps the cults de facto leader now Ellen has been sacrificed. There's
also a chance that the leader of the grief recovery
group is a cult member we see on screen but again it's
not particularly clear who's kneeling at the end as we can't see all the faces. I think
we can say though that in all likelihood probably everyone
here is a cult member, and this whole group exists
solely for Annie's benefit. Annie's speech here is extremely telling,
but a lot of it we've already covered so I'm going to throw
the whole thing up on screen and just very quickly go through the important points or
stuff we might have missed. Firstly the DID she mentions
Ellen having. As I touched on earlier this is very open to
interpretation, it could be that on top of all the other goings on that she did develop
DID. Personally I think it's much more likely this is either
some element of being driven insane or somehow sharing a
mind with Paimon, or she explained her plans or beliefs to a doctor as a form of end of
life admission and they interpreted it as DID and dementia.
She mentions her father dying from starvation when
she was a baby after suffering from psychotic depression and again I already touched on
that, that's where we get the keep out room. This is resultant
from the cult and Ellen's meddling, either he saw
what they were up to and locked himself away and that reaction was subsequently put down
to psychotic depression, or much like we see
with the Graham family he may have been purposefully driven to a mentally unstable place to suit
the needs of the cult. I.e. get him out of the way so Ellen
can be fully betrothed to Paimon. She also mentions her brothers schizophrenia and that
he killed himself ultimately because his mother was
"trying to put people inside of him". This obviously is
Ellen's initial attempt to insert Paimon into a human vessel. From there she goes on a bit
of a ramble about Ellen's later years and it's here that
we get the information that she was kept away from Peter
in his youth and that she was able to get her hooks in Charlie. After that things get
even more abstract, she softly criticizes her family
and ends with this feeling she can't explain, a feeling of being
blamed. And what she's grasping at but can't say, is this hidden narrative of the cult
and Ellen's plans that have shadowed her entire life. This feeling
that she can't explain of her life somehow not being
hers, and ultimately the resentment she felt from her mother initially in not being born
a boy and later in keeping her first born away from
her. And that's all pretty concrete but it's important to
remember that beyond 'what's actually going on in the film', all the supernatural truth
behind what Annie is describing here, that subtextually
we are using this as a vehicle to discuss mental illness,
trauma and ab*se within the family unit. That we're constantly dancing a knife edge between
the supernatural sacrifice and the image of a
woman who's felt controlled and demanded upon her
entire life, never getting the love she deserved from her parents, now struggling to forge
emotional connections with a family she was never sure
she wanted. And with that out of the way that's all the
foundational work we need to do, so let's take a breath
and get ready for the horror. This is part two, the descent. After the meeting we see Peter in his room
taking hits from the bong like his names b-real, and
there's a couple of important Easter Eggs here. Firstly we have a cult member watching
Peter outside of his window and clearly getting
quietly alarmed that they can be seen as we hear their
breathing tense up slightly. From here the film is going to keep peppering in background
cultists anywhere it can get away with it. We also
have possible black specks in Peter's weed which are very
possibly Dittany of Crete. And lastly we have Brendan inviting him to the party and telling
him to bring a certain part of his body, which isn't
much of an easter egg but really what's happening here is
the cult is telling him to think with his sexuality and blindly pursue Bridget. Over in Charlie's room and she's working on
her diorama and again snacking on chocolate. There's
no hidden meaning behind Charlie's sweet tooth, Ari Aster confirmed it's just a vehicle for
the audience not questioning Charlie's fondness
for cake during the party scene. As this scene closes we
see a key clue in this shot of Charlie's baby photograph. We see Ellen feeding her and in
the bottle is an obscured black herb. This is Dittany of
Crete which we later see in Ellen's box of packed up
belongings, in Steve's weed and on Annie's lips at Joan's house. It's used to facilitate
possession and here in this photograph we see the evidence
that it's how Ellen installed and perhaps at first
maintained Paimon within Charlie's body. But the main question arising from this scene
is the blue light shimmering around Charlie, something
that becomes increasingly more prevalent through the course of the film. And we're going to
look at what it is and what it represents exactly
in a little bit but for now we need to ask who or what is
controlling it. And we have a few options, it could be some result of the cults magic,
it could be Paimon, or it could be some other element
of the supernatural, a guiding hand that we're never
introduced to. And honestly it's not really going to change much whatever your reading
is of that. But for what it's worth the light is turquoise
blue which we know is seemingly related to Paimon, this
wisp is quite far away from anything we see in the cults rituals and most importantly
we know that Peter is ultimately possessed by Paimon and
we see this light, this wisp enter his body. So in terms of
which answer is most likely given the information provided to us it's almost certainly Paimon.
Now a big question then becomes how? If we assume
this blue light is Paimon, then how can it simultaneously be interior and exterior to
Charlie who at this moment has Paimon inside her? For all
intents and purposes she is Paimon? Well when we see these sort of 'pulses' like Charlie
does here, I imagine them as a kind of subconscious sonar
guiding the possessed mind towards where it needs to
be. Later when we see Peter's possession we'll see a far more distinct wisp like light which
I think is more clearly the soul, or spiritual embodiment
of Paimon. But I don't think it's as black and white as
that, later Peter will see these pulses prior to being fully possessed so clearly this is
some sort of signal Paimon can just give off so long as
the person is spiritually vulnerable enough to see them.
And it does suggest, not prove but suggest, that although all of Charlie is Paimon, maybe
all of Paimon isn't in Charlie. We know that he has
another form, a non-human form, residing in hell, in
the city of Pandemonium. So maybe while all of Charlie and later all of Peter is consumed
and controlled by Paimon, maybe exterior to that
Paimon is also still aware and affecting things from the
spiritual plane. And the more I think about it, the more I like it as an answer because
ultimately this feels like something that's exterior to Charlie,
it does feel like she's being led somewhere by
something - and truthfully there is no other named supernatural force in the film beyond
Paimon for it to be. He is referred to as the 8th King
of Hell so we know there's at least seven others, maybe one
of them could be helping him out, but truthfully I think it's far more likely this is just
some unknown extension of Paimon's abilities, despite let's
say a certain percentage of his psyche being occupied
elsewhere within Charlie. We're going to pick this back up in a moment and go through what
this light shimmer actually means, why this particular
effect was chosen and why it's relevant to the
movie. But for now I think we can say that this is possible because Paimon still exists
in some way outside of Charlie, as a force in the spiritual
realm and as his true form back in hell. This would be
Paimon's spiritual or in-between manifestation and we'll look into exactly what that is shortly.
We get a bit more of a glimpse into the state of Annie's career as we see her dodging emails
from the exhibit owners regarding the status of
her work. Really this collapse of her career we see is just a
marker of her declining mental state that the audience can keep track of but on a meta
level we see this relationship between the reality of the
film and the dioramas continuing, as she loses grip on the
larger dollhouse, her family, the unwitting dolls of Paimon and the cult, so to does she
lose grip on the smaller worlds she creates and supposedly
controls. This is driven home here as we see her
working on a diorama that seems to be an art exhibit of dioramas. A small world within
a small world. We're being encouraged to view the
events we're seeing as levels within levels, that the
reality of the film, really our reality, is akin to a diorama, a dollhouse of some far
grander beings. Now perhaps this is Annie just being meta
and it was always intended as part of the exhibit to have a
miniature version of the exhibit. But earlier we see Steve ask her what she's working on
and she seems to indicate the hospice and the preschool
are her major remaining projects. I think there's a
good chance that in an effort to combat her mounting anxiety and failure to produce for
the exhibition she's using her only outlet, creating
dioramas, to create a diorama of her problem. We see
her face much more serious issues in this manner later on and there is something beautifully
self- obstructive about creating the exhibit she's
already struggling to create in miniature that seems to
define Annie to a tee. While we're on the subject of Annie's miniatures
we should also touch on this scene from a few
minutes later, where we see a diorama, again of Ellen in Annie's bedroom, this time watching
from the door while Annie lies in bed with Steve.
Now firstly we again see Annie react to this diorama
almost as if she's shocked by it and again we don't really have any context for what
she's reacting to exactly. But I think here it's clear this
diorama hasn't just been put here or messed with by cult
members, I think what we're seeing from Annie is a newly discovered revulsion. We've seen
her blindly ignore signs like the note from her
mother or the triangle carved into the floor, just like she's
been ignoring signs her entire life. But here she's starting to recognise her mothers behaviour
for what it truly is, she's starting to recognize
the signs of sickness and realise how she's been ab*sed.
Another big takeaway here is how the shot is positioned to make Annie seem like some
giant being looking in on the house, this is a clear allusion
to the larger, or more spiritually powerful, being
looking in on the house, the family their playthings as the miniature dolls are Annie's.
It's the same reason why we have these shots I'd liken to
someone staring in at a terrarium, of someone on the
outside looking in. It's also why we see these tilt-shift exterior shots of the Graham household
looking like it's own miniature dollhouse. Now as to what's happening in this diorama
specifically, we have two options. Either Ellen is sleepwalking
and has stumbled into the room, which could be
the case as we do need to prep the audience for Annie's sleepwalking. Or on the other
hand, that Ellen is involving herself to a very creepy
level in Annie and Steve's reproduction, potentially up to
watching them have sex. We know Ellen was hyperconcerned with this and it fits perfectly
with this idea of a mother pressuring her daughter to
reproduce. I think in my headcanon it's both, that she
was absolutely watching them to make sure they were trying to have another baby and
that maybe when Annie noticed her stood there they passed
it off as part of her worsening condition. Back to Peter doing his best to interrupt
Annie's work by asking to use the car but Annie can barely
take her eyes off the matryoshka miniature exhibit in front of her. This entire exchange
is defined by Annie insisting on reflecting Peter's teenage
tone, really being a good deal more immature than him
by the end of it. It's certainly knowing on Annie's behalf, she's using the opportunity
of him wanting something to give him a bit of his own medicine,
but at the same time it's another marker for this
break down of communication within the family. They're both deliberately stand-offish here
and you really get the feeling for a hundred arguments
they've already had in how they're being extremely careful in how they both pick their language.
And truthfully this edge of uneasiness is slightly forced
on the scene, it feels a great deal more hostile than it is or should be and this is almost
certainly because it's trying to hide from the audience
how horrendously unlikely it is that Peter would just
take his sister to a party where he's planning on getting high, drunk, laid and then driving
home. So this unspoken chess match is employed here
so that we, just like Peter, are trapped in this decision
to take Charlie to the party. And there's a scene in between here and the car but this
cut to Peter's face as he's driving there with Charlie's
clicks in the background was, for me at least, a much needed
laugh break. Probably the only moment you get to chuckle throughout the whole film and
it's only there as a moment of easement before all the
terror starts happening. As I've explained for me the
'cluck' is an aspect, a tic of Paimon's speaking apparatus in his true form. There is a reading
some people provide here where this is something
the contained Charlie, the displaced original Charlie can
do when she's trying to call out essentially. And that is a terrifying thought, I think
a lot of people ascribe to it online, that the cluck is somehow
the original Charlie trying to warn the family. Which
would make the increased clucking here supposedly make a lot of sense given what's about to
happen to her. But this just isn't the case for two pretty strong reasons. Firstly Ari
Aster has said outright this isn't the case, the original
Charlie was displaced at birth and we don't see any elements
of her struggling to break free, nor would such a thing be possible. The only time we
have hear from the original Charlie is when Annie's mouth
opens a direct line to hell. The second reason is that if the
original Charlie was still somehow trapped in this body, I think getting the demon that's
been controlling you for the last 13 years to top
itself with a lamp post would be a pretty good deal,
certainly not something you're trying to warn your family about. I think the increased clucking
here truly is to first and foremost drive up the
tension and secondly have the audience side with Peter, or
at least understand the decisions he's about to make.
Before all that though we first see Charlie in the field, having been led there via Paimon
sense. She sees an old woman sat in front of a fire that
looks a great deal like Ellen. In fact there's really no one
else in the film this could be as we have an extremely limited cast list. It could be
a cult member deliberately messing with Charlie, but really
to what end. I think this is almost certainly ghost Ellen
doing some sort of ritual or blessing for Paimon. Maybe just as a way of reassuring
Charlie that everything is going to be okay and that life
continues in the afterlife. It also seems like Annie should
be in direct line of site to be able to see the fire so again I lean towards this being
some kind of apparition only Charlie is seeing. If you're
paying very close attention you'll see the first thing she
does upon being spotted by Annie is sneak the pigeon head away inside her sleeves. Annie's
reaction to Charlie being outside is relatively brutal,
she asks her "are you some kind of idiot" which given the
context of Charlie being in special needs education is extremely cutting. She's also
manhandling her and again reacts quite childishly in the face
of her difficult children. It makes sense Charlie would
miss her Grandma but Annie can't help but take it personally and again just resorts
to manhandling her. And this is just more of the tightrope
the film walks between providing you the breadcrumbs of
the supernatural and convincing you that Annie is the real villain and that ultimately this
is all a product of her deteriorating mental state. Next up we have the party and really up until
this point the film has shown a lot of restraint, but
from here it goes off the rails very quickly. It starts with this shot of Paimon's sigil
carved into the telegraph pole, foreshadowing to the audience
the tragedy that's about to occur but more crucially
through whatever form of magic, marking this as the location and method of Charlie's death.
And I want to point out that as mad as it may sound
after everything we've just discussed and everything
that's led up to here, but this is really the first major clue the audience have that
something is going on around the family. Truthfully I think this
is the point where I said 'hold on a minute' on my first
viewing. All of this analysis may seem obvious when we have the answers but on first viewing
this film is extremely well guarded and right here
it's deciding to show you it's hand ever so slightly. Right away the party scene feels different
to the rest of the movie, it's loud and bright, there's actual
music playing as opposed to just ominous horns, the camera seems to have more energy, no longer
moored to a fixed position and everywhere you'll see lashings of the red we associate
with the cult, including ominous red glows designed to allude
to the satanic sacrifice at work here. We're building
up anxiety and taking away the audiences thinking space so they don't have time to see what's
coming. Now I've attended my fair share of houseparties and when I first saw this scene
I presumed the girls were enthusiastically chopping up
mushrooms or truffles, because teenagers do not get this
excited for baking when alcohol is available. But as we know this is a counter full of nuts,
a truly unreasonable amount of nuts. But if we look
at the two girls preparing it they are wearing red and
turquoise, the colours we associate with the cult and Paimon respectively. And we know
it's the cults plan to have Charlie die here so ultimately
I don't think there's any doubt that these two girls are
cult members and indeed in the original script we actually see one of them directly offering
Charlie the cake. And that tracks with what we see
from the other cult members, this kind of enthusiastic,
almost giddy way they approach the families deaths. When Peter returns to school following
the loss of his sister not one person will console
him or ask him how he is doing, again we see laughter and
everyone in a great mood. Now on the subtextual level I think this is supposed to reflect
how life moves on around us and how the world doesn't
share in our grief but in terms of an in canon explanation I think it's because none of them
view it as a tragedy. We can presume they're brainwashed by their parents and have been
told this sacrifice is a good and joyous thing that's going
to greatly improve their future. And that giddiness comes across in this nut chopping,
it's a little too excited. And if we play it side by side with
this scene from later we'll see them going at the exact
same rhythm. This isn't coincidental, it was actually edited side by side in one of the
theatrical trailers so clearly they were aware of the
mirroring. And given that when Annie is violently headbutting the ceiling she's possessed by
Paimon it's another good bit of evidence for this being
the work of the cult. I'm not saying these cult members are directly possessed by Paimon
at this point, but under the influence of him, gleeful
with his presence, I think that's quite likely. It's also worth mentioning that they cut the
cake with the same knife they cut the nuts with and
hand it pretty much straight to Charlie so it's almost a certainty this is part of the
plan as there really couldn't be a more dangerous way of doing
this as far as nut allergies go. Now I don't think it's
necessarily purposeful here but we do see the knife and chopping board reflecting and
glowing with the light of the room and at various stages
of the cults plan we'll see this light, just like we saw as it
directed Charlie, highlighting Paimon's supernatural involvement behind the scenes. Again I think
it's quite a low chance it's happening here, but
I have seen a few people suggest it and while it may
seem unlikely right now, as we move through and see more evidence I think it'll seem likelier
and likelier. We see Peter try to engage in flirting with
Bridget, who as I think I mentioned is wearing both red
and turquoise. Stood literally between their conversation we see another blond haired extra
keeping very close watch of Peter, again we can't
say for sure but he certainly fits the profile of a cult
member. And as Peter and Bridget head to the back room to smoke a bowl we meet two more
teenagers that are almost certainly part of the cult too as they're watching an old black
and white clip of beheading via guillotine. Now as is
clear from the events of the film the cult is extremely fond
of beheading, we're going to look at exactly why that is later on but for now let's just
say these kids enthusiasm is not for black and white cinema
and this is really all we need to signal them as cult
members. We see potentially maybe some black Dittany
of Crete mixed in with Peter's green. This is a popular
one people like to point out but truthfully it could just be a bit of burnt plant material
left in the pipe. Whatever the case we know Peter is being
spiked with Dittany of Crete via his weed in this
exact manner so it's really just splitting hairs as to if he does here in this scene
or not. Judging by the look on this guys face though I'd say he's
relatively eager to see Pete blaze up. Bridget seems unhappy about how Charlie has
drawn her, and this is actually played for laughs, but
ultimately if we're trying to understand Bridget's mental state, she likely feels a little bit
nonplussed that a weird kid her parents and all their
friends are obsessed with is drawing mocking images of her.
If this is their icon, some supernatural deity everyone around you is worshipping then seeing
them draw you in a manner you deem as "retarded"
may tick you off enough that you try to bring it up
and find an explanation. And that might seem like reaching to some but when we stop to
consider the background narrative here that is essentially
what's happening. And from there we know what happens next,
Charlie comes in with the allergic reaction to the nuts
and Peter springs into action. There is one key piece of dialogue here however which is
Charlie telling Peter that she thinks "her throat
is getting bigger". As Peter is carrying Charlie out of the house
we see several people potentially observing this, we
can't say for certain as they're just background extras but it seems on brand for the cult
to be observing their plan is unfolding correctly.
And it's easy to miss because the scene is so gripping but
listen to this demented rising sound, very similar to the clopping hooves and skittering
insect sounds of Paimon's approach during the opening scene.
It's that cloven or camel hoof sound at double speed, way more frenetic as the scene builds
towards this shattering moment where everything stops. And when it's paired with the devilish
glow of the tail lights moving away from the screen it
really calls to mind some mothman-esque demon chittering through the night. We'll see this
glow from the tail lights used behind Peter too
to signal this encroaching shadow of satanic power circling
around the family. Now despite being perhaps the most famous
scene in the movie there isn't a whole lot going on
here besides amazing performances by Alex Wolff and Milly Shapiro. It's tense, it's
toe curling and it's tragic. This isn't the only time the
film trusts Alex Wolff's face to carry a huge moment all on it's
own and I think he pulls it off every time. I've seen a few people be quite critical of
his acting abilities but I think he's absolutely phenomenal. There
are a couple of key questions raised in this scene that
do need answering though: firstly how is it possible that the cult can plan Charlie's
elaborate death with Agent 47 levels of premonition and accuracy?
And that's a fair point, certainly how it's played in
the film makes it seem at first like a freak accident, but as we know it's anything but.
The answer comes through Paimon's lore, both in the film
and in occultism in general. In the film we see Annie
leafing through one of Ellen's books that has information on Paimon and we do get glimpses
that he's able to offer hidden or secret knowledge,
among many other cut up details. And all of this page,
from what I can tell, is different passages from existing texts and grimoires regarding
Paimon, from E.A. Koettings Works of Darkness to Aleister
Crowley's version of The Lesser Key of Solomon. And all
of them agree on this ability Paimon has to bestow hidden or secret knowledge, really
any knowledge the conjurer asks of him, be it
of the Earth, of the Winds, he can tell you. This began as
essentially him teaching a very advanced knowledge of science, described as the earth the winds
and the waters but in later grimoires would be
made more fantastical with the assertion that he would
truthfully respond to any question asked of him which ultimately becomes him having the
answers to all hidden things. Now he has other powers,
generally this knowledge comes with riches too -
something we also see alluded to in Hereditary. And a few other weird and wonderful eccentricities
that aren't always agreed upon. But in practicality this function of Paimon to know all and bestow
knowledge has led to his longevity, it's the reason he's quite a well known lord of the
underworld. Because people that have actually practiced
magic have generally been seeking answers and
forbidden knowledge and he is absolutely the one to provide them within that lore.
