Hereditary: 10 Hidden Details You Didn’t Notice In The Movie

Hereditary is one of the most universally acclaimed and beloved horror movies ever made. It is one of those rare works that actually show everything that horror movies are capable of being, and it certainly raised the bar for any horror flicks that come after it. But given how much work writer/director Ari Aster put into making the film the best it could be, it’s really no surprise that the results were so spectacular.

The work that every person working on the production put into the movie is pretty astounding, and as everyone has seen by now, the end result is fantastic. However, there are still plenty of small details that the average viewer just isn’t going to notice unless they’re really looking for it. So here’s 10 hidden details in Hereditary that you almost certainly didn’t notice.

10 Parental Alienation

Director Ari Aster had no intention of alienating actress Toni Collette when he was casting the film.

However, Gabriel Byrne, the man who played her husband, and Alex Wolff, who played her son, had already worked together on the series In Treatment (in fact, they played a father and son in that series as well). And coincidentally, Wolff and actress Milly Shapiro (who played Charlie) went to the same school, the Professional Children’s School.

Since the three actors had all developed a rapport with each other previously, it left Toni as the odd woman out, which ultimately worked very well for her characterization too.

9 Significant Shapes

The set designers on Hereditary went out of their way to put a lot of symbolism into the design, and one of the most powerful recurring elements is that of geometric shapes that can be found everywhere in the background of the film.

The designers incorporated a lot of squares and triangles to represent the family itself, but the clearest symbolic meaning in the film has got to be the circle. The circle represents many things, but it’s a clear physical manifestation of this cycle of horrors that the family is trapped in as they are used as Paimon’s pawns.

8 Family Horror

Many critics and audience members alike have lauded Hereditary for not just being an amazing horror movie, but because it is also a movie that very seriously and emotionally deals with familial grief and cycles of abuse. And of course, that is no coincidence.

When writer/director Ari Aster began writing Hereditary, he initially envisioned it solely as a family drama. As his work progressed, he realized that there was a lot of potential to incorporate a horror story into the film as well. And had he not changed course with Hereditary, his most recent film Midsommar would have been his first horror film, as he originally intended.

7 The First Attempt

Pretty much right as the movie begins Annie drops some nuclear bomb sized hints at the fact that her recently deceased mother had originally tried to use her own son to be Paimon’s vessel on earth. He was diagnosed as a schizophrenic when he claimed that his mother was trying to put people inside of him, and ultimately wound up killing himself.

And although Annie was only a helpless bystander, the fact that her daughter Charlie was chosen as Paimon’s new potential vessel seems to be written in the stars, since Charlie was actually named after Annie’s brother Charles.

6 Not Quite Home

It should come as no surprise that the detail work on both the miniatures that Annie creates and the set design itself is incredibly complex and specific.

The sets for the house actually had to be built on a sound stage because the director’s needs for the set design were so intricate, and because so many scenes transition from miniatures to actual scenes so the walls of the rooms needed to be removable in order to accommodate that. And the prop designer who worked on the miniatures worked in tandem with the set designer in order to get the pieces to match identically.

5 Fake Friends

By the end of the film it becomes clear that the entire Graham family has been surrounded by this strange cult that is devoted to the demon Paimon. For the most part it seems like the members of this cult are around Annie’s mother’s age, and they seem to be complete strangers to the family.

However, one notable exception is hard to pick up on at first. Surprisingly, one of Peter’s school friends appears to be a member of the cult. He is initially seen smoking under the bleachers with Peter, and then later her reappears in the grand finale when Peter is possessed by Paimon.

4 Mommy Issues

Although Charlie was initially the vessel for Paimon, and it appears that she has been possessed by the demon since birth, there are many indications that Peter will be the ultimate home for Paimon, and it seems that Annie can somehow sense this.

Annie appears to be afraid of Peter for very little reason, something that Peter picks up on to the point where he finally accuses her of it. Annie also tells him that she never wanted to have him, and although she seems to have a lot of behavioral outbursts in the past, the fact that she tries to burn Peter alive seems to say something.

3 Special Effects

Like many filmmakers, director Ari Aster decided that any effect that could be done practically would be done practically for the sake of a more realistic final product. And one of the quirkier instances of these practical effects is when a piece of chalk appears to be drawing on it’s own.

In order to make this effect happen, the producers of the movie put a magnet into a piece of chalk, and then moved another magnet around on the back of the chalkboard in order to get it to move on it’s own. And apparently accomplishing this was unexpectedly difficult.

2 A Dedicated Performance

For the very dramatic scene where Peter is violently manipulated by Paimon and smashes his face into his school desk, actor Alex Wolff actually expressed his willingness to break his own nose for the scene. Ari Aster understandably declined the offer, and the desk was made with a soft foam padding.

However, Wolff apparently underestimated his own strength and overestimated the softness of the desk, because when it came time to actually film the scene Wolff hit the desk so hard that he dislocated his jaw. The actor had dislocated it before, which presumably contributed to it happening again in this instance.

1 The Sacrificial Lambs

Early on in the film the Greek playwright Sophocles’ work is being discussed, and free will is the specific topic of discussion. This was very intentional on the part of Ari Aster, because in his mind the story of the film is very akin to a classic Greek tragedy.

And of course the subject of free will is being discussed, because much like the characters in the play, the characters in the film are just helpless puppets who are being used for some inevitable greater (or obviously in this case, horrific) destiny that they don’t even know exists yet.