Genre research; Hereditary

  In order to get a better understanding of the genre that we chose, my group and I watched and evaluated a couple of horror films. One of movies that my group and I researched for our project was the 2018 horror movie Hereditary. Directed by Ari Aster, Hereditary follows a grieving family being haunted by tragic and disturbing occurrences. The reason we chose this movie was because Hereditary was one of the highest grossing horror movies of 2018 and was one of A24s most successful films. We noticed a variety of camera shots, angles, and movements throughout the film. For angles, there were eye-level angles, low and high angles, and oblique angles. The movie also used a variety of movements such as zooms, tracking shots, tilts and pans. The shots used in the movie were long shots, three shots and medium shots. Many times, throughout the film were close-ups and two shots used. Over the shoulder shots were used quite often during conversation scenes.
Hereditary also had a very interesting mis en scene. The costumes were regular street clothes and didn’t really stand out too much. The lighting in the movie started out bright in the beginning of the movie because many of the scenes were shot in the daytime but by the final act, the lighting was very dark, and it was almost hard to see. The acting was great in the movie. There were some very great and impactful monologues and the actors and actresses did a very good job at showing their grief. The make-up in the film was pretty plain and didn’t make much of an impact unless an injury was shown. The injuries that were created in this film were very bloody and gruesome. The make-up was also very well done and the injuries that were displayed in the film looked very real. There were many props used throughout the movie, the most important props were the dollhouses that the main protagonist creates that help to tell part of the story and a journal that helped to establish a malevolent entity. The settings were pretty basic. The movie took place in a house, a high school, a treehouse, and a couple of other less relevant locations such as a craft store. The main sound used in the film was dialogue but there were also a couple of other sounds. The movie had an amazing original score which made for a more impactful ending. A couple of non-diegetic sounds played throughout the movie such as the quiet mouth clicking noise that would occasionally be played as well as the sound of injuries being created or messed with. There was incidental music and ambient music played and, in some scenes, there was no sound at all which helped to heighten tensions.
The movie followed many of the common horror movie elements but also had a lot of original elements of its own. The movie followed the element of an evil force arriving to a family. The movie also had a fair amount of violence and tension throughout its run-time. Hereditary did an excellent job at provoking fear and creating an unsettling tone. An element of the movie that I did enjoy was the that the film kept a consistent tone throughout its runtime and I really liked that the movie didn’t and rely on jump-scares to create the feeling of fear and relied on the actual plot to create that feeling. The elements that I didn’t like in the movie was the violence. There was a lot of violence in the movie which is okay but a lot of it seemed unnecessary and prolonged. Overall, I think that this was a great horror movie and helped me to understand how to make a movie fall into the horror genre.