But answers to the mysteries of life don't really help you plan the perfect murder. Luckily
we do see Paimon use some pretty specific abilities
during the film that can help provide us with answers here.
Those answers can be found in 'Abramelin' or 'The Book of Abramelin', or 'The book of
the sacred magic of abramelin the mage' a set of manuscripts
first dated to the early 1600s, but claiming to
have been written several centuries earlier as so often is the case with occult texts.
Despite obvious questions about it's authenticity the text
is still undeniably one of our earliest sources on this
pseudo-Christian occult interpretation of Paimon. And in it we see a much more varied
explanation of Paimon's powerset, most of which matches
up to what we see in the film. We've got flight, acquiring and dismissing servant spirits,
making spirits appear, creating visions, making all kinds of
things and most crucially knowledge of past and future events. That is ultimately how
they are able to plan Charlie's death so perfectly, the
presence of Paimon's sigil indicates his magic is at work here
so we can imagine he's broadly orchestrating events, the roadkill that makes Peter swerve
is likely placed there by the cult after receiving some
kind of indication from Paimon. Really everything that
is happening to the family is pre-orchestrated, pre-determined, this is just a lynchpin moment
in that plan where it becomes obvious for a moment
that that is what's happening. The other major question people usually have
here is 'is there any truth or real world influence here
relating to Charlie's accident?' And Ari Aster has remained tight lipped on this, there's
never been any confirmation that it was, but it does
bear remarkable similarities to a tragic accident that took
place in 2004. Two friends in their early 20's John Hutcherson and Francis Bohm were
making there way home after a boozy night out partying.
Hutcherson was behind the wheel and Bohm, suffering
from the bumps and winds of the road was vomiting out of the passenger window. According to
later testimony the intoxicated Hutcherson had swerved to avoid an oncoming car, decapitating
Bohm as he grazed a telephone pole at the side of the road. From there he drove a further
12 miles to his home, falling asleep in bed in blood
stained clothing while the headless body of his friend sat
in the passenger seat of the car, only being discovered by a neighbour in the morning.
When authorities questioned Hutcherson he seemed
to be still suffering from the effects of the night
before, unable to remember what had happened clearly due to alcohol and unable to process
it due to shock. And we see something very familiar
following the accident in the film where Charlie's body
is only discovered upon Annie leaving in the morning and Peter is still laying in bed,
unable to process what's just happened. Now again, no
link has ever been confirmed between the movie and
this incident, but I think most people would agree that it's extremely similar to what
we see in Hereditary. And one thing we can say for certain
is that this image of a decapitated Charlie was Ari
Aster's first mental concept image for the film, so there is the possibility that this
really was his starting inspiration. There's a couple more visual easter eggs here,
we have the image of Charlie's severed head which I
absolutely can't show you but is crawling with ants. Again we have that theme of death
and decay and pestilence and insects eating away at
the dead that's followed Paimon from the opening shot.
And far more subtle than that as we see Annie fall to her knees in horror upon finding out
about Charlie you'll see she takes this very low,
almost downward dog position that we'll also see her dead
body in right at the end of the film in the treehouse. I probably can't show you that
either but the meaning is pretty straightforward, if she's
kneeling at the end out of a post possession reverence,
she's seen the eternal truth and now bows to Paimon, then here she's been brought to
her knees, she's been forced to submit by the malicious
actions of the cult. They need her mentally weak and
suggestive, not just so she'll act as they want her to but also to better facilitate
possession when the time comes. And really this face to the floor
submissive position is a signal that it's worked and the
plans a go. This montage of scenes following the accident
is accompanied by Toni Collette's animal like howls of
grief and it's only really when we get to the funeral that we see them match up with
what we're seeing on screen. It's a phenomenally low
tech device for quickly presenting the audience with this
idea of sustained grief over a period of time that we're seeing condensed. The idea that
Annie has been in this perpetual and unchanging period
of complete shock from accident to funeral. And as
the turquoise coffin gets lowered into the ground the camera keeps it central in frame,
moving down below into the earth, reminding us not only
of the practicalities of death but also the idea of hell
lurking below. Now cards on the table, I hate this device where the camera moves across
set boundaries, breaking the fourth wall essentially.
There isn't a cross section of graveyard cut away
within the reality of the movie and so normally this would really offend me visually. A prime
offender is the movie Green Room where the camera just moves across the top of the set
showing us the room partitions, I think Fargo did
it, it was quite a popular technique five years ago so I'm sure
there's hundreds of examples available. And any time I see anything close to this on screen
it just makes me want to tune out. And here in Hereditary
would perhaps be the worst example of it, but
as with everything Hereditary does it's the exception that proves the rule. This is actually
perhaps the clearest signal we get to the events of
the film being some dollhouse or terrarium like exhibit for
a higher tier of supernatural being and the lens of the film, the frame, however you want
to describe it, being at least at times the point of view
of whatever being, presumably Paimon, is watching. I
think a terrarium is the best example for trying to understand it visually, and here
we're seeing from the edge of the glass. It's not meant to be
literally that, the characters aren't in a physical glass dome
- but this cross section, the downward moving camera, it's all meant to allude to a terrarium
or some other dollhouse like structure in which the
family are just playthings. Immediately following the burial we see this
strange warped reflection in the gold glass of the
Graham's reception room. We have a similar thing happening to the workshop where it's
using the muffled voices to allude to this sort of inbetween
space of living and dead. And we're actually seeing
from the point of view of this figure. Which is absolutely Peter but we see him look up
suddenly and it's relatively obscured by the noise of the
room but we do hear him make a definite click, or clucking
noise rather, so while it's Peter's outline, maybe in these brief moments of extreme grief
Paimon manages to force his way inside of Peter momentarily.
I think we may have a hint of it happening as
we're seeing Annie break down in the bedroom too. Now following the wake we get a chopped up
selection of silent scenes demonstrating the families
grief. Couple of things of note here, firstly that this is designed to represent the blinkered
and hazy mind following severe trauma and secondly
that all the family members are isolated from one
another, rather than consoling and confiding in one another as you might expect a healthier
family to do at a time of trauma. Annie even goes
out of her way to make sure she is apart from the family,
clearly blaming Peter for what happened. This is of course ultimately what the cult wants,
seeking to cause division and mentally weakening them
to the point of complete erosion of the family unit. And
really that's the whole point of this montage, to create distance between Annie and her family,
particularly Annie and Peter, culminating in this moment where she's hiding in the car
and sees him mentally preparing himself to enter the house,
clearly she'd be able to see and understand his
discomfort and would want to care for him and fix the situation, but instead she ignores
him and drives off, signalling this full breakdown
of their relationship. There's a couple of other things worth picking
up on during this montage. We have more satanic graffiti, this time in the form of ZAZAS.
And while it's unclear on screen I think in this scenario we're
supposed to assume that it's a bit too well hidden for Steve to see it, but if he did
see it he almost certainly just puts it down to his wife's
deteriorating mental state, something that at this point he's
afraid to address directly. As to what Zazas means it comes from the kabbalistic mantra
'Zazas zazas Natasatanada Zazas'. The Hebrew word Zaza
the kabbala is using here means 'bursting with light'
but when it appears in the bible the word means 'belonging to all'. In the kabbala this
mantra belongs to Choronzon, a demonic entity and
the phrase is sometimes referred to as the sacred key
of Choronzon. It's generally related to calling forth this demonic entity, as all the writing
on the walls is in some way, and as with much of the Kabbala
it was really brought into popularity through the
work of renowned occultist Aleister Crowley. I don't want to get too bogged down in Crowley
lore but one thing you should know is that he wasn't
just into magic as we traditionally know it, he was pioneering his own brand of specifically
sex magick. Something he would later brand with
the different spelling of 'm-a-g-i-c-k' to provide it more
historical legitimacy and separate it from perceptions of things like stage magic. Now
one thing that's great about creating your own school
of magic is that you get to make up all the rules. So it's
telling then that Crowley decided as part of his initiation, as part of his rites of
ascension, his levelling up into this new school of magic, that he
needed to take a ritualistic gay-sex holiday to northern
Africa. He was accompanied by his friend, another occultist, and they set off to Algiers
to have increasingly weird sex in various places Crowley
deemed magically important and do as much research into the demonic as they possibly
could. One night they journeyed out into the desert and
performed a ritual to summon what they described as the demonic inhabitant of the abyss. Upon
summoning the demon it uttered the phrase Zazas zazas Natasanada Zazas' followed by
a further quote that I'll put up on screen. As it turned
out the demon in question was Choronzon. What follows in the story is a pretty terrifying
battle between the demon and Crowley's man servant and
ultimately the two men describing themselves as being forever changed by the experience.
It's often used now as a phrase to call the demon forth
but in every original use I could find it seems to be
something this specific demon says once it has been called forth.
The phrase 'zaza' is also a popular prompt on Ouija boards, first originating as a way
of checking if you had an active demon or ghost with Z and
A being at opposing ends of the board although it's
unclear if that was at first influenced by Crowley's Zazas as Ouija boards were soaring
in to popularity at roughly the same time. As the montage continues we see Steve discovering
Charlie's drawings and again we get this foreshadowing of the crowned pigeon, the crown
or some form of crown-like object being another element we see congruently in almost every
depiction of Paimon. We also see Annie in the
treehouse using this bright red, ominous looking space heater. If you remember right back to
the beginning I mentioned this is alluding to
this space being a metaphorical stand in for hell, specifically
the city of Pandaemonium, and this is just a visual allusion to that. If you listen closely
in Peter's room as he sees the red light turn on you
can hear Paimon's fly like buzzing again. And following that we get a quick but crucial
scene of Peter and his friends getting high under the
bleachers and Peter seemingly having a bad reaction. As we know this is due to the Dittany
of Crete he's getting spiked with and Brendan's reaction
to this is extremely telling, it's a little bit disguised
amidst the foleying but he reassures Peter that 'it's just weed' which signals him as
the person providing it to Peter and is a pretty odd
thing to say if that's really what it is, there would be no
reason to doubt the legitimacy of what is or point that out. If you're wondering why
they can smoke it and not worry about the effects it's having
on Peter, this is very likely because unlike Peter,
Paimon isn't currently trying to get inside them. Now as Peter's having this anxiety attack/coughing
fit of sorts, we hear him say I think my throat is
getting bigger, directly mirroring what Charlie said during her allergic reaction. And if
you were to make that link upon first viewing, firstly
well done but secondly you would likely assume Peter is
having an anxiety attack and hypochondriacally imagining Charlie's symptoms. You probably
wouldn't guess that Paimon is using this moment to try and cram himself down Peter's throat
like he's goddamned Harvey Weinstein but that's
exactly what's happening. Now Charlie was actually
having an allergic reaction, but we can assume given Peter's repeating of it here that some
part of her throat getting bigger was Paimon's soul
trying to force it's way out and here when Peter says it
it's trying to force it's way in. And if you think I've just gone full blown lunatic there
is visual confirmation of this in the form of a blue
lens flare that literally appears over Peter as this is
happening. As I've already touched on and will explain to you in about seven minutes
that is absolutely indicative of Paimon's presence
here. We also hear Peter talking in quite a childlike
pleading tone and asking for his hand to be held, we'll hear this voice later on during
the s ance and when Annie is banging her head against the
attic door and he's pleading with her to stop. We see in
these moments exactly what Peter is lacking, the loving attention of a mother that shows
care for him.
And that all brings us up to Joan, and her meeting with Annie in the car park. Joan is
perhaps the sneakiest character I've ever seen on screen.
Everything she does is an attempt to misdirect both
Annie and the audience and she's very good at it. And I think the reason she's such a
successful tool for the movie's deception is that like Annie,
like Peter, the audience are being starved of any kind of
emotional connectivity or warmth or nurture that we accept Joan and don't see her as a
threat. She's extremely touchy and sensitive and so
connected with her feelings that it stands in bold
contrast to the extremely cold and distant environment we've been in up until now. I
also think that's what makes her switch into an enemy
so horrifying, it's the one person we'd been relying on
to provide any kind of caring influence. And by the time we've realised everything isn't
right she's already screaming occult commands at Peter
from across the street. Hereditary isn't a horror film
that relies on jump scares, but it has a lot of these mental lurch moments where what you
thought is completely flipped, kind of psychological
jump scares. So the whole time she's on screen the film is
essentially doing it's best to show you all the hints it can get away with while leaving
you completely in the dark, just like the beheading clip
at the party, the film is playing with the audience and it does
it very well, so let's look at this scene in detail and unpack exactly what's going
on. Firstly we see Annie make the decision to
not enter the grief support group, presumably a trap that
has been laid for her. Thinking on her feet Joan sees Annie failing to take the cults
bait and in her own words 'chases her down'. She's dressed
in this same red we see other cult members, our other
key colour blue and as with so much of the cults aesthetic we see these geometric patterns
on her clothing alluding to signs and symbols related
to esotericism. Even the car she's in front shares this
same red of the cult. And pay special attention to her body language the whole time she's
around Annie, she grabs at her, repositions her,
holds her in place, does whatever she can do to keep Annie
focused where she wants her to be. Now this is sometimes done to prevent Annie from seeing
things that would cause her to figure out the trick
being played, but for the most part this seems to be
some affectation, some occult jedi mind trick, designed to make Annie believe her. Really
we're watching her put Annie under her spell and
to a lesser extent she's putting us under that same spell.
And that's very interesting because both critics and the director have pointed out that the
whole film functions like a ritual, or spell on
the audience and here we get to see a very clear microcosm of
that. Now in this scene because there's the barrier of the car door it's not quite as
obvious, but watch how much Joan is grabbing on to that
car door, touching at Annie through the window. She's
like a pickup artist trying to establish physical contact, trying to accelerate Annie's process
of trusting her and keeping her focused on the magical
misdirection coming from her mouth. I also think there's
something very dramatic and reverent to her body language, something that old witchy ladies,
old church going aunties often have. And while
it does work as good surface camouflage for seeing her
character as this old friendly lady, we do know on second viewing that this is likely
the high satanic priestess in her coming up to the surface. Joan asks Annie if she isn't coming in and
we see Annie a little bit shocked by how over familiar this
woman is being. Joan realises she may have put Annie off and does her best to backtrack
and reassure her. Now it's not 100% clear as to
the timeline but it seems like Joan messes her backstory
up here. She claims to have lost her son and grandson four months ago and says she's been
coming to these meetings for a couple of months.
But right at the start she tells Annie that she recognizes
her from a few months ago, and almost certainly a few is more than a couple. Even the story
of the deceased son and grandson, which we find out
is in all likelihood entirely fake, she seems to put
together in the moment, adding in details like the grandson dying after her initial
explanation and only telling the story when it's clearly necessary
to stop Annie from driving away. She manipulates Annie's loneliness into a further meeting
with her and with that the cult's plan is fully in motion. And quick shoutout again to Toni Collette's
acting here, perfectly selling this moment of the first
time she puts words to her tragedy and says outloud what's happened to Charlie. And pay
close attention to how she phrases it, because it's
not just the fact that she's saying it that shocks her, it's
how she phrases it. She does not say 'my daughter died in a terrible accident' or like Joan
says her son and grandson drowned, Annie doesn't say
'my daughter died in a car accident' or 'my daughter
was decapitated', she says very plainly 'my daughter was killed'. And killed could imply
killed by a telephone post to the head, but it could also
imply that she believes Charlie was killed by Peter and I
think that's why we get this look of complete shock. She's admitted, to herself at least,
that she does blame him. And following that we see a much
more callous demeanour towards Peter, and the
rejection of her husband as he clearly doesn't feel the same way as her. When Annie returns
home we see that she's again lied to Steve about
where she's been, again using the movies as an excuse.
She immediately greets him with 'I'm going to bed' and clearly is uncomfortable being
around him. It's interesting that we'll see Annie flip
from this rejection of her family to trying to save them and
seemingly acting completely out of loving interest towards them. But I think because
the flip in her feelings towards them is so extreme, that
we can assume within the lore of the movie it's first driven
by the cult and Paimon weakening her mental state and doing what they can to cause division
and then reverted by her ultimate realisation
that something very dangerous is happening and that she's
been tricked and needs to try to undo it. But on a subtextual level and as part of the
initial fakeout of this all being in Annie's head, this is very
much supposed to emblematic of mental illness. It's
difficult to not draw parallels with dissociative identity disorder or schizophrenia as Annie
oscillates between these two extremes of loving mother
and eventual killer, but it doesn't have to be so
pathological, it can simply again be this idea of a woman who feels like her life isn't
her own, forced into motherhood by an overbearing parent,
trying to fulfil societal expectations while quietly
building resentment towards the children she was never sure she wanted. And subsequently
what we're seeing here is the flux between the
children and family she knows she loves and the
overwhelming anger and frustration and fear she feels now she's trapped in a life she
didn't design. Design being the operative word there as we
see Annie designing small worlds, simulacra for her
situation, which ultimately she can control. Annie doesn't stay away from Joan for very
long. We have a couple of brief intermediary scenes,
firstly this scene with Peter in the bedroom, staring at the demonic glow of the space heaters
in the treehouse. And this shot is amazing, with
the devilish glow reflected back in Peter's eyes. Given the
ending this foreshadowing would be intelligent enough just with that. But there's a bit more
to it than that, it's this demonic influence, Paimon's
malignancy and the manipulations of the cult that
have driven this wedge in between the family, that orchestrated Charlie's death and Annie
and Peter's opposition. And as we're watching
him lay there staring at the treehouse, it's obvious he's
feeling one thing - resentment to the mother that doesn't show him love and blames him
for something outside of his control, just as
she was treated by Ellen. So we're watching this resentment
build in his eyes and this demonic glow becomes not just foreshadowing but a literal explanation
and visual identifier of where this resentment
is coming from, Pandemonium. It's an extremely elegant
way of demonstrating this with a simple visual metaphor and again as we see everywhere here,
demonic glowing eyes are pretty overdone but Hereditary finds a way to make it refreshing
and intelligent. Just as with Annie seeing Ellen in the attic
we can find something very relatable in Peter staring at
clothes in the corner of the room, trying to convince himself he didn't hear Charlie's
clicking. I'm sure we've all done this before and again
it's a very natural thing to happen following a tragedy,
certainly after losing a close family member. And while we can consider that as subtext
what's truly amazing here is that the film takes those
recognisable markers of trauma and grief like seeing shapes
in the corner of your room or thinking you heard or saw someone you recently lost and
it uses them as actual indicators of supernatural activity.
It's weaponizing our own trauma against us and saying
'all those weird little thoughts you had during your darkest hour, they were all true.' I
think when combined with this flat realist aesthetic,
stellar acting and genius level writing. it's that closeness to
real world loss that makes the horror here seem so personal. Interspersed between Peter and the next scene
is this quick stationary shot of the Graham's letterbox, or mail slot if you're American
at home. And I'm pointing out the difference because I
don't know if in America this practice is normal or not, but here it is quite standard
to have different people delivering singular flyers after the
government employed postal service has done the rounds.
So when I first saw this it really slipped over my head that it would be a cult member
delivering this but that is most certainly the case, this
is another tool to get Annie to embrace occultism and trick
her in to summoning Paimon and allowing the latter stages of the cults plan to go ahead.
