How to Kill the Kid: A Review of Hereditary

In a story.

Please don’t call the cops.

I watched Hereditary over the weekend. (CONTAINS SPOILERS!!!) Or at least I tried to. I turned it off about an hour in. I like tales of the supernatural, but Hereditary was too dull, too slow, and too sad. I read the rest of the plot online to discover that it does pick up near the end, but by then I’d already returned the DVD.

The experience got me to thinking about horror movies and the whole debate on the hows and whys of killing the innocent in the course of your storytelling. “Should I kill the kid?” is a dumb question. Obviously there will be times when it’s unavoidable. It’s a HORROR story. It’s going to horrify you. It’s right there in the name. So you can’t let a reader think that the cute baby is safe just because he’s cute. For that you want fantasy, or possibly romantic comedy.

But there’s a trick to doing it effectively. The following is the opinion of the author and subject to scrutiny and critique. Good horror is highly subjective, but it’s my strong opinion that the best horror has heart to it as well as blood and guts. It’s not about sparing the viewer’s feelings as it is manipulating them to maximum effect. If you’re going to make them cry, you’d better make them believe it was worth it.

To this end I want to compare Hereditary to one of my all-time favorite stories: Pet Sematary by Stephen King. For this purpose you can assume I’m talking about the book or the original movie with Fred Gwynne and Denise Crosby. The storylines are almost identical, and Gage’s death is the same in both. (And the less said about the remake, the better.)

(You didn’t need a spoiler alert for this, did you? The movie is 30 years old. You’ve either seen it by now or you don’t want to.)

In Hereditary, a teenage boy is forced to drag his younger sister with him to a party that she doesn’t even want to attend. She eats a piece of cake there and has an anaphylactic reaction. (We are told near the beginning that she has a nut allergy. We are also told that her family is EXTREMELY careless about it and keeps leaving her Epi-Pen at home.) The boy is high off his ass, but he wakes up enough to panic and throw her into the car. While he’s driving like a crazy person, she opens the window and hangs her head out to try to get more air. He skids out on the road, grazes a telephone pole, and it takes her head clean off.

Then he goes home and goes to bed, leaving his mother to discover the bloodied corpse in the morning.

Then you get to see a close-up of the severed head, lying in the road covered in ants. Fun!

I had the kind of physical reaction that I expect the filmmakers wanted me to have. I was worried about the kid, although not too worried because I thought she’d be the central figure–the Regan, if you will–and it wasn’t her time yet. The moment of decapitation shocked me out of a half-doze, and it took me a few minutes to catch my breath. So in that respect, it was a success. But then I turned the movie off half an hour later. There was too much yelling, and I was getting a headache.

Graphic death does not inspire fear if it does not move the viewer emotionally. There needs to be empathy. And most importantly, the death has to follow the rules of the world it happens in. I found out later that this was actually a demonic possession movie with some pretty serious chops in the last ten minutes, but at the time of Charlie’s death all I had were some vague flickers of ghostly activity that appeared to mean nothing.

Hereditary takes place in what is believed to be the real world, but there is nothing realistic about Charlie’s death. She is allowed to go to a party without her Epi-Pen. She’s given a piece of cake and eats it without asking if it has nuts. Her brother tries to do the right thing–finally–but just happens to hit that skid at just the right moment to graze that pole in just the right way while Charlie happens to be hanging her head out the window. I realize that Final Destination managed to make a good living at this sort of scenario, but that franchise has an entirely different atmosphere.

By contrast, let’s examine Stephen King’s masterpiece, Pet Sematary. Say what you will about the special effects, but the pathos is deeper and truer than in most modern films. A precocious two year old gets hit by a truck while chasing after a kite. That’s it, that’s the whole scene. It could have happened to anyone. The news is full of similar stories, and in fact the book was inspired by a very similar incident involving King’s youngest son, Owen. (Thankfully the real deal had a better outcome. Owen King grew up to be a gift to the writing world.)

Almost nothing of the accident is shown, although it is described secondhand in some detail in the book. All you see in the movie is a slow-motion tumble of a sneaker filled with blood. That fucks me up so much worse than that goddam severed head. The head just made me angry. Not because Charlie died, but because I felt manipulated. It felt like when I was a little kid and the boys on the playground would shove a dead bug in my face to try to make me scream. The only foreshadowing was the father finding out that the family matriarch’s grave had been vandalized and desecrated. If he had come out and told someone that the old lady’s head was taken off, then I could have shifted my mindset accordingly and it wouldn’t have seemed like a pointless punch in the face. I suppose for some people the decapitated pigeon would have done the trick, but the kid was so weird in general I honestly didn’t give it a lot of thought.

This might seem like a dumb nitpick, but I have friends who have children with life-threatening allergies, and they never go anywhere without that Epi-Pen. The child’s first complete sentence is invariably, “Does this have nuts?” I couldn’t really get into the pathos of Charlie or her parents when I was shaking my head and saying, “You’re really going to let her eat that chocolate bar, huh? All chocolate has traces of nuts. Oh look, now she’s eating chocolate cake. Can’t imagine what’s going to happen next. CHARLIE WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOUR PARENTS???”

After reading the synopsis of the rest of the movie on Wikipedia, I found out that the decapitation was a necessary plot point. Apparently everyone in that family gets their heads cut off as a sacrifice to some demon. If there had been more supernatural occurrences from the beginning, more foreshadowing to indicate that this was a possession movie, then Charlie’s death would have seemed less outlandish. But as I said, the impression is given that this story is taking place in the real world, and there aren’t enough demonic manifestations to either suspend disbelief or maintain my interest. It’s funny to say that the presence of the supernatural would have made the scene MORE believable, but it would have at least provided a rationale for the bizarre series of accidents that lead to Charlie’s death.

My takeaways from this experience were twofold: make your reader care enough or interested enough to keep them engaged, and keep. it. simple. If you have to create a weird unbelievable scenario in which to kill someone off, be johnny-on-the-spot with an explanation. If you wait until the end, you’ve waited too long.

Agree? Disagree? Did you see Hereditary? What did you think of it?