When The Witch hit Sundance a few years ago it not only took the chilly audience by storm, it set the stage for what many thought was the scariest movie of the year. Since then, I’d say Park City has been the place to be for splashy new genre flicks of that nature, and this year the talk of the town was Hereditary, which the fine folks at A24 quickly snapped up seeing $$$ in its future release.
From what I’ve heard and what I see from this footage, this is easily the most grim and violent of some of the other Sundance horrors out there. I’m seriously regretting not catching up with it while I was there. Here’s the synopsis:
When Ellen, the matriarch of the Graham family, passes away, her daughter’s family begins to unravel cryptic and increasingly terrifying secrets about their ancestry. The more they discover, the more they find themselves trying to outrun the sinister fate they seem to have inherited. Making his feature debut, writer-director Ari Aster unleashes a nightmare vision of a domestic breakdown that exhibits the craft and precision of a nascent auteur, transforming a familial tragedy into something ominous and deeply disquieting, and pushing the horror movie into chilling new terrain with its shattering portrait of heritage gone to hell.
Hereditary opens June 8th.