It's important to note though that Annie does not
take the bait and the cult take a separate route to
having Annie conduct her own s ance. So while it may feel as though the cult have this perfect
and infallible plan that's been meticulously planned,
the truth is more that their influence and surrounding of the family is so complete that
whatever route the family takes they'll end up with the
same outcome, in line with the themes of 'tragedy of fate' and predestination. And following that we get a crucial scene
with Annie, perhaps the easter egg that's become most
well known, her knocking over of the paint pot without touching it. And if you did miss
it on the first watch then don't worry, it's very subtly done,
but when you watch Annie's hand she doesn't come
anywhere close to the paint. I think by now I probably don't have to say it but it is
especially important here: the paint Annie spills, the
note next to her that distracts her, Joan's phone number,
they're all marked with the same turquoise blue that we associate with Paimon. This may
be the moment the film really shows it's hand and
lets you know how important this colour coding is. In
fact if we look at what paints Annie has laid out we see the turquoise I've mentioned, the
gold we associate with Ellen and the orange colour
we associate with Charlie and Paimon in their previous
earthly form. And we can safely presume that the bottle falling over on it's own, directly
on to Joan's note is due to Paimon's magic trying to lead
Annie toward a certain outcome, essentially doing what
it needs to to ensure the right version of the future where the cults plan is successful
comes to be. And truthfully that's why this scene is so
crucial. It's because here we see all of our theories be
proven right, really it functions like a key to a puzzle. It's okay to say all this stuff
but we have to be able to prove it and right here is where we
can do that. Now right before the bottle falls over we see
a wisp of light, not the pulse like when we're seeing Charlie and Peter be directed, but
more like the wisp we see enter Peter, float down past the
window just before the bottle tips over. The turquoise
bottle that pushes Annie towards making contact with Joan. And as I may have mentioned this
light we see, that we're assuming to be Paimon shares
this kind of light blue hue. While it may seem
obvious now, really this scene is the linking factor that demonstrates it all and links
the subtext with what's clearly happening. We see things being
directly affected by magic, even if it's quite well
hidden from the audiences view and we see this purposefully inserted blue light move
and clearly indicate that it's doing it. And other than
when we see that wisp enter Peter this is perhaps the most
obvious it will be that this light blue to turquoise light, Paimon, is inflicting it.
And at many major points during the cults plan, some of which
I've covered already, we'll see blue lights, blue lens flare,
or purposeful roving wisp like spotlights that are another example of the same thing,
just more subtly done. And we could leave it there and pretty much
have the same meaning, but there's likely a specific
reason as to where this weird light reflection style effect is being used and again this
scene works as a key for it. We see this wisp right next
to Annie in frame, it seems like it's behind her sure, we have
that soft jump scare thing, but on screen it's right next to her. Just like these blueprints
are next to Peter's room or behind Ellen when she appears
in the attic, this closeness is used to suggest a
synergy, a mirroring, just like we see with the bedroom diorama and the actual bedroom,
or the chopping and the headbutting, or Peter's face
filling the screen at precise and key moments. This
relation is 100% intentional, and here where the wisp sits over Annie's shoulder, we see
her using her magnifying glasses. Now as before we see
she's only got one of the lenses deployed, as I
mentioned she's not fully blind to things like Peter is, she is watching, she is paying
attention, but her closeness, her magnification, prevent
her from being able to see the big picture. But far more
crucially than that it's this lens, whether it's Annie's magnifiers or Peter's telescope
or even the lens of the camera that we need to be focused on
because it's here that we find the secret to what this
light is. Which is to say it's the reflection of the cosmic or spiritual lens of whatever
being is watching over the family, like Annie looming large
over her dioramas. It's the viewfinder of whoever or
whatever, almost certainly Paimon, being is treating the Graham's household like their
own little dollhouse.
We even see movement very reminiscent of light reflecting off a tilting lens as Paimon is
trying to attract Charlie's attention to her grandma
which I think really makes sense when we view next to
Annie tilting her lens. It's why we have so many shots of the house in tilt-shift, why
we see the camera moving below ground, why we see Annie
doing this, why we see miniatures inside of miniatures. It's all alluding to this larger
being that's watching the family and controlling events. As I
covered earlier, almost certainly Paimon, but if your head canon is that it's lucifer
or whoever you want it to be, it really doesn't make a difference.
The point is that it's the reflected lens of whatever
being is watching and really as far as I'm concerned there's no being mentioned directly
other than Paimon that it could be given what the film
presents us with. If you've ever seen Carl Sagan explain 'Flatland'
then I kind of think of it like that. In flatland a 2D
world would perceive a 3d object very differently to how we would, seeing only two dimensional
slices of a strange, unknown object. Now Mr Sagan uses this to make an extrapolation about
the fourth dimension but for us, just think of
the 2d world as the non-spiritual realm and Paimon as a
spiritual observer, the 3d object that passes through. In the non-spiritual realm they can
only really perceive slices or reflections of him, this
light essentially, and even then it takes a good amount of
being mentally or psychically broken down and fed bits of Dittany of Crete to be able
to see it. A lot of people have treated this lens theory with
a pinch of salt but I actually think it's cut and dry when
you look at all the evidence together. And just like that we're back to Joan, even
on the street outside her apartment we see the path
Annie is taking is lined with turquoise street signs and so on. I don't know how normal this
is for Utah or America in general but this film plays
such close attention to it's colour coding that really
nothing would surprise me at this point. Either way we see her following this turquoise stained
note to Joan's house, which makes no sense beyond
the subtextual meaning of that colour as it just has a
phone number on it. Now I'm not sure what the deal is with this
mirror. It's put there very purposefully, we see the
camera hold on it for a second or two, this will happen again in reverse later on in the
film, and at no point where Annie walks past it do we see
her reflection. Nor do we see Joan elsewhere on screen
while she's being reflected. This is a very purposeful decision, very purposeful camera
movements and very purposeful blocking of the shot by
Toni Collette. Now first and foremost this is not Annie
being in some transient spiritual place where she doesn't cast a reflection. We can say
that with certainty because just moments after the first
mirror shot we see her reflection in one of the framed
photographs on Joanie's wall. So the answer is not Annie is possessed, Annie is a vampire
or anything like that. One thing of note though
is that mirrors and the occult go hand-in-hand, we'll
even see Paimon mess with Peter through his reflection. And I do think there's a little
bit of a nod towards the idea that mirrors, reflections,
can be used to see and commune with spirits. But
truthfully I don't think Annie isn't casting a reflection or having her reflection messed
with by Paimon. I think it's a cleverly placed mirror
and a very well structured shot and by keeping Annie in
frame but not reflected, and Joan out of shot but reflected in the mirror, we once again
get this impression of her looking in through a window
at Annie, just like the cult are doing, just like she did
when she first introduced herself. This feeling that Annie is being observed, which she is
certainly, there's a camera right outside Joan's apartment.
And that it's happening with a mirror shouldn't be
lost on us because again they do have this link with the spiritual. So truly I think
this is a visual metaphor for how Annie is being observed and
manipulated by the cult, both directly from right
outside her house, through a window, and more supernaturally from this spiritual plain we
see associated with reflections and the film has
alluded to at multiple points. Let's rewind a couple of seconds and have
a look at Joanie's door mat, and if you're wondering why
I'm calling her Joanie now this is why, she's clearly introduced herself as Joan to Annie
but to her friends she's Joanie. As we come to find out
this doormat has absolutely been made by Ellen, we see
similar mats made for Annie and her brother later on and in this scene Annie even mentions
to Joanie that her mother "used to embroider
ones just like it". Joanie plays this off expertly saying "did
she really? Isn't that funny!" This is a great example of Joan being a high-level manipulator
because she's not just playing it off as if it's nothing,
she's playing it off in a way where she encourages Annie
to accept coincidences, she's essentially saying isn't life funny, what an odd coincidence,
what a 'small world'. And given that she knows Annie
is going to be seeing and hopefully ignoring a lot of
clues, that's what she's really pulling towards here. Keeping Annie away from noticing the
truth. Now the 'welcome mat' as they call it seems
absolutely not fit for purpose. It looks a lot more like an
embroidered pillow that's going to be destroyed just by people stepping on it let alone wiping
their feet. So we shouldn't assume that's it's primary
function. And just as with Annie and her brother we
see some symbolism on the pillow that suggests more is going on. Here specifically we see
geometric outlining, this is par for the course with
Joan's d cor, her clothing and all the other places I've
already pointed it out. This idea of sacred geometry being important in both spiritualism
and the occult.
More specific to here though we've got 6 pointed stars, more commonly known as hexagrams. I
think most people traditionally associate it with Judaism, but truthfully it pops up
in Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, really everywhere you
would expect it to. As I mentioned near the beginning with
the pentagram stars are one of the earliest graphic symbols developed so there's a long
and storied history there. And alongside it's use in religion
it's prevalent in occult and ceremonial magic. Truthfully to give you a full rundown of the
hexagram would likely take at least four hours and it's
ultimately not that relevant here. So to give you an extremely abridged version the first
understanding of the symbol would be a representation of the seven so called 'old' planets
recognised by early astrologers. Sometimes it represents the different elements, sometimes
the two overlapping triangles just represent fire
and water and sometimes it's used as a sign for
quintessence, the supposed fifth element. But most crucially, most relevant to us here
and it's use in general, the hexagram is viewed as a talisman
for conjuring spirits and the various forces of occult
magic. And sometimes it's called the Seal of Saturn, but most commonly it's referred
to as the Seal of Solomon. Solomon being this father figure
of occult magic that I've mentioned many times already, most notably the grimoire, The Lesser
Key of Solomon, where we get all this crucial information regarding Paimon. The text itself
is littered with them, and if you search up occult
symbolism this is likely to be one of the main results. In opposition to the hexagrams we see this
symbol, now it isn't particularly clear but I think this is a
combination of two symbols. It looks to be like an alchemical flask or potion bottle
with an all-seeing eye on it combined with this curvy outlining
on the bottom of it that's reminiscent of the modified
sigil of Paimon used throughout the movie. We certainly see the same three circles there
alluding to the three heads of Ellen, Charlie and Annie.
And there is another part to the design that I think is
somewhat an unfinished motif in the film. We see leaves like this on Ellen's stationary,
we see this sort of floral leafy wallpaper at the party,
there's a fair few times we'll see this kind of floral nature
imagery. I think it's largely a combination of these riches Paimon is supposedly offering
and the pagan or occult belief of sacrifice improving
harvest. We're in Utah, we don't see it but we can
presume there's a lot of farming going on and this could likely be one route the cult
may see riches. The way I see this as being under developed
or unfinished is that this imagery never really goes
anywehere in the film, it's extremely background and ultimately I think these themes are far
better explored within Midsommar. And as I mentioned
I'm definitely going to do kind of a comparison complete guide video for that and the original
Wicker Man, another of my all time favourite horror
movies, so I'll leave anything I've got to say here for that video.
Following their conversation about the welcome mats we cut straight into Annie sharing the
details of Charlie's death with Joan. There's a couple
of things of note here, first we have Annie's mention
of there being tar like black blood around the neck, we don't need to go into the real
world practicalities here I think we can say whatever
the case this is softly alluding to there being
something demonic about the body. Next we'll see Annie mention that the head
was not there and we get this sudden sort of snapping
glance from Joan which on first viewing is supposed to seem as though she's just disgusted
by the details but given that we know Charlie's head
is of prime importance for the cults invocation of
Paimon it's actually much more likely that this is Joan realizing that they need to find
that head asap. Keep following Joan's eyes and you'll see
her watching Annie drink the tea very closely, making sure
she's ingesting the Dittany of Crete. And we know the tea has Dittany of Crete in it
because we see Annie pull some from her lips after drinking
it. This is really the clearest view we get of the herb in
the whole movie and it's likely the first time the cult has been able to get Annie to
ingest it. From here we'll see her suggestibility increase
and her mental stability rapidly deteriorate as the herb
weakens her defences and ultimately facilitates her possession by Paimon.
Wanting to distract from the tea, Joan moves the conversation on to Peter, the member of
the family she's interested in far above the rest.
It's here that we get Annie's admission that she
sleepwalks and this immediately rings alarm bells in the viewers head, it's such well-crafted
misdirection that let's you think you're solving the puzzle while hiding the real trick right
in front of you. Of course the viewer will relate Annie's
sleep walking to Ellen and more specifically Ellen's DID,
by this point in the film there's a very good chance you're viewing Annie as a potential
enemy, despite her being the main character. And
when she expands on what her sleepwalking entails
there's really no wonder, even when we hear her admit it as an unwitting victim, it's
a difficult thing for the audience to forgive a mother dousing
herself and her children with paint thinner and holding
up a lit match. We're likely to be sceptical that she has their best interests at heart.
And Toni Collette plays this so down the line, so on the knife
edge between legitimate victim and mentally ill
perpetrator convinced of her own innocence that it's almost impossible to tell on first
viewing. And the film gives us a lot of subtle clues that
Annie is lying, or at least is used to lying about it. When she
begins telling Joan the story she says "I sleepwalk, I haven't done it in years, but
a couple of years ago" and then precedes to tell the story.
It seems right from the off that she's fudging details and
maybe try to make it more palatable. Despite this it's clear to the audience and
her that she's lost the trust of her children and when she
uses phrases like 'it was impossible to convince them' it's tacitly building your image of
Annie as a person who wasn't believed at the time, who
wasn't believed by her closest family members who
presumably know her better than anyone. And that positions us against Annie, not believing
her just like everyone else. And when we really think
about that, how awful this situation truly is where she
isn't in control and her loved ones view her as a threat, disbelieving her honest denials,
that's pretty damn heartbreaking. Annie's been put through
this her entire life, but we, and her family refuse to
trust her because of it. We see this idea of ab*se creating the ab*ser and a mentally
ill person who is perhaps feared by their loved ones, and although
we may feel sympathetic for Annie we can only see her behaviour for what it is: a direct
threat to her children's lives. And while she was almost
certainly trying to subconsciously eliminate them from the board she was doing this in
again a deeply subconscious effort to save them from
the horror that on some hidden level she knows is
coming. We'll see this confirmed later on when she does the same thing again and we
hear her tell Peter that she's trying to save him. It's
Annie's subconscious bubbling up to the surface to try and
save her son the only way she can, by killing him before Paimon takes hold. And Annie closes this scene out with the again
quite juvenile, teenage style delivery of "and there's
nothing I can say, and nothing I can do, because it happened. While I was asleep." And there's
a clever bit of double meaning here, really
this line perfectly sums up Annie's entire narrative. There is
nothing she can say to stop it, there's nothing she can do to fix it, it's all already happened
while she's been asleep, that is to say there's
nothing she can do to stop what's going to happen to her
family because she's been asleep to the machinations of the cult her entire life. It's too late
and the plan is already in motion, this is the sacrifice
from the sacrificial lambs perspective and the lamb has
begun to subconsciously understand what's happening far too late, and is at the end
of the day just a lamb, unable to prevent the sacrifice if
it wanted to. Really you're supposed to feel momentary
hatred for Annie here, but knowing what Annie is ultimately victim to during the film, this
may be the bleakest window into her life the movie
gives us and when we consider what this is alluding to in
terms of mental illnesses beyond that it becomes even bleaker. There is something to be said for Annie's
choice of accelerant here too. This could have easily been
gasoline, well actually let's start at the start: she could have been holding a gun to
their heads. But there's a historical and intertextual importance
to this being fire, we've got cleansing fire, we've got
hellfire, we've got people setting themselves on fire in protest we've got mothers doing
this to their kids and we've got this idea of feminine sacrifice
being tied to being set on fire and all linked in with
the history of witchcraft and supposedly mad or different or possessed women being burned
at the stake. And that is crucially important and
almost certainly the subtextual intention here given we'll
discuss a very similar thing with beheading towards the end. But why paint thinner? The
easy answer is that it's on brand for Annie and it makes
sense that she would have it to hand. But I think the
better answer is that if Annie's miniatures and dioramas, the things she uses the paint
on, represent this matroshka, simulacra of the supernatural
intentions surrounding them, then the paint thinner
can be seen as representing a way to undo that. A way to erase the meticulous plans
laid out for them. And if you want to be even more direct
than that you can see this like Peter's covered telescope and Charlie's constellation pajamas
in the next scene. Annie has literally just followed a
paint covered note to Joan's house and now, for the first time, she's telling the audience
she tried to commit infanticide by paint thinner. One other thing I want to mention quickly
before we move on. This is the first and really only time
we don't see Joan constantly grabbing at Annie and realigning her or subtly but physically
coercing her. And that's because Annie is exactly where
the cult want her, doing the exact thing the cult want
her to be doing. I think it's clear that Annie isn't fond of
the welcome mats her mother made as the very next scene
we cut to the Graham's interior doorway and we see they don't have anywhere to wipe their
feet. And on the ground in front of the door we
see a clutter of muddy footprints around the entrance.
Now maybe this is just the family coming and going, maybe that's why Steve is normally
militant about shoes off in the house, but I don't
think so. Firstly as I've pointed out this is a set, so we're not
filming in a real house where this could be here accidentally, everything on screen is
precise and meticulously presented. Secondly we know these
footprints weren't there before as we see the
hallway prior to the party. There are some scuffmarks there but clearly not in the same
muddy abundance we see here. This is pretty clearly
alluding to the cult members having dug up Ellen and
then transported her through the house to store her body in the attic. This may even
be why Steve has become militant about shoes being off,
because he keeps seeing cult members footprints in his
hallway. And let's stick with Steve for a moment as
we see him very weakly, very impotently chastise his son
about signing up for his SAT Prep course. Steve even seems to realise his own failings
here, he knows he is losing the battle with his family, communicating
with them less and less. Peter just outright ignores his reprimand here and there's a deliberate
softness to it where even Steve can see why he
would. Afterwards Steve heads upstairs to tell Annie
dinner is ready and we see her working on a not so
miniature diorama of the accident. It's much larger than the others, actually the size
Ari Aster wanted all the miniatures to be at first before
realizing they needed to be scaled down, but this one
wasn't. This is supposed to be a large and confronting moment where we see Annie has
gone over the edge. She's certainly losing track of
reality, not seeing an issue with what she's doing, not
realizing dinner is already made and so on. And up until this moment her dioramas may
have been somewhat worrying but this really is a good
deal more problematic. She describes it as a neutral
view of the accident and that begs the question neutral for who, because to Steve it's obviously
offensive and to Peter would be even more so. She means neutral for herself to be able
to understand what happened, although we've already
seen that subconsciously she blames Peter, but
in this aiming to gain understanding we see the real admission, that this is the only
way Annie really knows how to process trauma. While she may
well be able to take traumatic events and render
them objectively in miniature, Steve rightfully views it as deeply unhealthy and so it's also
here that we probably see him at the precipice in regards
to their marriage. Not his final breaking point of
needing to call the police and ultimately being set on fire, but certainly the point
of no return in being able to continue a happy marriage with
Annie. We do see him finally snap on her verbally, although given the context it's still quite
a muted, impotent reaction and certainly not one that does
anything to reach Annie who continues daubing away with the red paint. It's a short and
impactful scene that very quietly marks this point of
no return, the cracks that were present in the family unit
have begun to crumble. And that's exactly what we see as the family
sit down for dinner, which to give Steve his dues looks
absolutely delicious. Just like when Peter was asking to borrow Annie's car before the
party we see this standoffish, very surly teenager type
attitude from Annie again. And while there may have been
some small element of humour to that initially, this is now much darker in the context of
what's happened to Charlie and Annie's subsequent
feelings towards Peter. We see her not talking, glancing
up from her plate as she plays with her food, verbally mimicking Steve and being contrarian
and standoffish with Peter. It's all again, very
surly teenager type behaviour. A mirroring of a lot of the
things she resents about Peter. And before we get into their argument I wanted
to mention how Peter is holding his cutlery, which is
borderline unnerving and for such a small little detail really has five possible answers.
