Starring Toni Collette, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro, Ann Dowd, and Gabriel Byrne, the film follows a grieving family tormented by sinister occurrences after the death of their secretive grandmother.

Miniature artist Annie Graham lives with her psychiatrist husband Steve and their two children, 16-year-old son Peter and 13-year-old daughter Charlie.

She attends a bereavement support group, revealing her troubled childhood and that she and her mother had a fraught relationship until Charlie was born when Ellen became a significant figure in raising her.

In shock, Peter drives home and leaves Charlie's headless body in the back seat of his parents' car, which Annie discovers, to her horror, the following morning.

Objects begin to move and smash, and Peter is terrified when Annie is possessed and speaks in Charlie's voice until Steve throws water on her.

Annie goes through her mother's old belongings and finds a photo album that shows Ellen as "Queen Leigh," the leader of a coven, and Joan as one of her acolytes.

[14] The demon king Paimon originates from numerous grimoires, including The Lesser Key of Solomon, Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, Dictionnaire Infernal, Livre des Esperitz, Liber Officiorum Spirituum, and The Book of Abramelin.

[15][16] Paimon is obedient to Lucifer and manifests with a crown on his head, heralded by a "host of spirits, like men with trumpets and well sounding cymbals, and all other sorts of musical instruments".

[17] Though she was reluctant to work on a horror film, the script's grounded approach to the genre convinced her to commit to the project and she later said that Aster "just really understood the dynamics in the family, has such an understanding of what it is to be human, what it is to experience loss".

[18] After watching Shapiro's audition, Aster was immediately relieved because he had left Charlie's personality more ambiguous than other characters in the script and knew the "chances were slim" that he would find the right actress.

Since each room was built on a stage, walls could be removed to shoot scenes at a much greater distance than a practical location would allow, creating the dollhouse aesthetic of the film.

[19] Aster later recalled during a Reddit AMA, "Alex Wolff told me not to say the name of William Shakespeare's Scottish play out loud [during filming] because of some superstitious theater legend.

[28] On Anzac Day in 2018, the trailer for Hereditary played before the PG-rated family film Peter Rabbit in a cinema in Innaloo, Western Australia.

According to a report in The Sydney Morning Herald, the Hereditary preview was accidentally shown to family audiences and created a small panic in the theater.

The site's critical consensus reads, "Hereditary uses its classic setup as the framework for a harrowing, uncommonly unsettling horror film whose cold touch lingers long beyond the closing credits.

[37] Writing for Rolling Stone, Peter Travers gave the film three and a half out of four and called it the scariest movie of 2018, saying "it's Collette, giving the performance of her career, who takes us inside Annie's breakdown in flesh and spirit and shatters what's left of our nerves.

Club, A.A. Dowd gave the film an A−, stating that, "In its seriousness and hair-raising craftsmanship, Hereditary belongs to a proud genre lineage, a legacy that stretches back to the towering touchstones of American horror, unholy prestige-zeitgeist classics like The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby.

Remarkably, it's a first feature, the auspicious debut of writer-director Ari Aster, whose acclaimed, disturbing short films were all leading, like a tunnel into the underworld, to this bleak vision.

[2] Some publications noted the critics-to-audience discrepancy, comparing it to Drive, The Witch, and It Comes at Night, all of which had positive critical reviews, but failed to impress mainstream moviegoers.