Horror aficionados may have guessed where things were heading with Hereditary early on. First there was that strange symbol on the dead mother’s necklace, then there was her strange book on spiritualism with a note inside. Toni Collette packs the book into a box as if to say: “I’m sure this will be of no significance to whatever weird, supernatural occurrences ensue.” Wrong!
As magnificently terrifying as Hereditary is, once the panic dies down, the conclusion feels a little familiar. It’s the cult! It’s always the cult! Invariably when it comes to these kinds of horror movies, the perpetrators turn out to be a secret bunch of malign old people. They are overwhelmingly white, they worship demons, they hold powerful positions in society, they enjoy being naked. But unlike the Republican party, they prefer to stay behind the scenes – at least until the end of the third act. You could think of them as a satanic deep state.
This cult has engineered some of the greatest atrocities in horror history. Hereditary knows its heritage. It’s clearly indebted to Rosemary’s Baby, in which Mia Farrow’s respectable neighbours turn out to be a similar cabal of evil wrinklies, pulling the strings of her nightmare pregnancy.
That was 50 years ago, and as you would expect of an organisation preoccupied with lineage, the cult has successfully perpetuated itself through the ages. Also in 1968, robed devotees were summoning Baphomet on Salisbury Plain in Hammer classic The Devil Rides Out. In 1977, they were operating behind the front of a German dance academy in Dario Argento’s Suspiria (a remake of which is on the way), and by Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) they had scaled up to masked orgies in posh country houses.
Has the cult now blown its cover? It’s all over the place: from Get Out, where it disguised itself as white country liberals, to Ben Wheatley’s Kill List, where they were straw-masked, torch-bearing pagans, possibly descendants of The Wicker Man’s islanders. In Martyrs they were a secret society of philosophers; in The Witch, a coven of crones hiding in the woods (and getting naked).
Depending on how you look at it, this current tipping of the cult’s hand could reflect a generational paranoia, a warning to today’s youth to beware of their elders, especially the naked ones. Or it could be an indication that, despite horror’s bracing new guises, the same old ideas lie underneath. As Keyser Söze might have put it after an all-night horror binge, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the next generation they were watching something new. Either way, if you read reports of my mysterious death in a freak shaving accident in the coming months, know that the cult is real, and it has silenced me.