Now I think the one I subscribe to is that this is another
example of Peter's stunted development, his borderline
neglect in some respect by his parents. And that fits with Peter's baby like crying of
'mommy' and needing his friends to hold his hand. Peter's
nearly finishing high school, this should be something he
knows how to do properly and we even see Annie look at it with resentment, a subconscious
recognition that maybe she hasn't been the mother she needs to be. So for me it's an
example of him being emotionally and developmentally
a bit stunted, but perhaps we can go a bit further and
say it's even exacerbated during times of stress or emotional turmoil, like when your
mother is holding you responsible for killing your little
sister. Maybe this isn't always how Peter eats but rather
some bad habit he's regressed into due to the stress. And I should mention the other
three theories because truth be told I don't think you could
outright call any of them wrong. So first this could be
an example of Paimon worming his way into Peter, we already know he's been able to attempt
taking control in brief moments and we know he eats food weird. Certainly possible but
the least likely. Secondly this could be some piece
of character back story we don't really get confirmed, I'm
thinking specifically that Peter has attempted cutting his wrist at some point, we know he's
suffered from depression and Steve seems very wary
of provoking him, and that's caused him to have to hold
the cutlery like this. And thirdly, that Steve is worried about Annie's mental state to the
point where he's hidden all the sharp utensils and Peter
is having to work with a very blunt knife here. That last
one was just something I saw on Reddit I think the knife is perfectly fine for cutting food,
truthfully it's whatever head canon you prefer here but
I think the safest and best answer is this stunted
development and at times childlike regression we see in Peter. Now while Peter may vocally instigate the
conflict at the dinner table I think it's fair to say that it's
Annie who starts the argument. After sitting in silence for a while Peter compliments the
food and when Steve says 'Thanks Buddy' we see Annie
snicker to himself and silently mimic the 'thanks
buddy', clearly taking the positivity they're attempting with one another as a slight on
her. Peter asks quite genuinely "you okay mom" and for
a moment we see Annie react with almost pleasant shock. Everyone in this family, especially
Annie and Peter have been crying out for emotional support and I think this initial shock from
Annie is being actually quite warmly surprised that she's
being asked. But she fails to reciprocate, saying 'what', she doesn't know how to respond
to loving inquiry thanks to a lifetime with Ellen, and
we see the conversation quickly devolve from there.
Peter asks if there's something on her mind and we see this childish repetition of the
question back to him. Annie's meaning is clear, is there
something you want to say to me, but she says it as if she's
confused with the question. She's not trying to honestly communicate and really in this
moment Peter is being the more mature party.
From there Annie says something very telling, "why would I wanna say something so I can
watch you sneer at me?" And this may be the smartest
line in the entire script. When you first hear it you'll be
certain that Annie has gone insane because Peter hasn't smiled once during the movie,
it may even feel out of place or like an outright mistake.
Peter acts as shocked as we feel, aligning him with the
audience against Annie as he flat out denies it saying "Sneer at you? I don't ever sneer
at you?" The word ever is key here as it informs us that
this isn't something happening off camera or prior to the
film commencing. And with the films acknowledgment of the incongruity we know it's not a mistake
of the films it's a mistake of Annie's. So when she says "Oh sweetie you don't have to
you get your point across" we can go, oh yeah she's definitely
insane as she's admitting he's not actually sneering
in the next sentence. But as we know having seen the film, this absolutely is something
Annie is seeing, and Peter absolutely will be sneering
later on. It's another little piece of subliminal awareness, a reflection of the plan Annie
can't quite make out. Paimon's sneering face over her sons
face, looking back and mocking her. And that's confirmed with what Annie says during her
tirade a minute later "all I get back is that f*cking
face on your face". Now this is absolutely played for a
moment of brevity for audience members tired of their teenage children but again, that's
how smart this script is. Because as well as being genuinely
quite funny, it can also be seen as Annie being
unable to communicate with her child, quite a dark moment for a grieving family and ultimately
still it's true meaning. The same as the sneer,
this idea that Annie can somehow recognise Paimon's face
on her sons, staring back and mocking her, taunting her with what's to come. It's funny,
smart and genuinely chilling all in the same sentence.
As with every part of this movie it gets smarter the more
you understand it. And to just cut back for a moment to before
Annie blows up at Peter we have the same thing with
the phrase 'release me' repeated multiple times and Peter raising his voice telling
Annie to release him which has obvious connotations to his
fixed destiny and also the idea that Peter's soul is
released from his body to make room for Paimon. It is extremely, extremely smart scriptwriting
to achieve all this and do it so subtly. To put
it in such plain, screaming in the audiences face, view -
while still hiding it's true meaning completely is genius.
Once Annie has finally snapped at Peter we do hear her refer to Charlie's death as an
accident but she also says to Peter "I wish I could shield
you from the knowledge that you did what you did." So
not only do we have her directly blaming him, saying it was his fault, but there's even
more layered language here. 'I wish I could shield you'
is exactly what Annie is trying to do in these subconscious
attacks on her children, trying to kill them so she can take them off the board and keep
them from Paimon. And to go a little bit further 'shield
you from the knowledge' is also descriptive of Annie
here. She knows something is desperately wrong, she can feel that everything is already doomed
beyond repair, but because she has been shielded from this knowledge her whole life she can't
see it for what it is. And by the end of the scene
I don't think there's any doubt that Annie is blaming
Peter, saying "If you could have just said 'I'm sorry' or faced up to what happened"
accusing him of not being able to "take responsibility". Despite
her saying it's an accident she seems certain the
family cannot move on due to Peter not being able to apologize for and take responsibility
for said accident. And from there we hear the truth,
she cannot accept what's happened and she cannot
forgive Peter for, in her eyes, perpetrating it. And as Annie finally lets it all out and
reaches a climax of venting her frustrations we hear the truth
slip out again, the hidden truth that even Annie can't
see. She can't accept and she can't forgive because "nobody admits what they've done".
She knows she's been the victim her whole life, she
knows her mother has done nothing but hide things from
her and torment her, but because her mother was never honest with her she doesn't know
what she's missing, she doesn't know how to accept
her child's death or why Peter isn't to blame, because
she doesn't have the key to understanding the events that she's at the centre of. On
a deep level she still loves Peter, she still wants to protect
him, but she's fighting a losing battle against an enemy she
doesn't understand and her family are the only people she has to rage against, the only
people she has left to blame for this powerlessness that's
been present her whole life. And when Peter finally
fights back, when he points out that she's equally to blame in this cause-and-effect
game of assigning accountability she looks like she's
about to explode, maybe she does want to scream 'you
killed her', but ultimately she bites her tongue - and not because Steve put his foot
down. Her agreeing 'fine' is ten times more forceful
than Steve telling them to stop. It's because ultimately she
has to resign herself to the knowledge that Peter is right, that she isn't exempt from
this unseen influence that she can't even verbalise, that
she can't protect her children even when she considers
herself to be fully in control of the situation. And we're left with this wide static shot
that doesn't follow Annie out, giving the impression she's
just disappeared from the family as Peter and Steve sit
shellshocked at the table. This is the last time I'm going to mention
it but Toni Collette not only wasn't nominated for an Oscar
but that year Glenn Close was nominated for the 7th time for her performance in The Wife,
a film I'm sure we all have seen multiple times. Melissa
McCarthy was nominated for a film I hadn't heard of
where she almost certainly starred as a bubbly loser with a quick temper, and ultimately
Olivia Coleman won for The Favourite. I love Olivia
Coleman, I enjoyed that movie, it's not fit to clean
Hereditary's shoes. Here and the scene prior where Annie's discussing her sleepwalking
with Joan, on their own, should have been enough for
a Best Actress award. It very much speaks to a broader
disrespecting of horror by the academy. And I'm the first to agree that a lot of modern
horror just isn't up to snuff, but I also think many of
our greatest all time examples of cinema come from that
genre. Alien, The Shining, The Thing, and yeah, Hereditary. It should have been recognized
for how good it is. Following the blow-up at dinner we get a quick
shot of Annie that I think is supposed to be visually
alluding to someone in a straight jacket, she certainly looks like she may have double
dropped whatever meds she keeps taking and her blurred
gazing at the clown seems to give the impression of
muted asylum inmate too. I think the idea with the clown here is the same as the sneering,
that on some level Annie can perceive the occult forces
laughing at her, using her as a plaything. We also see
Annie again follow the instructions of a turquoise note and once again run into Joan as she does. From there we see Annie in the car park apparently
running into Joan by chance. Joan's demeanour is extremely different, apparently brimming
with happiness all of a sudden. Watch as she makes her
way over to Annie she's already using her arms to grab Annie's attention and she grabs
hold of her as soon as she's close enough. Again Joan
is a master manipulator not just of Annie but of the
audience too. Again she's wearing red, blue and geometric patterns. Now eagle-eyed easter
egg investigators may have noticed that as Joan
pulls Annie towards the car she is doing so to keep
Annie from seeing that her backseat is full of chalkboards. Later during the fake s ance
Joan will claim to Annie that this chalkboard was a
beloved item of her grandsons. But that's not all that's
hidden here, and something was bothering me about this scene for the longest time, until
I realised it was the decision to shoot this scene at
sunset. It just seemed out of place somehow, but I think it's
very clearly done to give us this visual evidence of Joan leading Annie to the northwest, towards
Paimon, the king of the north-west. We know the sun is setting in the west so we can say
pretty clearly Joan leads Annie to the north-west.
We'll see more subtle and not so subtle north-western imagery as the film moves on but this is by
far my favourite and the most cleverly hidden. As the scene continues Joan goes absolutely
Derren Brown on Annie, keeping her constantly aligned
and making eye contact, even stroking her arm, doing everything she can to plant the
idea of being able to spiritually contact Charlie within
Annie. She spins a story where scepticism has been
overwhelmed by the demonstration of spiritual fact. And under normal circumstances I think
we could safely presume that Joan is just making
this up so that Annie believes the lie, but we did
actually see them insert the flyer for the spiritual reading through Annie's letterbox,
so much like the grief counselling I think we can say they
did stage this event for Annie's benefit and for Joan to run
into her in the audience during the seance, it's just Annie never took that particular
piece of bait. Annie seems very sceptical of what Joan is
saying, extremely resistant in fact even though a lot of her
expressions are hidden from camera she clearly isn't buying what Joan is selling. Joan recognises
this and plays the converted sceptic alongside
her, ultimately saying 'It would be everything if you
came." We never see Annie actually say yes, just cutting straight back to Joan's apartment
instead. But it's clear from the last few things Joan
says regarding being able to communicate with her dead
grandson that the promise of being able to contact Charlie is enough to get Annie to
go along with it. The main thing I want you to recognise about
this s ance is that it is, as the name probably suggests
to many of you, a parlour trick. It utilizes things, tricks, the average person might associate
with the occult. The movement of the glass was a popular
trick in spiritualism, obviously very similar to Ouija
boards. Having spirits write things, verbally communing with spirits in the room, it's all
stuff that I'm sure you recognise, essentially modern spiritualism
that is a refined version of things we saw during
the Victorian boom of parlour entertainment. This is a very far cry from the hermetic magic,
demonology, occult worship, Miltonian biblicism, invocation and possession that we see the
cult using elsewhere. This is all a show, exactly
what it's designed to be reminiscent of really as at this
point the audience has no conclusive evidence of the supernatural, but more than that it's
a show for Annie's benefit. It's using tools she
recognises from spiritualism, one to convince her of the
reality and two to keep her mind away from this being a gateway to a demonic ritual that
she should absolutely not do. But all that's not to say
that there isn't actual magic happening here, the glass, the
chalkboard, that's not being operated with magnets and cult members, there's a definite
demon in the room which we'll get to in a moment, but
this style of parlour magic they're disguising it with is
supposed to signal to the audience that this isn't necessarily to be believed and keep
Annie from seeing the real demonic play that she's just
become a part of. Now as I mentioned the chalkboard that Joan
claims was a cherished item of her grandson was
recently purchased by Joan, and given how haphazardly Joan put together the story about
them back at the meeting I think we can say with
reasonable certainty that they don't, and didn't, exist.
So, if we know Joan is truly communicating with a spirit, and we know she isn't communicating
with her deceased grandson, then who is she communicating
with? Well I think the obvious answer is Paimon, we know this is well within his powerset
as we've seen him knock over the paint and we see
much more later on. He can certainly effect objects in the material plane. And as when
we discussed the light and this larger being observing
the family like a dollshouse, we're saying this is Paimon
because it almost certainly is because there's never any real mention of beings beyond him,
above or below him. His minions, so to speak are
the cult who are human and for the most part living, and
although we get a mention of him as being one of 'the eight kings of hell' he's the
only one named directly. Now that implies seven other beings
along the same rank as Paimon and perhaps leaves
room for one all-powerful being above them as we often see in literature regarding hells
hierarchy and greater demonology. That being may sometimes
be Beelzebub, Satan, Astaroth, Baal, there's a
great many differing interpretations of it and depending on which one you're looking
at you'll come away with a different answer. But easily the
most common is Lucifer, the bringer of light. And most
significantly to us Lucifer is the focus of John Milton's Paradise Lost, which as I've
mentioned is certainly in line with the occult evidence
we get within the film, this focus on the stars, this use of
Pandemonium and so on. And the name Joan chooses for her make believe grandson, whatever
demon or spirit she's communicating with is 'Louie', which could be a dry joke on behalf
of the cult, alluding to the name Lucifer, again dangling
the evidence in front of the family, laughing at them.
This is going to become more of a theme as we go on, that these spirits have a pretty
sick sense of humour. So that's not out character, I think
maybe it is somewhat of a stretch to think this is
something Lucifer might waste his time with however. This film has set up a hierarchy
in hell, Paimon is one of eight kings, I think given
what we know about hells hierarchy there's no way Lucifer
is the same rank as Paimon and I think we can go out on a limb and say he's probably
the only being above the kings. So messing around with parlour
tricks does seem like a bit of a stretch. With that
being said Lucifer is a being of light, he is often described as this because he's disguising
himself as an angel, or while he was an angel and sometimes
just as more of an abstract form made of light. And that does fit with this lens, this wisp
of light, that we see and have associated to Paimon. So
while nothing I said before was technically incorrect, and while there is no other being
mentioned directly other than Paimon, we must also consider
that from context we know there are other beings
in hell and here we're seeing this 'Louie' nickname used which is closely reminiscent
of Miltionian Biblicism that we see the film reference at
other points. As before, it's up to you and what you prefer
your head canon to be. This could be Lucifer, if not it's almost certainly Paimon, it really
depends how compelling you find the evidence. I actually
quite like the Lucifer theory but for the purpose of
this video we're just going to be using Paimon as the umbrella term for this being. Now it
would tie the whole 'how is Paimon simultaneously inside
and outside of Charlie simultaneously?' with a neat
little bow but ultimately I think I have answered that question and any theories we have regarding
the light wisp being Lucifer really fall down when we see it enter Peter's body and have
it verbally confirmed that he's been occupied by Paimon.
Still though, the name 'Louie', just here during the
s ance is almost certainly a knowing wink to Lucifer, and who knows maybe he is in the
room here. As the s ance progresses we see Annie becoming
more and more unnerved, jumping at the movement of the glass and screaming when her
hair is blown by an unexplained gust. She moves
from skepticism to belief very quickly, remember she's in a desperate situation and the cult
have been doing everything they can to break her
down and make her as suggestible as possible. Joan has
'Louie' write on the chalkboard and whatever spirit is in the room writes 'I luv u granma',
now as good an actress as Joan is here I think she
does actually break character for a moment. When she
declares her love for Louie, and let's say that's Lucifer here but Paimon if you like,
then she's really declaring her love for him. She seems reverent,
almost brimming with joy at the contact, I think for
Joan this has gone a little bit further in this moment than just convincing Annie. And
we see that as Annie, clearly upset and terrified, asks if
they can stop for a moment and Joan, more venomously
than we've ever seen her replies 'what?' in quite a confused and confrontational tone.
She gathers herself and gets back into character very
quickly but clearly Joan was for a moment all consumed by
her open line of communication with Paimon or Lucifer or whatever demonic entity was
in control. As Annie tries to rush out we see Joan grab
a piece of paper. On it is the incantation or barbarous
words used in the summoning of Paimon. The writing we actually see on the paper is the
hebrew text, we can also see design elements seemingly
lifted from the Lesser Key of Solomon that also
features Hebrew text as part of this circular mandala design. And it's difficult to make
out but central to that design we have an old style compass
illustration with a direction marker pointing to the
North West, to Paimon's domain. We'll see this same compass marker denoting the North-west
on the stairs leading up to Charlie's room and
on the welcome mat Ellen made for Annie, as well as next
to the illustration of Paimon we see in Ellen's book and also in the treehouse right at the
end. Joan talks Annie through the ritual the cult
want her to perform, which is most certainly not an
innocent way of communicating with Charlie, actually it's the invocation of Paimon into
the house and likely what allows for her to be fully
possessed by Paimon during the final act, although you
could make the argument that occurs once she's finally broken down fully at the point where
Steve bursts into flames. Joan tells her that she
needs to say the words to make things start, and really this
is what she means by that, once she says those words Paimon essentially has free reign over
the Graham household. This is confirmed by Ari
Aster, but he also makes note that if Annie hadn't
chosen this path, just like she didn't take the bait of the s ance, the cult would have
found another way to invocate Paimon within the household.
Which is to say that Annie's decision to carry out the
ritual speeds things along but is ultimately meaningless in terms of her being able to
effect the outcome. If she didn't go through with it,
the outcome would have still been the same because as
we learned during Peter's class the family have no agency here.
Back to Joan and there is also quite a confusing continuity moment here where Joan's voice
doesn't match up with her mouth movements. She tells
Annie that every member of the family needs to be
in the house, but 'the house' was ADR'd in in post. The original line was every member
of the family needs to be in the room, but Ari Aster realised
in time that this wouldn't line up with the events of
the movie. Ellen's body for example is in the attic at the point where Annie does the
ritual, so this was changed to just be 'the house'. It's an
error that a reasonable amount of people have noticed
but I actually think it highlights the level of care and attention to internal logic present
within the film. And lastly for the s ance scene we have Joan
saying to Annie 'You didn't kill her', delivered through
this window of the oddly structured mirror shot. Now this is a very strange line. If
Annie has implied to Joan that anyone killed Charlie it was
most certainly Peter. She doesn't spend time blaming
herself at length for what happened. And sure maybe she's just bottling that up and Joan
can recognise it. But even Annie is confused by
what Joan is saying to her here, it doesn't make sense.
Now the line is kind of rectified by Joan saying 'she isn't gone' and Annie seems to
accept this meaning, but it really actually solidifies
that Joan is blaming her. 'You didn't kill her because she isn't
gone' is essentially the same as 'you killed her but there's an afterlife.' So I think
we can very much read this as Joan trying to mess with Annie's
head, encourage that self-doubt and guilt in the hopes
of pushing her over the edge so she can ask Charlie for herself, so she can find vindication
or absolvement. Following the s ance, and certainly following
Annie's invocation of Paimon momentarily, we see
things start to get a lot more trippy. The film hasn't gone full mask off yet, it's still
leaving room for this being a hallucinatory view from the lens
of Annie's madness, but we're well on the way to the
reveal that this is indeed supernatural. I think the point I really felt the shift is
when we hear Annie chanting the words from behind the closed
door. But just before that we have this multi-layered dream sequence where we get a few useful bits
of information and it does really drive the plot
forward into a place of conflict so all the usual criticisms one might have about a dream
sequence aren't really relevant here. I was listening
to Martin Scorsese praise the film recently, giving
particular credit to the intercutting in this scene, where see these lightswitch style flicks
between layers of the dream and changes in the situation
like them both being covered in lighter fluid all of a
sudden. It's absolutely masterful work, again so low budget for how high impact it is, just
like we saw with the original lightswitch cut with Ellen
in the attic. We'll see this again a couple more times in
quick succession, with the exterior tilt-shift shots flicking between night and day, again
like a lightswitch. In fact we never really see a
clear indicator of any passage of time in the film, no
reference for the distance between scenes. At one point what could have been days is
confirmed to be at least weeks if not months. And all of
this, particularly the flicking of the switch style scene
changes, is supposed to create this feeling that the family are in an artificial environment
like a dollshouse, or a terrarium. That whatever
higher being is watching over them can flick night to day
as simply as turning on a light switch. It's not 100% the same thing here in Annie's dream
sequence, but we see a very similar style to it. Almost
like the higher being is skipping scenes rather than hitting
a switch. There's still this sudden, jarring break where things are different, here it's
obviously used to raise the question of Annie missing time during
her sleepwalking or potential DID breaks. We know
that in reality it's a combination of Paimon messing with her head and her subconscious
desire to save her son by taking him off the board fully. We first see Annie get out of bed after noticing
some ants, now this is obviously part of Annie's dream but it is reflecting reality, the house
is becoming insect ridden due to the corpse-filled attic,
and so while she isn't seeing them right now because she's asleep, she is in some way aware
of them still. Her dreams are infested just like the
house is. It's certainly the films way of letting us know
they're proliferating. As they have every where else insects, flies, ants, maggots are
all relating to Paimon and this image of death and decay and
pestilence. As with the fly during the opening scene
and the bird hitting the window I suppose you could argue that Paimon is controlling
these creatures but I think of it more like a subconscious
attraction or ability to sense the magic that the animals
have which is pretty standard fayre for horror movies. Annie then sees Peter, presumably
deceased with his face covered in ants, which I probably
can't show on screen. So as I've said we've had this
association with Paimon and insects the whole way through and really this is a visual metaphor,
maybe a kind of prophetic vision Annie is having regarding Peter being almost or already,
smothered by Paimon's control. Essentially a vision
of her son overcome by Paimon. From there we quickly jolt into the second
level of the dream, as with the first it's initially presented
as reality, where Peter is awake and quizzing the recently sleep-walking Annie. It's here
we get a lot of important things confirmed to us regarding
Annie's mental state and her relationship with her
children. Perhaps most importantly that she never wanted to be Peter's mother. This is
the proof for everything we've been discussing regarding
Annie being pushed in to starting a family and it's the
final building blocks for Annie's perceived insanity. It's heavily reminiscent of several
high profile cases of mothers killing their children and
reminiscent of depressed, regretful and ultimately mentally ill motherhood. A lot of the other
things she says go along with that too, that she didn't feel
like a mother, that she felt pressured by Ellen. She even admits to trying to force
a miscarriage and it not working, which as we've seen may have
been to do with Ellen's magical interferences in her
reproduction. Now as with everything we know that what's actually taking place in the movie
is Annie's subconscious desire to end her sons
life so she can remove him from Paimon's grip. And
that's really the third dream layer, this final switch where they're both doused with
paint thinner and Peter is screaming that she tried to kill
him. So really the dream from beginning to end is first
realizing Paimon has a grip on her son, secondly arguing out loud, trying to find her justification
for committing the act and then finally, what
she knows she has to do to prevent it. Now that's not to
say Annie can understand all that with clarity in her waking mind, she still has no idea
what's happening. But as we've covered she's half-awake,
she's subconsciously aware of the cults machinations so in the dream she can see things
with a bit more depth. Now while this is most definitely a dream
the exchange between Annie and Peter is still relatively
lucid and really contains all the background information we've needed regarding the tension
between them. It won't ever be explained on screen but we do see soft hints that this
conversation with Peter is still taking place in some way
in some realm of the immaterial. Ultimately we're not
supposed to know for sure as this blurring of reality is beginning here but I think for
all intents and purposes as to where these characters are
at, yes this is part of their actual character progression
and not something that is undone moments later, not fully undone at least, by Annie simply
waking up from the dream. When, real, awake Annie
wakes peter up to apologise about the things she said
she could easily be meaning what she said at dinner but there's also the very likely
reading that she's meaning the admissions she's made in the dream
too given she's kind of blurring in and out of her
waking mind. And on top of that Peter mentions he was also having a nightmare so we have
this suggestion that perhaps they were both lucid
dreaming, whacked off of Dittany of Crete, in this
spiritual in-between place of the house and they did have this sort of shared dream confrontation.
It's very much open to interpretation, it could be that Peter was just being tormented
with his own demons just as Annie was, except again, his
demons are pretty much Annie's demons seen from the
other side, so I choose to subscribe to the theory that they were sharing the same dream
space here. And I just want to draw attention to how incredibly
threatening and trippy it is when we cut back to
her hovering over Peter and telling him to wake up after the intense, multi-layered nightmare
sequence we just went through. The audience have no idea if this is going to be real after
two or three very similar rug-pulls just moments
prior. And when we see this threatening, looming shape of
Annie come into frame as the camera spins to adjust, we realise that all at once our
feelings towards Annie and her relationship with her son have
completely changed. Likely at this point it's the most
we see her as a threat. We've had Annie recounting covering her son in paint thinner while he
slept, we've had Annie just recently dreaming about
it. Chances are next to zero that your first time seeing
this you were happy that Annie was hovering over Peter and probably even lower that your
top concern was her summoning a demon into the
home. Just before Annie wakes Peter up for her attempt
at a s ance we see, or rather hear, her chanting the words given to her by Joan, that will
allow Paimon this greater ability to manifest within the
home as part of the long standing occult tradition of the demon, spirit, vampire and so on needing
to be invited in. I'll put what we hear Annie
chant up on screen, obviously I'm not trying to welcome
Paimon into my home but feel free to try to summon him yourself and let me know down in
the comments if you survive. It's a mish mash
of Latin and Hebrew chants used to invocate Paimon,
taking their origins and format from The Complete Book of Demonolatry and The Complete Book
of Demonolatry Magic, although they have been
paraphrased and pushed together for the purpose of
the movie. Translated into English the phrase reads 'Hail Paimon, King of the West! Praise
Paimon!' or perhaps 'Blessed is Paimon' at the end
there depending on how literally you translate it.
Once Annie has woken Steve and Peter we see her invite them down to a Paimon summoning
session in the living room. It's worth noting that this may be the kindest and most loving
version of Annie we ever see, she's apologising profusely
to Peter and accepting culpability, she even calls
Steve 'baby'. Now this does raise the question of whether or not Annie is in control here,
is her new found kindness a product of Paimon being at
the wheel. And the answer is no, almost certainly not.
We very clearly see Annie get possessed, both at this s ance and later following Steve's
death. We can easily identify when Annie isn't and is
possessed. This blue white light bathing her head and her
turquoise dressing gown may indicate that she's somewhat under the influence of Paimon
though, in his thrall so to speak, but she certainly
isn't possessed as she will be later. I think it's fair to say that
her kindness here is mostly performative, she's being kind to them so that they will
listen to her and do what she wants them to do. In a way you
can see it as a poorly affected version of what Joan did
to her, and ultimately it works as they do get up and take part, begrudgingly, in the
s ance. But I think there's a more, much more generous
reading to Annie that I personally lean towards. If
we consider that the peak of her nastiness, her honesty has come moments before, literally
visualising that the only thing resembling a happy ending for them is needing to kill
her own son - and we know that it's this understanding that
she's not in control, that she can't save them and she's
never had agency that's pushed her to that realisation, then here in this moment we're
seeing an Annie that thinks there's an escape, that
thinks against all odds she's found a way out, found proof
that her daughter isn't fully gone. For me at least, I think that's why Annie is so kind
and lovely here, I think she truly is sorry to Peter when she
says it, but she's mistaken mania for clarity and is
currently on a mega high thinking she can easily commune with her daughter, and that
maybe there will be a happy, more divine ending for her
family. Unfortunately for Annie we find out pretty quickly
that this is not going to be the case. I think mania is a good term for how Annie is being
here, she doesn't even skip a beat when she reveals
her friend Joan to Steve, nor does she stop to consider
the ramifications that has on lies she's told to Steve. She's entirely focused on proving
to them she can commune with Charlie. And watch her focus
on rules here, refusing to close the window, telling
them where to stand and what to do. This is really important, it's part of the trick that
Paimon is playing on her. Annie thinks she has found
something she can finally control and she thinks by
keeping all the same variables she'll have control over the outcome. But this is all
a lie, she's not in control of anything here, the demon or demons
are simply playing along until they decide not to. She gets some resistance from Peter and particularly
Steve at the beginning as they obviously don't believe her and really are just concerned
for her. And we get this very subtle arms out palm s
forward, stigmata/christ on the cross posing from Steve which the camera keeps focus on
very purposefully. This isn't too much of a mystery
as he's a few scenes away from quite literally dying for
Annie's sins. We see Annie affecting these Joan like mannerisms, grabbing at her family,
positioning and rearranging them like dolls, she even
calls herself a medium and despite claiming she's lucid I
think it's pretty clear that she's entrenched in her delusion right now. Again this turquoise
dressing gown should signal pretty clearly where these
ideas are coming from. She does make the interesting claim of having seen apparitions earlier and
shaking them off. Now firstly it's important to note that
the spell she did in the bathroom, what she's referring to, is not the same as what she's
doing here on camera. This is the s ance, the communication
that's being manipulated by the demon. In the
bathroom she performed the actual invocation or summoning of Paimon. And when you read
descriptions of this summoning from the grimoire, this is in line with what is described. I'll
put a quote or two up on screen but the basic gist
is that after saying these words you are going to get an
apparition, a vision of the demon you've summoned. Even the phrase Annie uses to explain why
they stopped, that she "dismissed" them has clear double meaning. On first viewing we're
meant to assume she just mentally dismissed them, as
in told herself she was imagining things, but 'dismiss' is
the exact language used in opposition to summoning. Once done conversing or exchanging with the
demon one would say certain barbarous words to dismiss it. The other more obvious clue
is that Annie says apparitions, plural, meaning she
hasn't just seen Charlie, or something pretending to be
Charlie, she's seen something else too. But she's too blinded by her first piece of control
over the situation, the only hope at speaking to her
daughter again and so as she always has done, she
ignores the signs right in front of her. The s ance begins properly with Annie asking
Charlie to move the glass and very quickly we see the
Grahams descend into fighting and screaming, at which point the spirit seemingly feigns
being upset, smashing a pane of glass and making the candle
flame surge. And right then is when we first see
Annie get visibly possessed. Now we hear a strange set of noises come out of her immediately
following this that we should definitely go through. First is this long, croaking, rasping
sound. Now I've mentioned before that Paimon may have
some difficulty communicating between forms and
that things like the cluck may be a product of this difference in speech and body parts
that effect the formation of speech. But this noise specifically
is lifted straight from Paimon's lore with the Liber
Officiorum Spirituum describing him as having a hoarse voice, and claiming he will speak
only in his native language until commanded to converse
in the summoners. Almost all of the other essential
texts for Paimon make mention of this, making some suggestion that he has to be commanded
to speak plainly. This is 100% that hoarse raspiness
we're hearing but this isn't the only time. When we
hear Charlie sleeping, and during her allergic reaction and her voice in general was very
croaky, hoarse and raspy, the voice of Paimon. And
right after the rasping croaking noise at the s ance, for
the first and only time we hear Charlie's actual voice. Millie Shapiro without the Paimon
affectations essentially, call out 'Hello?!' through Annies
mouth. I guess the best way to understand what's
happening here is almost like the phone call from a hostage, proof of life essentially,
although it's more like unlife in this case. Paimon is using
the original Charlie, the displaced Charlie not
Charpaimon, essentially giving her soul in hell the phone for a moment. This is the Charlie
that literally never had a chance at life so her
confusion is no doubt well-placed and we can only imagine
the horrors she's endured if Paimon just had ready access to her soul or her in the underworld,
however you want to imagine it. Now while this has the desired effect of the family
not realising they're complicit in demon summoning it's
most likely a product of Paimon's sick sense of humour.
Charlie is being used as bait, as a tool to taunt and horrify the family and to push Annie
fully over the edge in her belief of the occult. And from
there what we hear is a mix of Annie and Charlie's voices
ADR'd over one another as we build this image of there being two souls or two beings fighting
for control of the same body. Essentially setting
up the internal logic for what happens to Peter. We
have Charlie and Annie both screaming mom and by the very nature of their relationship
we see this blurring between generations of the family,
Charlie is calling for Annie and conversely Annie seems
to be screaming for Ellen, giving us the impression that while Charlie has been handed the drivers
seat for a moment, Annie is perhaps trapped somewhere else, this spiritual realm and can
perhaps see or feel the presence of her mother.
As the weirdness reaches a climax we hear Peter again regressing into baby-like crying
until eventually Steve douses Annie with a cold
glass of water. Upon her return to normalcy we see her
take the same venomous tone she's had throughout the movie, again suggesting that her sudden
kindness may have been largely performative or an aspect of mania or of being somewhat
under Paimon's thrall.
Following the s ance we get a sequence of quick shots, most notably this one featuring
the words 'Liftoach Pandemonium'. Liftoach is again
Hebrew meaning open, or unlock. And Pandemonium is
sometimes synonymous with hell, more specifically though in Miltonian Biblicism, that is to
say John Milton's Paradise Lost, Pandemonium is the
capital city of Hell, the High Capital of Satan and his
peers, home of the stygian or infernal council, built by the fallen angels at the suggestion
of Mammon at the end of Paradise Lost Book 1.
This along with all the other factors I've mentioned is
enough to inform us that we're dealing with this lore as the lore we're working with in
the film, the internal consistency of heaven and hell likely
follows suit with what we see first established there. As
with the other scribblings this is a key phrase taken from grimoire's, but those grimoires
themselves were building upon wider Christian canon,
much of which was established by Milton in Paradise Lost.
And just in case you're entirely unfamiliar with Paradise Lost, it's so influential that
it's very easy to make an argument that it's where we get the
foundational design for the Christian idea of Hell. Not
the bible, Paradise Lost. And Paradise Lost refers to the capital of hell as Pandemonium.
As for it's meaning in context well firstly it marks this
turning point in the movie, the point from which the
floodgates, or gates of hell, or more specifically Pandaemonium lay open and from here Hells
true madness is going to descend on the family.
More literally I think it means that the house is now an
open conduit to hell, and then there is the other lingering possibility that this plan,
the cults true objectives are greater than just Paimon. That
potentially the gates to Pandemonium are now open,
Lucifer is overseeing the whole affair and Paimon is the first of many. That's not something
ever directly suggested by the film, but it's difficult
to read this and not see it as a potential meaning. Next we move to Peter's classroom where he
begins to see the shimmer that Charlie was directed
by. Again this is Paimon, or let's just say the higher being overseeing and influencing
events directing him to see what it wants him to see. In this
case the absolutely terrifying reflection of himself smiling
back, a clear indicator that Paimon is at least beginning to possess him, wearing him
down mentally until he can possess him fully. As I've mentioned
this idea or image Annie has of Peter sneering at
her is almost certainly this as we never see Peter smile really, so we get the sense that
Paimon has been lurking around Peter for a long time
now. This is another example of the film wearing it's
influences on it's sleeve, most notably Don't Look Now, and taking existing clich horror
tropes and breathing new life into them. This was certainly
the second most viral moment from the film after
Charlie's clucking but it's something we've seen again and again in horror movies, this
idea of the reflection not matching or somehow revealing
the supernatural truth of a situation. As I've
mentioned this is paired with the occult belief that mirrors function as this communing device
with demonic entities as well as many other alleged
properties. I think what I find really terrifying about it
is how nonchalantly Paimon is in revealing this to Peter, this 'dude sup' approach he
has to notifying him that his body isn't his anymore is pretty
chilling to consider. Peter rightfully freaks out and gtfo's
the classroom as quickly as possible. Following Peter's exit our POV switches back
to Annie, again wearing turquoise and working on her
dioramas when Steve calls her furious about Peter being terrified at school. I think we
can say this is his second breaking point where he pretty
clearly doesn't want Annie around Peter anymore. The
first was the failure of his marriage and the third will be him calling the police on
Annie, which he threatens to do shortly before he is killed.
There's a couple of telling moments here, firstly when
Steve asks her to guess who called him from school in complete hysterics and she replies
'Charlie', clearly for Annie this is something she's
now fully courting as reality. Steve is trying to get across to
her the importance of Peter's breakdown, saying he feels like he's being threatened. And rather
than trying to take the logical train of thought
Steve is promoting she says 'Why does he think he's being
threatened?'. She again takes the supernatural element seriously here which to Steve obviously
seems as though she's doubling down on tormenting their son and ignoring the validity of what
he's saying to her. Obviously though we know Annie
is starting to wake up to what's going on. She cares
about Peter too, she just has accepted the supernatural reality that's occurring. And
we see that put beautifully when she calls Steve back to leave
an angry voicemail and she shouts "I am not sleepwalking anymore!" And this is true, she's
not watching with one eye open anymore, no longer
blind to obvious signs as she has been, but unfortunately for Annie she still can't see
what's actually happening or how she's being used, nor that
it's too late to stop it. Following the phone exchange with Steve we
hear Annie receive a voicemail from the gallery she's
preparing the exhibition for. This is actually Ari Aster's voice on the phone, in the script
this was supposed to be the woman that's been emailing
Annie so my guess is this was a cameo of necessity rather than just wanting a directorial appearance
in there. It's this message that pushes Annie over
the edge with her work and causes her to begin smashing everything up and it is absolutely
lovely, the gallery are clearly very understanding
despite her apparent lack of contact and essentially just
want to make sure she's okay and support her. And really I think that's why we see this
reaction, again this kind of emotional understanding
and communicative care is exactly what Annie has been
starved of her entire life and certainly very much so recently. But she also knows that
her situation is a useless one, she knows that her control
has been removed and she has recontextualised her place
in the universe as something held at the whim of unseen supernatural beings. All the lies
and secrecy and trauma these dioramas have provided her
some degree of control and understanding over, it's
all rendered meaningless, and so she snaps. I'm not sure you could say for certain she
realises here she's in a dollshouse herself, I don't really
think this is something Annie ever learns before it's too
late. But if her subconscious in the dream and in previous sleep walking episodes knew
she had to kill Peter and Charlie then I think we can
say here that subconsciously she's made this realisation
that she has control over nothing and that in truth she's closer to the plaything, the
model in the diorama than it's creator or controller. Alongside Annie's breakdown we see Steve return
home with Peter and he comments "oh jesus the
smell". This isn't ever really addressed but it's obviously because the house now has a
beheaded corpse in it. I think maybe you're supposed
to attribute it to tossed paints and modelling supplies, or
maybe just Annie not taking care of herself but given what we know it's almost certainly
Ellen's body. And this is the third time we see this
in-between space of the doorway used to highlight the
cults activities in the house, so you can be sure next time we'll see something definite,
something that changes the formula and proves the rule. Steve walks upstairs to find Annie sitting
amidst her smashed up workshop. We see she's using a
SAD lamp with this blue white light we associate with Paimon closely bathing her. This is a
seemingly small detail but it's also a legitimate visual
metaphor tying together the supernatural core theme
and this subtextual bait-and switch dance with mental illness. The light is built for
combating depression and within the context of the film
it's directly representative of Paimon's influence. Steve's usual tact and subservience is nowhere
to be seen and he greets her very bluntly, her
explanation as to the damage is 'I didn't feel like looking at it anymore'. And I think
that's pretty much confirmation of what I've been saying,
she's always used the diorama creation as a method of
processing trauma. A lie she's telling herself that she has some degree of control over her
reality. Now she's seen the truth of that and at least
subconsciously recognised her role as being closer to
the doll than the dollmaker, she can no longer look at it. Who's hands grab Peter? Paimon begins to control
Annie. One model that's seemingly intact is the replica
of the Graham household and Steve makes notice of
the decapitated model of Peter laying on the bed. I think when we view it in conjunction
with everything I just mentioned we can see it
as Annie's subconscious understanding of her only
remaining move. Something she's known she's had to do for a while. In the script it mentions
this being the only intact model although we see
that the diorama of the accident is relatively intact too.
Either way I think this still confirms the intention of the house in miniature representing
Annie's supposed last bastion, her only motivating
directive from this point on, to try and keep her family
safe in whatever fashion that might require. Following this we see several quick shots
building the tension, Steve taking more of his prescription
than he should, Annie sitting awake in the bedroom and then subsequently heading to Charlie's
room. On her way there we see that the door to Ellen's room is open again, yet another
sign of the cult or potentially Paimon messing with the
house. And as Annie approaches Charlie's room she sees
Charlie's notebook being drawn in, we don't quite get to see at first but it's revealed
shortly after that it's multiple drawings of Peter, crying
and dead, signalled by his crossed out eyes. Now it's
unclear exactly what happens regarding this book. It could be that seeing it literally
puts Annie under Paimon's thrall momentarily, it could be that
seeing what it represents, that being the dark forces
designs on her son causes Annie to go into a sort of sleepwalking fugue and attempt to
end her sons life, it could be that she sees it and horrified
runs in to check on Peter who is being attacked by
something else entirely. Personally I think there's a lot of good evidence for it being
the first option and this is the first time we see her fully
under Paimon's spell, but this is a confusing 30 seconds of
movie so let's go through it step by step. So first we have this camera pan down from
the attic where we know Ellen's body is. We see these
strange, U.V. style glow in the dark doodles, one appears to be a fanged face and the other
is essentially just dots. It could well be the
cultists, the four dots could be representative of compass
markers with the face positioned at north west, but perhaps more likely than that I
think it could have been Charlie sitting on the attic steps
with a glow in the dark pen. As with the camera pan in the opening shot
I think we can read this as the spirits movement from
their dwelling in the attic into Peter's room, where the camera ultimately comes to rest.
It's letting us know they're coming to mess with him essentially.
We see Peter slowly wake up after hearing Charlie's cluck and see her ghostly apparition
stood in the corner. Her head rolls off and becomes a
nerf basketball in the moonlight. Now as with other ghostly sightings in his bedroom this
is done to allow for the potential of this all still
being a hallucination or trick of the light or maybe Peter's half-
dreaming mind, even this late in the game the film still hasn't fully committed to the
supernatural. With that being said though I think we can
say pretty comfortably that Charpaimon was in the room
with him, and I don't think it was to warn him, quite the opposite in fact, more to distract
him so that he can be grabbed from behind. Next we
see Max at the door getting increasingly upset with
the demonic presences in the room, more on him in a second. And then comes the head grabbing, which is
quite a strange way of attacking someone and seems to
be causing Peter to writhe in terror and agony. So who's hands are they? I suppose they could
be ghostly Charlie or Ellen's hands, but they
don't look old enough for Ellen and they look far too old for
Charlie. It's very difficult to make out but the colour and cut of the shirt Annie is wearing
right after matches exactly with the arms we see coming
through the bed. Plus just seconds later Annie is in the
room with Peter screaming that she did it and we don't have any evidence to suggest
ghostly apparitions would be able to wrestle with
Peter. From everything we've seen Paimon needs to
physically possess people to do things like that. So I think it's pretty reasonable to
say this is Annie doing the headgrabbing. So why is she doing
it? Is she doing it to take him away from Paimon as has
been hinted at? Well, no, I don't think so. Even though the film really wants us to think
Annie intends to kill Peter, she's absolutely not trying
to here and I think that's evident from this being such a
strange attack. This scene is normally referred to as strangulation and in the script it's
described as trying to yank the head off, which certainly
fits with our headless theme. But she's actually stretching his mouth open by holding his head
in place and peeling his chin downwards towards his
neck. And we know from Charlie's allergy and Peter's bad reaction to the Dittany that this
is where Paimon is trying to enter him. He's also been
bathed in bluewhite moonlight, just as we saw before
with the bluewhite lens flare as Paimon was trying to get in initially. So if Annie is
stretching his mouth open for Paimon to enter, the literal
opposite of what she wants, then it's fair to say the
sketchbook did send her into some kind of thrall so that Paimon could try it on, and
the door slamming to keep Max out, just like the glass
of water or her waking herself up striking the match,
snapped her out of it. So she isn't lying to Peter, she most certainly doesn't remember
grabbing him. She was being controlled by Paimon, not trying
to strangle or behead him but rather hold his mouth
open so Paimon can enter. And all of this is confirmed by the door slamming of it's
own accord, Paimon, or whatever overarching being is literally
working in conjunction with the possessed Annie
here so I really don't think there's any doubt. But that door slamming brings me onto Max.
Because while all we hear is a door slam and a whimper in the movie, In the script it's
a lot more obvious by this point that something supernatural
is happening and rather than just slamming the
door, Paimon slams the door, drags Max backwards downstairs, opens the front door of the house,
throws Max on the ground outside, slamming the front door of the house closed again.
There's a direct intervention here that Annie is absolutely
part of while possessed by Paimon and I think that
removes any doubt regarding her, or rather Paimon's motivations here.
I'm not sure at what point you will have decided that Annie isn't a murderously bad person,
it may have been right at the point of her death,
maybe right at the point where you realized that the
supernatural stuff was legitimately occurring. I think it's safe to say though that the film
is still very much pulling for you to distrust Annie. It's
a pretty obvious attack on Peter and even when she's
lucid again her concern isn't for him so much as which corner of the room he'd seen Charlie
in. Regardless of the truth behind it one would
hope a parent's instinct would be to try and reassure
their child rather than interrogate them. And immediately following that we see her
tell Peter to keep this incident from Steve while explaining
she's the only one that can protect them and accusing
him of being "crazy" for suggesting she attacked him, which is all pretty typical ab*ser behaviour.
All that being said Annie must have a definite
turning point here following the incident given her
decision to burn Charlie's book. Now this is to do with what it represents and what
it's suggesting, the repeated image of a dead Peter, but I
think in the most direct sense it's Annie deciding enough is
enough regarding the supernatural shenanigans she's invited into the house. Still believing
what Joan told her she sees Charlie's sketchbook
as this conduit object and presumably she thinks if she
burns it she can break the link. She still believes there's rules that can be followed
and it's this belief that allows Paimon to play this final trick
on her. When Annie initially tries to burn the book
her sleeve spontaneously sets ablaze, now obviously no
amount of being on fire is a good amount, but this fire springs to life relatively tamely
in comparison to what we're about to see so it's worth noting
that she is being messed with here. This is designed
to trick Annie as much as it is the audience. We're seeing the suggestion that there's a
link between Annie and the book, that as the book slowly
burns so to does Annie. But no such link exists, the book
is largely meaningless, it's just an object being used to mess with them. It's being used
to convince Annie specifically of this link but this is
literally just the demon having fun at Annie's expense.
Presumably if he wanted to he could just burn Steve any time. There's no link between Steve
and the book nor Steve and Annies bloodline yet Paimon
is, let's say summoned enough, within the house by
this point that he is just able to set Steve on fire. So what's crucial here is that the
demon is building an Agent 47 like setup so that Annie will
be convinced that her misaction has resulted in Steve's
death, and again, simply to laugh at her and make this as cruel as possible. That full
breakdown of her mind and spirit is what allows for her
to be fully, or rather permanently possessed in the latter
scenes of the movie. Annie retrieves the book from the fire and stamps out the flame rather
than trying to extinguish the fire on her arm.
This not only demonstrates to her that this link does exist
between her and the book, which again it does not, but it also demonstrates to us that her
belief in the supernatural is absolute at this point.
It's not logical or instinctual to try and put the book out
before your arm unless you're 100% certain of this magical link existing. After another lightswitch style edit from
night to day we see a mentally broken Peter trudging his
way to school and a crazed looking Annie watching from the gap of Ellen's ajar door. Again we
see this suggestion that Annie has been the one
opening Ellen's door the whole movie, but that's
absolutely a misdirect, it's been the cult up until now. Deciding she needs help in stopping
what's going on Annie heads back to Joan's. She finds
the door locked and we see it's being monitored by a
camera with an active red light signalling it's being observed. While Annie is stopped
at the door we do get to see inside and this is really the
final reveal that it's been the cult all along and that Peter is
their target. Inside we see evidence of the possession ritual, a similar carved triangle
pointing to the north west just as we saw carved in the floor
of Ellen's room. Presumably the one she used for the
possession of Charlie by Paimon. We also see a few other familiar symbols, multiple examples
of Paimon's sigil and Charlie's makeshift dolls
and icons. It's not until Annie looks down at the welcome
mat her mother made again that she realises Joan is the enemy. But as we've discussed,
she's too late, the cult are way too far along with
their plans for her to be able to meaningfully effect them
and Joan is already on her way to Peter. For me it reminds me somewhat of Ozymandias in
Watchmen or perhaps the end of the Wicker Man, the horror lies in the hopelessness.
Rather than an exciting battle that is ultimately lost,
it's revealed to us that the loss has already occurred, that
the stakes were far closer than we had realised. It again feeds into this idea of the sacrifice
from the sacrificial lambs perspective and again something
I've tried to draw inspiration from for my upcoming novel. And so while Annie is putting the final pieces
together we flick to Peter who becomes aware he is
being beseeched from across the street by Joan. She's trying to expel Peter from his
own body and we hear her use the barbarous words Satony,
Degony, Eparigon. These all come from the necromancy banishment ritual from Verus Jesuitarum
Libellus that I mentioned near the beginning and that's exactly what Joan is using them
for, except instead of banishing a demon she no longer
has use for, she's using it to banish Peter from his own body to make room for a demon.
Now this isn't meant to just pop his soul right out,
it's just another part of the ritual to weaken his souls grip
on his body and as we see in his following scene it most definitely does just that. Rather than heading to help Peter Annie heads
to the workshop to raid her mother's boxed possessions in search of answers. It's here
we see the welcome mats Ellen made for Annie and her
brother. We see a similar floral patter on her brother's matt, two very clear sigils
of Paimon and even two almost complete satanic pentagrams.
It's safe to say that upon seeing the similarities between the mats Annie recognises the designs
but she's putting stuff together quite quickly at this
point and I feel as though she'd already made the connection, now she's just trying to find
out anything she can. Skipping the book she'd
previously leafed through she first opens a brown book
with only Paimon's sigil in the front. It's absolutely supposed to be reminiscent of quite
a few of the grimoires we've mentioned already, I think
it's 100% supposed to be directly visually representative
of the Goetia or the Lesser Key of Solomon in parts. We also see this little illustration
of people with plants growing out of their head and as I've
mentioned I think the theme is a little underdeveloped but there is the gentle suggestion that some
of the boons the cult receive may come in the form of
something similar to a plentiful harvest, that kind of riches. But the illustration
itself I knew by sight, I'm sure many of you will recognise it too.
This particular style of illustration was used to
demonstrate Mandrake Root in old botany and alchemy manuals, mandrake root is historically
synonymous with witchcraft and for those interested this particular illustration was taken from
this exact page of 'Kleines Distillierbuch' published
in the year 1500. That has nothing to do with the text
however which I think is supposed to be Sanskrit but is actually Devangari and the text itself
is pretty much gibberish put through a word generator
which honestly at this point I'm super happy about
because I really didn't want to translate Devangari, a language I only just found out
existed. Annie moves on to the book titled 'Invocations'
and this is just a huge on screen info dump about
Paimon's abilities, motivations, promises to the conjurer and so on. Now there's a lot
here that I've already covered and more that just proves
things we've been talking about. So I'm just going to run
through everything we can see on screen in no particular order as there's a lot of information
about Paimon here - and really this is what we can
consider to be 100% accepted Paimon canon within the
lore of the movie. So firstly where does this text come from? Well as I touched on earlier
it's an amalgam of different passages from existing
texts and grimoires regarding Paimon, from E.A.
Koettings Works of Darkness to Aleister Crowley's version of The Lesser Key of Solomon. We even
see The Goetia directly mentioned in the bottom paragraph. Some of it has been written specifically
for the film and relates directly to the internal logic we're using here. But there is no one
over-riding source this is all lifted from, it's all been
tailored to demonstrate how Paimon's powerset works
within the film. So this top left paragraph probably gives
us our best piece of confirmation right off the bat, it's
discussing how Paimon will attack the family both psychologically and physically and we
see a mention of the deep mind calling to the victim
to warn of the attack. This idea of the deep mind is
almost certainly the films referencing of Annie's sleepwalking and confirms to us that
much of what we've been seeing is her subconscious knowing
it needs to kill Peter to save him from being an
eternal skin suit for Paimon. We also see a mention of Paimon being the king of the
northwest. The second and third paragraphs are more about
the conjurers, that they need to be free from fear
and clear and absolute in their motivations. This is exactly what Crowley discusses in
his summoning rituals. There are a few key words we see
used here such as coven and magistelli, which is a broad
term for a form of totem that could be an animal such as a familiar or an object that
has particular spiritual significance. This just works as
more confirmation that the cult are much more interested in
occultism rather than the parlour magic of the s ance. We also see some of the promises
Paimon makes to the conjurer here such as knowledge
of science, arts and astrology and again we see that
nod towards Paimon's knowledge of the stars, this reading of Miltonian Biblicism and the
greater demons as fallen angels that lost the war
for heaven. We then get this zoom in on the second page
which tells us a little more, we see the rules the film
uses for how and when Paimon can possess and unpossess people and the fact that he prefers
a male host body which we've already pretty
well covered at this point. Above that we see this image
of Paimon which we'll come back to in a moment and his bracketed title of God of Mischief.
Which I wouldn't say is really a major part of Paimon's
lore, we might expect to see 'King of Hell' there, or
even more likely something related to wisdom and knowledge which seems to be the primary
reason for calling on Paimon and potentially his greatest power. I also wouldn't really
even describe him as a god so we can see this as an effort
by the movie to reinforce with the audience that Paimon
is playing tricks on the family, he is laughing at Annie just like she suspects. I don't want
to get too bogged down in it because truthfully the demon
Paimon is his own entity, but most mythological characters are evolutions of previous characters,
or beings you might say. And as I mentioned Paimon, like many demonic and semi-demonic
figures was previously a djinn, and it's worth pointing
out that mischief is something djinn are known for. Not only that but some people will take
it even further back and link that djinn character
with African deities that we can also tie in with the idea of
'mischief', but truthfully it gets a bit muddy because of how myriadic mythology and folklore
is. Obviously within occult lore these beings
have essentially always existed, they didn't just spring in to
being in the 14th Century, so to someone who practices this, the people who wrote those
grimoires and people still today, Paimon was that djinn
figure and they're all one and the same. But truthfully
they're not. The originating figure was most likely a middle eastern pagan goddess of some
kind, likely a riff on Isis or a Mesopotamian goddess,
that has gone through a great many different cultural
iterations and branched off in a bunch off different directions. We do see some things
that maintain, for example the name Paymon likely comes from
the Hebrew word 'Pomn' which means a tinkling sound or small bell and we see this in the
grimoires and in the movie, this notion of his approach
being preceded by bells and other loud instruments. We see this idea of some kind of feminine
visage and the camel he's riding. There are historical and etymological links between
these characters and again, from a spiritual or
occult perspective these are just differing descriptions of
the same being, but in the sense of literary history I think we can definitely say the
version of Paimon we see popularized in european Christian
and occult literature is his own thing and it's that
understanding that the film is going with here. With that said there is something about this
image that definitely stands out as an original addition
of the film. If we look at other traditional representations of Paimon we'll see this androgynous
crowned figure riding a camel that is often wearing a crown itself, what we will not see
however is three decapitated heads hanging from that
camel. And I'm sure if you're at this point in the video
that I don't need to explain to you that this is absolutely representative of the sacrifice
Paimon is demanding in return for his services. He wants
three heads, from three generations of the Leigh
bloodline as proof of their subservience to him. Three female heads specifically, namely
Ellen, Annie and Charlie. That much is definitely clear,
but a big question, really the last unanswered question we
have left here is why? Why is that what he wants? And what does it mean? And what implications
does that have on the ultimate meaning of the film?
The easiest answer I can give you is that it's another sick joke of Paimon's that runs
with his theme of gender inversion twisting a central motif
of Christian faith into a perverse sacrifice that signifies
the entire destruction of the familial unit. But obviously there's a lot more to it than
that and on it's own that probably doesn't make complete sense.
If you google what's going on with the three heads
in this image then the main suggestion you'll likely see is that Ari Aster just saw this
drawing somewhere and decided to roll with the three
head theme. That's patently false - from everything I
can tell this image was drawn specifically for the movie, likely using this one as a
reference but redrawing it in an attempt to provide a more
malevolent and easier to make out image for Hereditary's audience. As I've mentioned the
film also uses a modified version of Paimon's sigil
that's altered to better resemble this notion of three heads also. So we know it's a purposeful
inclusion of three heads and that by doing this Ari Aster is tying something else into
Paimon's lore. The question is what is it that's being tied
in and why and there have been some clues already but
it's difficult to see at this point in the film because it hasn't been laid out in front
of us. Now again if we look online for an explanation for the
three heads in general, that is, why is the film centered
around 3 decapitations, we'll have to look pretty hard but really we can find two schools
of thought. And oddly enough they're both right but neither
go far enough to meet in the middle. Theory one
has been espoused by a couple of feminist critics online. This is the notion that historically
loss of the head has been attributed to disintegration
of the female identity and has been related to women
sacrificing themselves for men, or indeed for their families. This is quite a long standing
trope in feminist literature and there's certainly
a hell of a lot of examples we can pull from. We can say even
more generally there's a trope of women sacrificing their bodies for men and for their families,
not just in art but in history. Childbirth is
a great historical example of that and fits perfectly with this
image of Annie as a reluctant mother. In fact really all of the film is exemplary of this,
it's the story of three women needing to sacrifice themselves
or be sacrificed for a male demon to enter a male
body. Charlie's body is literally used as a temporary vessel for Paimon. It's a throwaway
sacrificial form. And very often this complete sacrifice
at the hands of men, the disintegration of the feminine
self is depicted as the loss of the head in feminist literature.
We can even go one step further and say mental illness has been traditionally, historically
seen as a feminine problem and I think in history and
on-screen it's generally viewed through a gendered lens
and we can go as far to say that the Western concept of madness has been intrinsically
linked with gender. The word 'hysteria' for example finds
it's origins in the Greek word for 'uterus' and
eventually evolved into a diagnosable mental illness in women that essentially meant your
lady wife was having 'notions'. Annie spends a lot of
this movie hysterical, even though it's never spoken
about explicitly she's trying to combat the image of being a 'mad' woman, having to fight
off social and familial judgment in pursuit of the truth,
having to fight the gendered perception of seeming
insane. And again, this is absolutely a mainstay of feminist literature, perhaps even more
so than loss of the head. The treatment of women as mentally
ill for refusing to conform to societal norms, it's
why we burned supposed witches. They lived differently for whatever reason, people became
afraid of them and branded them insane and in league
with the devil and that's remarkably close to what
we get here. There's plenty more dangerous medical and mental associations and misdiagnoses
women have had to endure through the centuries. So much of it is tied to strange gendered
theories in our history. One such association is to
do with the link between women and the moon, something
that has absolutely invaded female medicine but also has been a very powerful image in
female empowerment and specifically withcraft. Now
none of that's terribly groundbreaking but it's
necessary exposition to get to this final answer of 'Why three heads?' As I said that's
half the groundwork or one of the existing theories,
that the female loss of the head represents the sacrifice
of women, very often the hereditary sacrifice of women within the familial unit.
The other less developed theory you'll really only see mentioned in a couple of Reddit comments
but is certainly the closer to being a full answer
is that it in someway represents the Christian 'holy
trinity'. The film, most films, are obsessed with doing things in threes and three beheadings
is certainly the prime example of this. I've
seen fans online suggest that this trinity of Ellen, Annie and
Charlie represents the father, the son, and the holy ghost and this is close to the truth
but also fits a little awkwardly. If we say Ellen is the holy
spirit because she's dead for the entire movie then Annie
is the Father and Charlie is the son. If Charlie is the holy spirit then annie is the son and
Ellen is the father, but it's not immediately clear which
and so I wouldn't say it fits perfectly. I'm also not sure
what the meaning would be there either as the cult are distinctly anti-christian. I
guess you could say they're sacrificing a version of the trinity
to demonstrate their anti-christian loyalty but again it
doesn't fit perfectly and everything up to this point in the movie has. Now there is
evidence supporting this, if we look at the statue
of Paimon seen right at the end and I'll probably have to be
careful of how I show this, but hopefully I can demonstrate that we see the statue making
a three fingered gesture. Specifically an inversion
of the traditional Christian hand gesture we see all the way
through Christian art that represents the holy trinity. And that word inversion is really
important here because we have a female trinity as opposed
to a male one, it's inverted, it's being prayed to
and worshipped by satanists, inverted Christians we could say. And right at the end we hear
Joan tell Paimon, "we reject the trinity" which is the
only real verbal confirmation of all of this and they've
chosen the word rejection. I think rejection definitely feels more satanic, more threatening
in the scene, but really inversion is much closer
to what's happening. They haven't rejected a trinity full
stop so much as replaced it with their own opposite one.
And it was at that point that I realised what we were looking at in the three heads, it's
not just an inversion, it's THE literal inversion of the
holy trinity, the pagan triple goddess. Now again as with
most ancient mythogical figures and symbols there's a lot of different versions of this,
we see it Hinduism, we see it most popularized in Ancient
Greece, or Hellenism to be more accurate, and
there's always slight variations. We see other versions of the holy trinity dotted around
too, it's pretty standard. But the one thing the pagan
triple goddess always has in common is this idea of
three states of womanhood, rather than the father, the son and the holy spirit we have
the maiden, the mother and the crone and that fits exactly
with the trinity we see on screen. And this trinity of
the maiden, the mother and the crone, like so many aspects of womanhood is tied historically
to the phases of the moon, the waxing, full and waning
moons. And all of this should be immediately ringing alarm bells because again, that's
exactly what we've just been discussing. We've again got
this link to the moon and mental illness and womanhood. That to be a woman awake to her
own sacrifice has historically seen you painted
as mentally ill. But to top it all off where this image has
stayed relevant beyond ancient mythology is the practice of witchcraft, most recently
wicca but it's always been present in some form. So much
so that within witchcraft the Triple Goddess, sometimes
described as one figure but more often described as three, is seen as the consort of the horned
god. Now in Wicca we're more likely to view the
horned god as this image of natural virility, somewhat
similar to The Green Man, but I think it should be obvious what other translations of the
horned god consorting with witches would be. Essentially
the centuries old image of witches consorting with the
devil. The triple goddess submitting to the horned god. And again that is exactly what
we see in the film. The witches of the coven consorting
with a horned god, a demon at the right hand of lucifer
himself. Even down to the roots in Hellenism that we see reflected in the cults jewellrey
and dress sense, in Bridgets second name, Molpe meaning
Siren tie together this final piece of meaning with
the predominantly Hellenistic image of the Triple Goddess or Triple Horae to be specifically
Ancient Greek. Even though it's never really spoken
aloud the triple goddess is at the heart of this movie as
the pagan inversion of the holy trinity, the ultimate symbol of the three stages of hereditary
womanhood, the mother, the maiden and the crone and ultimately the image of feminine
sacrifice that has historically been tied to both motherhood
and withcraft. And on a metaphorical level we can now view
the narrative as something much bigger. Put as simply
as I can it's the submission of the trinity of womanhood to the horned god as a result
of a desire for more than they had and as a direct response
to this treatment of being considered mentally unwell.
The whole story when viewed from as far out as we can is not too far from the witch, women
ultimately submitting to or siding with paganistic or anti-christian forms of evil as part of
an evasion of social persecution with both movies viewing
the female body as a place of male dominion, sacrifice and dark empowerment. Now in Hereditary's
case there's a lot more happening close-in, but it's interesting the answer we've arrived
at and it does help contextualise a bit better why
Paimon preys on the female members of the bloodline. As with every man in history he
wants to use their bodies to promote his own ends, primarily
through childbirth but ultimately through the most
complete sacrifice there is. Ellen, the knowing witch and leader of the coven presumably sees
this for what it is but decides to use her body
to take power for herself through aligning with him. This is
why we see this moon imagery, this triple goddess, all traditionally images of female
empowerment. I'm not saying this is an empowering ending
for the women in the film because it really isn't, Paimon
hasn't exactly been trustworthy the whole way through and we don't really know if there's
such a thing as a positive afterlife for Ellen in
hell, even if she is ruling as a queen. But it is a feminist reading
for sure, it's one that uses the historical imagery of witchcraft and mythology to demonstrate
the female body as a place of violence and sacrifice
for men. And it's reassuring for us that when we dig
to the bedrock of the film we see the imagery and the meaning all aligning perfectly with
our understanding.
The witches of the coven have aligned with dark powers, seeking something more. To the
outside world they seem insane, hysterical moon-driven
and mentally ill. The male demon promises them
riches and plenty and uses their bodies as vessels for sacrifice and his eventual rebirth
- destroying the inverted trinity of maiden, mother and
crone, rejecting it as Joan puts it, as a symbol of his own
ascension over the powers of Christianity and the provable devotion of the Leigh bloodline
to him. It all fits perfectly together and I think we
can say pretty safely that's the last major mystery solved!
Paimon wants three heads as an inverted representation of anti-christian sacrifice, representing
the triple goddess, or maiden, mother and crone
and with that imagery we see the film tying in this
history of the female body as the subject of mental illness, accusations and violence.
Back to Annie going through Ellen's belongings and we see another page from the book regarding
riches to the conjurer, note the nudity of the conjurer here, something that will define
the last ten minutes of the movie as we all collectively
scrub our eyes clean. There is more expositional text
along the right here, as with previous pages it's somewhat cobbled together from different
sources and there isn't really anything we need to
cover in any more detail there. After seeing all she needs
to from the book she keeps rifling through the box and that's where we see this photo
album where Ellen is posing with many different cultists
we've seen throughout the film. We also see this photo
with Ellen dressed up as a bride being showered with golden coins. Now this is clearly too
late in her life to be her first marriage to Annie and
Charles' father and the promise of riches is exactly what
she's getting for marrying Paimon, so we can say pretty clearly that this is Ellen's wedding
to Paimon, the point at which she became Queen Ellen.
We do know from the timeline that Annie gives us
though that she was likely trying to summon Paimon and practicing occultism for quite
a long time before this. We see Annie recoil in particular
disgust seeing at how overjoyed Ellen is at being wed to
Paimon, and we also see visual evidence that the Graham family are the cults target. From here we get some very quick intercutting
of scenes, all of which I've already made mention of,
we've got Peter being beckoned by Paimon's shiver, signalling his teacher as a member
of the cult, we've got Steve's realisation that Annie's
mother has been unlawfully exhumed which as we know is
in the attic and we've seen the muddy footprints of the cult bringing in the recently dug up
body. One little detail of interest is we get to
see the name of Steve's psychiatry firm 'United Psychiatry'
which is sort of ironic mocking, a kind of pathetic fallacy regarding his failed desire
to keep his family united. Now this discovery of Ellen being
dug up is cut back to back with Annie finding the body in a
now insect filled attic. We see Annie discover the body, we see that it is surrounded by
Paimon's sigil, we see her horror, we also know it's
very likely that Steve is suspecting Annie is responsible.
And because the tension is built so damn well here even though we see Annie discover the
body we still don't know on first viewing if she's
responsible either. We've seen her completely unaware of
the fact that she's just been attacking Peter, swearing that she didn't. We may know by this
point that she can be possessed, but we're certain
that she's a deeply unreliable witness and from here on
out she will continue to take action off camera essentially the whole time. Now she hasn't
dug up the body, the cult have, but I just wanted
to point out what a knife edge this twist keeps walking all
the way until the end. Peter gets back to his classroom and this
time they're discussing the tragedy of Iphigenia, the
daughter of Agamemnon who is sacrificed before the siege of troy to placate the goddess Artemis.
We again see the idea of characters being bound to a tragic fate as Agamemnon essentially
has no choice but to meet the irrational and terrible
demands of the gods. It is his bound fate as soon as
Athena has decided it is her desire because man is powerless under god or the gods. And
that again is what we see with the Graham family. This
sacrifice has been decided for them. In some versions of
the story Iphigenia is unaware she is to be sacrificed, being told instead that she is
to marry Achilles which is even more fitting with the Graham's
unwitting end. We also see the phrase "punishment brings wisdom" written on the board, another
clear allusion to the true plight of the Graham family
and the idea that the horror they're enduring will bring foresight, knowledge and wisdom,
potentially to Ellen and maybe them in hell, but primarily the cult members still alive
enough to reap the earthly benefits. As with almost all the high points of tension
in the movie once again Ari Aster trusts Alex Wolf's face
entirely to carry the next part of the scene. Peter begins to hear more frequent clicking
until his arm is yanked up into the air and he begins having
what looks to be a seizure but is actually Paimon
wrestling for control of his body. This arm movement is extremely specific, I'd say the
two ways of looking at it are either seeing Peter as a
manipulated voodoo doll target, we can imagine someone
grabbing the arm of a little voodoo doll and yanking it up, or alternatively like a marionette
puppet being suspended up by one arm, we even see
his facial features seemingly being dragged or
suspended upwards. Both have the same effect though, something that's been built on throughout
the movie, the idea of Peter being used and physically manipulated like a doll or a puppet.
And once Paimon seemingly has control of Peter he first
lets out the croaky gurgle of his true voice before
quickly using this momentary victory to smash his face against his desk. Now as I mentioned
earlier this definitely has the effect of making Peters
face more beaky and birdlike, perhaps to better represent Paimon's demonic form, but it could
be possibly that he simply wants to hurt Peter to
wear him down more to the point where he can be fully possessed. It could also be true
that Peter is already fully broken down and Paimon is simply
trying to kill him as quickly as possible so he can leap
inside, but I don't personally subscribe to that because it feels like everything is leading
very purposefully to this all going down during
the ending ceremony. As with every other time we've seen
Paimon try to enter Peter's body we've got this blue/white light either framing him as
It is here or flaring over him as we saw in earlier scenes. This scene is tremendously acted, absolutely
harrowing to watch and truly shocking the first time
you see it. Alex Wolff is truly phenomenal in this movie and his performance here is
perhaps the high point of that. Now there has been some slight
confusion and urban mythery surrounding this scene,
I've seen more than a few people suggesting he smashed his face into the desk thinking
it would be soft and ended up breaking or dislocating
his jaw. The truth isn't quite as awful but might be more
impressive. He did say in an interview he was happy to smash his face into a real desk
but Ari Aster obviously pointed out that would be super
illegal and not something they needed to do, they did get
a cushioned prop desk and Alex Wolff did say it was much less padded than he thought it
would be and despite not intentionally smashing up
his own face he did take himself to an extreme physical
place shooting this and did end up with quite real blood coming out of his knee after it
collided with the chair. Now that is somewhat conflated
with another answer he gave about the same scene
where he discusses his jaw being easy to dislocate as a result of a boxing injury he sustained
several years prior. In the scene his face looks so
strained and distended because he's intentionally dislocated his jaw and glued his eyelids up.
It's that combined with the face smashing into the desk
that often get confused into the same story. So no he didn't break or dislocate his jaw
on the desk, but he did do some rock and roll shit and
thoroughly beat himself up filming this and I think that
energy he brings to it and the pretty unique and real visuals on screen are what make that
story so believable and this performance so electric.
Lastly before we move on here, a question I think worth answering is why are the classmates
and the teacher so horrified here if they're in
on the whole summoning Paimon thing? And firstly we
can't say for sure that every student and faculty member are cultists, they most likely
aren't and so there's no reason why the cult members would
choose to drop the act and just get on their knees
and start hailing Paimon right then and there. I think that's the most obvious and best answer
but I also think it's fair to say that the cult
don't really know what Paimon on earth is going to look like, no
way of telling how bloodthirsty or violent he will be in practicality. That could extend
to every cult member but I think it's especially true for
the children who have almost certainly been brought into
this by their parents. We can't say for certain that Bridget is definitely horrified here,
she may just be a very good actor, but I fall down on the
kids not being 100% aware of exactly what they're signing
up for, more just going off vague instructions and explanations given by their parents. While Annie stands out in the rain, too terrified
to return to the house, Steve is given the task of
recovering Peter from the hospital. As they're driving back to the house we see Steve almost
drive through a red light and have to perform an
emergency stop. After doing so we see him break down
crying and at this moment there is this shape blurred in the background that could very
well be the headless ghost of Ellen in a white dress.
Now at first I thought there's no way, it's just part of the
infrastructure on the side of the road, more precisely I thought it was one of these things.
But after spending more time than I should going back
and forth I don't think it is one of these things. The
primary reason being that the background just doesn't line up with what we see in the exterior
shot. There's a bunch of discrepancies I could point
out but the main one is the edge of this white barrier,
in the exterior shot it's heavily sloped, in the interior shot it's almost level. So
either continuity doesn't matter or the white barrier we're
seeing from the interior is further beyond the sidewalk
than we can see in the interior. Either way, there's a reasonably good chance this is Ellen's
ghostly visage here. And that would make sense, not
only is Steve choosing this moment to break down,
perhaps being withered by her ghostly gaze, but also the spirits are about to determine
that Steve's usefulness has run it's course, mainly to
push Annie over the edge but also to get him out of the way
and prevent him from reporting this to the authorities, which is exactly what he threatens
to do moments later upon Annie showing him Ellen's
body. So it makes sense the cult, or Ellen at least
would be watching him very closely at this point to make sure he doesn't do anything
drastic that might jeopardize their plans for Peter. After Steve has seen the body in the attic
we see Annie spring into action preparing the fire, as she
sees it her final chance to vindicate herself and save her family, even if it means her
death. She's prepared to make the sacrifice, and that's
matched so perfectly against this final lunatic beseechment of Steve to listen to her evidence
to take her at her word and not see her as a crazy,
insane, dangerous woman. As with everything we've discussed with the feminist reading
and the idea of the triple goddess, Annie's options
seemingly are be recognised as insane or make a sacrifice
so total it results in the complete disintegration of the self. I think that's what makes her
performance in this scene so compelling, and again just this scene is Oscar worthy in my
opinion, it's that this is maybe the most insane, the most
unhinged and unbelievable we see her acting, she
seems completely insane by this point, but it's here we find ourselves siding with her
totally for the first time, we're beyond doubt too just like
she is and we're hoping against hope that Steve believes
her as she begs to be listened to and she doesn't have to use the fire to prove it.
We've gone from being suspect of the insane and dangerous
mother to understanding her sacrifice and the writing is
so smart that there's no clear point where that will just be telegraphed to the audience,
I think almost everybody will have a different moment
where they feel their allegiances switch. Unfortunately just like Agamemnon and Iphigenia,
just like Herakles and Deianira, Annie and Steve are
bound to their fate. His compassion and patience have disappeared and this time he won't listen
to what she has to say, he even catches himself looking
at the photo album for a moment and tears himself back
from doing so, determined not to indulge Annie anymore, destined to his tragic fate moments
later because of it. It's clear at this point that Annie has a
good idea of what's going on. She understands that Joan at
least, if not the cult, has played a trick on her and as she sees it when she made an
effort to summon Charlie she made a pact with some dark entity
that has now cursed them. Which is pretty close to
the truth. Unfortunately for Annie she thinks this entity follows set rules, internal logic,
that it can still somehow be controlled. She begs Steve
to burn the book, telling him that if they don't that
Peter will be harmed, she doesn't exactly specify what will happen to him because ultimately
she doesn't know. Again both Toni Collette and
Gabriel Byrne just phenomenal here as Annie says her
final goodbyes to Steve, just superb acting all round. For a moment it seems as though
Steve will acquiesce to Annie's demands but ultimately
he sees it as a form of indulgence or enablement and
he refuses. Now I think at this point the audience was screaming for Steve not to do
it, thinking Annie's mistake was not realising that whoever
burned the book would set on fire. So there's a
moment of relief when he decides not to do it. But just like Annie, the audience have
been tricked into thinking there's a set of logic Paimon
has to adhere to. He can very much do what he likes at
this point and apparently what he likes to do is play malicious and cruel jokes on anyone
he has the ability to torture. As soon as Annie grabs
the book and throws it into the fire Steve sets ablaze
regardless, burning near immediately right in front of Annie. There's a breathtaking
wide shot that I can't show you all of and this incredible
close up of Annie's reaction before we see a blue Paimon
shimmer flick across the room as Paimon uses this entire breakdown of Annie's mind to assume
complete control over her. And while Annie's mortal vessel is still alive and ticking at
this point that was the last time we'll see Annie in control
of it. In many ways she does die here alongside Steve,
there won't be a moment where she comes back after this, anytime we see her from now on
Paimon is doing the driving. As night rolls in we see another lightswitch
cut from day to night, this time as the flick occurs we see
the house is surrounded by naked cultists. Now pretty much the rest of the film from
here on out is full of them, and just to be clear if I show
it and censor it I will still be demonetized. But I don't think
at this point their easter egg hiding in the background needs to be pointed out, there
are guides available for every background cultist appearance,
and showing you them won't really add much in
terms of meaning. So I'm only going to discuss them when they're relevant, otherwise this
will just become a list of places cult members are standing
with accompanying images that I can't show you.
So let's just say broadly that the house is now infested with cultists we've seen throughout
the movie. And in line with this terrarium theme
they stay just on the edges, in the shadows, just
watching what Paimon does to the family. They're the audience to Paimon's show, staring in
at the family just like Annie stared in at the dollhouses.
There are a couple of things they do that effect the
plot so I will still be discussing anything meaningful that occurs with them. So after questions about Millie Shapiro and
the click, the next most common question is what is with
all the naked people at the end of the film. And the answer is quite simply because it's
entirely terrifying. If I turned round to this I'd
probably jump out of the window too. In the original script
they were all meant to be wearing red robes and if you think back to our colour coding
it's red that's been representing the cult so it's a nice
little confirmation for that. But clearly it was decided
somewhere during production that nudity would be more unnerving. Now as for an in-lore reason
why they would be doing this it's again a tradition of witchcraft and occultism. When
witches cavorted with the devil in the woods outside
of town, they didn't do it with their clothes on. There's
a massive rabbit hole you can go down with nudity and occultism but the quickest and
best answer is that ever since the first shamans, druids,
priests people have been doing magic in the nude,
something that has carried on through witchcraft and occultism to this day. The broad answer
is that clothing blocks the channeling of spiritual
energy and that by not wearing any you're more free,
unbridled and better able to harness magic. But I think if we step outside of occult belief
there's always been an at least semi-sexual side to
it, essentially religion that's up front about it's kinks. You
can also see it from the other side, that sexual proclivity and freedom have been traditionally
branded demonic and so the trope kind of builds the reality in a sense. However you look at
it nudity, free love and fringe sexuality have
always been involved with occult magic. We've just
discussed a very small corner of the occult and you can see very clearly how prevalent
gender is within it. Again same with religion and one
can't help but imagine how and why these traditions began, the oracles in Greece, temple priests,
American witchcraft during puritanism, the Catholic
church, Mormonism, honestly almost every spiritual group you can name - despite the valid beliefs
many may have I think it's also quite easy to argue that a lot of their origins and practices
are related to sexual advantage and power, but we can
leave that for another video, the point is simply that
Witchcraft and occultism generally are quite oversexed but I'd argue that there's simply
less of an attempt to hide it and throughout history
witchcraft specifically has gone hand in hand with female
sexual emancipation. It's a massive reason why it's been viewed as so dangerous by religious
groups. It's powered by the moon, it's a route to
female power that threatens to destabilize male led
heliocentric religion. And here the cult stand in complete freedom, being charged by the
spiritual energy of the moonlight, happily subservient
in a female led coven. Although as is the catch with
witchcraft and the occult, dedicating and sacrificing themselves to a male demon. As night arrives we see Peter's painkillers
finally wear off as he awakens to a house in darkness. He
rolls over to see the treehouse glowing with orange candlelight. The ceremony has been
prepared and now the lambs must be dragged to the slaughter.
As soon as we move to a wide shot we see AnniePaimon hovering in the corner like Ben
Batfleck. I already covered it at the start so I won't
dwell on it but the phrase fly-on-the-wall is applicable here for a couple of reasons.
This movement is so unique and strange I can completely
understand if it makes you want to laugh but for me I
thought it was wonderfully executed, fresh and terrifying. Peter calls out for his mom
and dad and at this point we know that neither will respond
to him. One is glued to the ceiling imprisoned in her
own body, literally hunting him and the other is charred to a crisp on the living room floor
and it's here that the first time viewer likely feels
that sinking hopelessness, the inevitability that there is no
positive end for the family here. Peter checks in his parents room and after
standing in the doorway for a moment we hear him get
startled by this noise. This is actually the sound of Annie ripping open the piano and
grabbing the wire from it to sever her neck later on. We
see once again the door to Ellen's room is open and Peter
by this point is clearly terrified, closing it with a slam without daring to properly
check inside the room. Now we've seen that both the cult and
Annie are responsible for leaving this door open, and
we realise that in this moment it doesn't matter which is responsible, for Peter, the
outcome and the threat are the same. As the camera cuts to
downstairs we see the overturned piano and ripped out
wire in the front of shot. Once again this front doorway space is being used to demonstrate
the off camera actions of Paimon and the cult, except
this time things are very explicitly wrong. Peter seems
to notice that the diorama house lights are on, but they've actually already been turned
on in several previous shots. After first being taken aback
by the damage in the upturned living room Peter
eventually spots the burned remains of his father, identifiable primarily by his unblemished
wedding ring. Again he is observed from the ceiling
by AnniePaimon and this time by the smiling cult member
from the funeral. Peter turning round here as he becomes aware of their presence is just
so well done and absolute nightmare fuel and the switch
as Annie moves from her spot on the ceiling to the
corner in front of Peter is amazingly executed too. Peter clumsily runs away and just manages
to lock himself in the attic. As AnniePaimon begins
smashing her head into the attic hatch we again hear him revert to this child like whining
of the word 'Mommy' that drives home this feeling
of his arrested development, difficulty communicating emotionally and lack of parental nurture that
we've seen from him throughout. It's also just straight
up harrowing as you come to understand there's no safe escape for Peter from where he's now
trapped himself. The smashing of the head against the attic door is perhaps the most
terrifying visual in the film for me, there's just something
about how brutal the disregard for Annie's body is and it
paints a terrifying picture of what being possessed by Paimon is like and how little
regard he has for these physical vessels. The implication that
has for the sacrifice that's been made and Ellen's
decision to align with him even more terrifying still. When the banging eventually stops we
see Peter, all the while being silently observed
by shadowed cultists, notice the ritual circle where his
grandmas body has recently been. In the centre of it is a photo of him with the eyeholes
burned out, signifying his death. In the script they were
crossed out, matching up with the drawings of Peter in
the notebook, but my guess is this would have been a lot less clear on camera in the dark
of the attic and ultimately this is much easier to see. It's at this point that he becomes aware of
the sawing sounds above him and looks up to see Annie,
levitating, sawing her own head off while making eye contact with him. As we covered
during the opening scene moving between walls and locked
places is very much something Paimon can do, so if
you're wondering how AnniePaimon got through the hatch the answer is simply because Paimon
can. The eye contact from Annie is haunting, either she's screaming from within for him
to run or Paimon is refusing to take his eyes off his
prey. Based on a couple of clues in the script regarding
Peter's possession at school I actually think it's the former and this stare of madness
is all the imprisoned Annie has control over. This is
just an insane visual, so hallucinatory and brutal and as
I'm reading this I'm not certain how much of it I'll be able to show you but it's worth
going back and checking out if you can't see it clearly.
Every single member of the Graham family meets a deeply
tragic end but this may be the worst. I don't want to re-cover everything to do with beheading
and female sacrifice, but I think it's worth repeating
that this moment is the apex of all that, the grand
culmination of all that shared meaning. But it's stripped of all agency, this isn't Annie's
sacrifice, although a few scenes ago she proved herself
willing to make it, this is Annie being sacrificed, Paimon removing the final head he requires.
And this goes hand in hand with what I was saying
about Witchcraft and the Occult, it's very much based in female empowerment, but the
final trick, the peak behind the curtain is yet another
story of male dominion. Again I don't want to dwell too
much on this because we've already covered it, but what a haunting and brilliant visual.
And make note of the sound continuing as we cut away
as we can tell exactly what's happening with Annie off
camera just from that. Now a few things happen in quick succession
here and on first viewing it can be quite confusing so
I'm just going to quickly explain them in order. First the three naked cultists hiding
in the shadows of the attic ring a tiny bell. As with all the
bells and horns this is an allusion to Paimon's approach
traditionally being signalled by bells and loud instruments. This is more obvious here
than ever as the score will begin to ramp up with an exact
and untamed score reflecting just this, building from
the moment PaiPeterMon enters the treehouse and begins his true ascension. The track is
actually named "reborn" on the soundtrack. After the
cultist rings the bell Peter quite rightfully nopes
himself straight out of the attic window. I've seen a lot of people ask the question
is Peter dead at the point where he lands following this.
And I guess he could be, you could maybe argue he is as it's left quite ambiguous. Paimon
certainly slots in there with no issue. But in the script
it's extremely clear that despite having some small
pieces of glass stuck in him he's otherwise unharmed. And really while we don't get exact
confirmation of this he doesn't seem to be wearing any injuries that may have taken his
life. I think it's more like Annie seeing Steve die, he's
just broken to the point where he can't put up any spiritual
resistance. As we watch Peter laying still in the flowerbed
we hear Annie's neck-sawing reach a climax and the
sound of her head falling to the ground, but not her body which clearly remains levitating.
We then see Annie's headless shadow silently drift
over the flowerbed. Once it's out of shot, the tiny wisp of
light that presumably represents Paimon's soul floats down over Peter and enters his
body. PaiPeterMon lifts his head just in time to
see Annie's headless body floating up into the treehouse in
preparation for Paimon's ascension ceremony. On his way to the treehouse we see PaiPeterMon
walk past Max's dead body having presumably been killed by a possessed Annie or the cultists.
I am pleased to inform you however that despite the
truly awful fate waiting for the Graham family In hell, likely being used as various parts
of Paimon's sexual furniture because of Grandma's need
for doubloons, that Max the dog will not be sharing in
their fate, because all dogs go directly to heaven.
As PaiPeterMon ascends into the treehouse we get a few key pieces of imagery. We've
already discussed them at various points but just
to check them off: we've got the birdcage with the
whipoorwhill inside it. A bird figure representing death trapped inside a literary image for
female subservience and suppression, Paimon inside
Charlie. We have the statue of Paimon, crooked finger
staff pointing to the northwest, other hand in this inversion of the holy trinity symbol,
the crowned head of Charlie an obvious representation
of him, the Paimon sigil on the chest. At the base of the
statue we see another symbol for the northwest. These sun light halo lines are representative
of angelic figures in Christian artwork so again
we see the implication that Paimon is a fallen angel. And
this whole scene is laid out in such a way that the ending shot, which I can probably
show you about 45% of, is a direct visual allusion to The
Night of the Hunter, as confirmed on reddit by Ari Aster and
as well as that it's also mirroring the motif of Charlie's makeshift congregation, as confirmed
on reddit by Ari Aster. And a very cool final
easter egg that you'll have to check out for yourself because
I definitely can't show you: when PaiPeterMon first looks around the treehouse we see Ellen
and Annie's headless bodies bowing to the statue
of Paimon with Charlie's head. Once PaiPeterMon is
crowned we see that the bodies have been magically rotated around to face him.
And now we're finally at the end. If you're still here, credit to you I don't know how
you've listened to me speak for this long. You now know as
much as there is to know, at least as much as I've been
able to find while just barely clinging to sanity. As a fun little experiment to demonstrate
just how much we've learned, I'm going to quickly run
through Joan's final address to Paimon. I just want you
to have a quick think back to how just 'What the f*ck' you were when you first were confronted
with this moment and this speech. I feel like I'm
pretty good at keeping up with movies but this is such a
tight rope balance of intrigue the whole way through that when I got to this point I just
was staring with my mouth hanging open wondering what
the hell I was hearing. It's an insanely confident closer, after two hours of giving you just
enough to keep you on the hook but maintaining this
realist, flat aesthetic, the film lays everything bare without flinching, using extremely plain
and blunt terminology that would feel extremely cringe
as part of a less intelligent script. You're still trying to
process it minutes into the credits. But hopefully now we know everything the film is saying,
this will no longer be baffling and instead just read
fluently. Let's go: Firstly Joan tells Paimon that it's alright,
and refers to him as Charlie. We know why she does this,
the first body Paimon tried to inhabit was Charles, Annie's brother and following that
Charlie Graham, and we know Paimon has this confusion
and fear when entering a new vessel, he's clearly
quite disorientated and Joan is using a name she thinks he'll be familiar with in this
form while trying to reassure him. Next she says you are Paimon,
one of the eight kings of hell. Which I think we've
more than covered at this point, we know who Paimon is, we understand his quite high station
among hell's hierarchy. She says "We have looked to the northwest and called you in"
again we know Paimon is referred to as the King of
the Northwest, that this is essential in summoning him and
that the film has gone to extreme lengths to visually allude to this link. Next is "we've
corrected your first female body and give you now this healthy
male host", we've been clear on that from the
beginning, Paimon desires a male form despite his traditional androgyny and cannot achieve
full power in a female form. Joan then says "We
reject the Trinity and pray devoutly to you" which is in
reference to the cults rejection of the Christian trinity, as proven by their sacrifice of the
triple horae or triple moon goddess or neopaganist trinity,
whatever you want to call it, here the maiden, mother
and crone, Charlie, Annie and Ellen. And the rest of what Joan says is just essentially
covering the promises made for the cult in exchange for
the sacrifice and the in lore boons that Paimon is able to
offer them: knowledge of secret things, honor, wealth and the ability to bind men to their
will. Hopefully all of that is clear as day now
and this video has done it's job. If not I've wasted months of
my life. But it makes sense to me at least and I hope I've explained it well enough that
it makes sense to you too.
Before I go I just wanted to provide a conclusion to the theme of mental illness within the
film. As I've mentioned, and as has been made very
clear by Ari Aster the movie is not an extended dream
sequence, we're not viewing a twisted perception built through the lens of Annie's madness,
these are very real events that are occurring. But
unfortunately I think far too many people take that to
mean that anything to do with mental illness is simply a red herring that can be cast aside.
But that's really not the case and I just want to reiterate
a final time that as far as subtext, tone and content go
it is extremely difficult not to see this as a story about hereditary illness, specifically
mental illness, hereditary ab*se, malignance within the family
unit and ultimately something very close to the
tragic, pre-destined fate of a woman pressured into motherhood, controlled and who felt like
her life was never her own, succumbing to the
same flaws and illnesses that plagued her mother,
snapping due to tragedy and murdering what remains of her family. While in the context
of the movie the demons are very real, on a subtextual
level you must remember that these demons work
as a stand-in for the real-life demons of mental illness and trauma. In many, all subtextual,
ways the demonic forces absolutely can be seen to represent
those things within the movie. I think people get
very hung up on Ari Aster saying it's not a dream, and take that to mean that the great
wealth of content relating to mental illness can only
be part of the misdirect, that's ultimately not the case and
as with most great pieces of art there is something beyond what it's showing you where
meaning can be found. All that Ari Aster meant by
that quote was that Annie is not imagining the events of
the movie. Which is extremely different to saying the film is simply not about mental
illness. And there you see exactly what we're discussing
here, a very personal, very painful look at a family being
torn apart from within. Through mental illness, trauma, mistreatment, really it all blends
into one and likely whichever has the most resounding
meaning to you will likely be what you pull from it. But
I think it's fair to say that despite the supernatural backbone of the film, the flesh
that sits around it serves as a warning of what can happen to
a family plagued by grief, destined to repeat it's own
trauma and succumb to the mistakes of it's past. It's clear what the Graham family is
missing, what Annie and Peter so desperately crave and their
parents failed to give them, emotional connection and real honest love. Communication and compassion.
Hereditary is to many a very depressing film I'm sure, but I think if we're to try and
find a positive message amidst the chaos it's the importance
of holding your loved ones close, and talking to one another about how you feel. This film
is marked by silence, it's thick with it the whole way
through, and that's there to highlight the lack of
communication within the family. Now as we know, it wouldn't be enough to save them during
the film, they couldn't communicate their way
out of this. But Ellen could have communicated, could
have discussed with her children before binding them to this fate. And when we go back to
the subtextual meaning, and I think that's what's
important, these problems, these malignances that can
cycle for generations, they nigh on always exist due to a lack of communication of some
kind and that's exactly what we see playing out in
the Graham family. Ultimately I think that's a pretty
positive message to find at the end of all that horror. And that is everything guys, thank you so
much for listening. I'd like to say a special thankyou to Mr
Steve Newburn for his wonderful help and information I could not have got elsewhere, and
thankyou also to my reddit warlock u/Mickle-Caunle who's help was invaluable also. Thank you
so much if you've subscribed, taken the time
out to like it that really means a lot and the better these
videos do really the more I can make. This script took months of work, it's at 70 thousand
words currently, I've poured my absolute heart and
soul into this and I hope that's shone through and been
a positive and useful experience for you. I hope that in some small way I've been able
to improve your viewing of the movie because I truly
do believe it's perfect. If you'd like to support me further
you can find me on Patreon, thanks so much to everyone that's been subscribed to me there
during the months I've been absent, and you can also
just use the thanks function below the video to
donate directly, which a couple of you have already on other videos and again thanks so
much it means the absolute world. I'm going to make
a couple of hopefully funny, definitely quicker videos
over the next few weeks just to have a bit of a break from this and get some easier content
up so stay tuned for more. If this was your first
time seeing one of my Complete Guide videos there's more
you can check out. The Lighthouse, Alien, Green Knight, Promising Young Woman. I think
my next one is going to be Midsommar but I won't start
working on that until everything with my novel is
sorted. Thanks so much for everything guys. Peace.
Hi guys, I make overly in-depth videos on films I love, mainly A24. Hereditary has been on my list for a while but I'd put it off because I knew it would be insane in scope, and I was right. There is no easy way to condense the 80,000 words in that video into one post but given that it's a very big ask on your time that most people simply can't commit to, I thought I'd also quickly go through a couple of the unsolved (and now solved) mysteries I found on Reddit during the course of the research, hopefully this will shed some much needed light for a few of you:
1. What is the 'keep out' room diorama during the opening sequence?
This is Ellen's bedroom. The room where Annie's father locked himself away and starved himself to death (hence the 'keep out' sign). It is also the room where Annie's brother Charles killed himself. I had this confirmed to me by the diorama's creator Steve Newburn. During the opening scene this is the first diorama you will see and the subsequent pan across the workshop dioramas actually serves as a full timeline of traumatic events in Annie's life.
2. What is rubbed on Ellen's lips at the funeral and why?
It is not Dittany of Crete, it is a nondescript oil that remains unnamed. It is not smeared on by Joan or Annie, it's another unnamed cult member. The 'why' is the important part: firstly to allude to her status as 'Queen' Ellen, this was a traditional rite on monarchs post mortem, particularly in Christian culture. More importantly though this is exemplary of the broader (often pagan) belief that oiling the lips allows for the soul to easier leave the body. First and foremost this is what allows Ellen to appear around the house and scare the family, her soul has been freed from her body at the point of death. But more crucially it sets up the films internal logic that Paimon will enter and exit through the mouth. When Charlie is having her allergic reaction she says 'my throat is getting bigger' - Paimon is trying to force his way out. When Peter smokes the Dittany laced weed and has the 'anxiety attack' this is actually Paimon trying to force his way inside him, again he says 'my throat is getting bigger'. We also see Paimon's blue light lens flaring over his face as this happens. When Annie attacks him while under Paimon's thrall she will hold his mouth open and again we'll see blue light bathing his face. The mouth is the soul-hole and here we see Ellen's being lubricated so to speak.
3. Why does Paimon want three heads?
This is a big question and really people online have got both halves of it but not connected the two. To give you the hyper abridged version: some people suggest it's about feminine sacrifice and others suggest it's a mockery, an inversion of the Christian trinity with Charlie, Annie and Ellen representing the father, the son and the holy spirit. Both are true but not quite the full answer, it's actually a representation of the Triple Goddess or Triple Horae, the paganistic inversion of the christian trinity represented in the maiden, mother and crone, which is a much better fit for charlie, annie and ellen. There's so much more to say about that and what it means for the movie, but the answer is 'a mockery of the christian trinity using the inverted or opposite trinity of paganism, the triple goddess, an icon defined by the innate hereditary sacrifices of womanhood'.
4. The Click
Not so much a question, but let me blow your mind for a moment. The click is not a click, it is a 'cluck'. And in my opinion it's a tic of Paimon's true demonic form and non-human speaking apparatus back in Hell/Pandemonium. And I think that true form is a kind of bird-like demon. It's why we have this wealth of bird imagery, why Paimon breaks Peter's nose to make it resemble a beak. Why Alex Wolff acts deliberately bird-like during the ending scenes. And just in case you think I'm a fucking lunatic by this point Ari Aster referred to it as a 'cluck' during a reddit AMA I just don't think the terminology ever caught on. It also sheds new light on another quote of his regarding the diroama charlie makes with the pigeon head Paimon. He says "I don't want to give too much away" and then explains pretty succinctly exactly what's happening with Charlie's diorama of the cult and it being "not too far away from what we have at the end". Given that Aster is explaining exactly the pretty obvious link between the diorama and the ending scene then what doesn't he want to give away exactly? The fact that the pigeon headed Paimon imagery he was being asked about is much more literally representative than he's letting on. The image/illustration we see of Paimon is his human form btw, it's essentially stated outright he needs a human form to frequent earth so we know his traditional/original form is non-human.
5. Satony
Again not a question but something I really wanted to get across, despite having roughly the right answer in terms of meaning, all the explainer articles on 'what the satanic graffiti around the house means' source from the same article from 'signalhorizon.com', even big theory websites like bloodydisgusting.com. That article is incorrect and cites 'The Grimorium Verum' as being the origin for 'SATONY'. This is not the case, I have read that Grimoire cover to cover. I actually trace the full etymology of the word during the video, across multiple influential texts, identifying not just the origin but also it's status as a 'barbarous' word and it's uses and so on.
Okay that's all I'm going to type out for now and it's about 10 minutes of a nearly 5 hour video. There are a bunch more mysteries explained in the video, easter eggs that no one has ever noticed before, (like Joan leading Annie to the northwest during their meeting in the car park, pretty sure this is the only reason the scene is shot at sunset) and all the academic, deeper meaning is explored in the detail it deserves. I truly hope you take the time to watch it but again I understand entirely why you wouldn't be able to, so please feel free to AMA in this thread and I'll do my best to reply to any queries you have.
Just when you think you have a pretty good grasp on something, somebody on reddit shows you how little you actually know.
I’ll give the video a good watch over the next few days and ask a few things here and there but so far it looks pretty comprehensive.
Thank you so much for the work you put into this. Any chance you could upload that 80,000 words document somewhere so we can read up on it?
Cheers!
Just as an FYI for others reading this thread, here’s a link to Ari Aster’s AMA on reddit he did a while ago which contains some things to which OP refers:
https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/8rbjj7/hi_im_ari_aster_writerdirector_of_hereditary_ama/
Haven’t watched the video completely (yet), so please excuse if these questions are answered in it but maybe you can shed some light on some often discussed questions to which we were unable to find answers so far.
What’s your take on Ellen’s motivation? Was she out for the rewards in the afterlife (Riches to the Conjurer) depicted in the book Annie finds?
While Charlie’s body is still alive and un-decapitated, who or what is directing the icy-blue light in the scene showing Charlie building her models/figurines? At this point, Paimon is still inside Charlie’s body, so why would Paimon direct that light? It’s not Ellen from the afterlife, is it?
What about all the birds? Do they act as a symbol for someone’s soul? Knowing Ari, the choice for Charlie’s chocolate bar to be Dove is not a coincidence.
Any significance to the form and shape of certain objects like the mirror in Ellen’s room, the door frame, and the round + rectangular heating lamp in the treehouse? The way these shots are composed tells me there’s more to them under the surface. https://imgur.com/a/xt9OPkt
On a side note, I have to compliment you on your voice which is a pleasure to listen to. It makes sitting through the video ten times easier than the usual YT video essay voice with mumbles and static from a bad mic.
A 4.5 hour video on one of my favorite movies of all time?
Count me the fuck in. I know what I'm watching tomorrow morning!! (It's 0427 rn lol)
This is great OP! Thank you for making, and sharing.
I just wanted to let you know this is the best post ever made to this sub and it should be stickied. Thanks for your hard work.
I’ve finished the video and it’s a fascinating watch, thanks!
Was Peter’s friend with the ponytail in the treehouse at the end? Was his teacher a member of the cult? Was Bridget?
Just finished this. I wish you could show real clips from the film.