I’m not in the habit of making excuses for the films I enjoy, but when it comes to the Paranormal Activity movies I always end up defending them. I love scary movies (after all, we’re scientifically proven to love them), especially ghost stories. I also love well-made movies. Sound design in scary movies make me giddy. Paranormal Activity has terrible sound design (part and parcel of being a found footage film). It’s gimmicky. It either takes itself too seriously or not seriously enough. It is the McDonald’s of scary movies, while Hereditary is a steakhouse.
All of that is true. But the thing that Paranormal Activity has going for it is the sheer force of not caring about being a “good movie.” And that is especially true of our main villain, the demon. This is no ordinary demon. This is a guy who knows he has to get the job done, but that’s not who he truly is inside. He’s killing people as a 9-to-5 demon, but in his heart, he is a comedian. He is a stand-up, prankster demon. This is especially true of Paranormal Activity 3, my favorite in the franchise, and the one that has the most in common with Hereditary.
Beyond here lie spoilers.
From the first Paranormal Activity movie, we know that our prankster demon is super into Katie and her family. It’s not until the third film that we know why, and like Hereditary, it’s all grandma’s fault. While some families have grandmothers who knit or bake cookies, both films feature grandmothers who get their kicks making pacts with demons. They both sport a full entourage of cultists, and both have no qualms about offering up family members to the demon in question. While Hereditary’s demon has a royal lineage, Paranormal Activity’s demon has the attitude of a monster who just graduated from Animal House.
I mean, look at how he treats the babysitter. I love the classics, but a ghost/demon thing that wears a sheet to do some haunting? That’s not the work of a demon taking his job seriously. In the same film he pranks the mom by attaching everything in the kitchen to the ceiling. That’s straight out of Old School Pranks 101. Meanwhile, King Paimon is getting down to business by beheading teenagers and possessing people (or just making that clucking noise while mom Annie is alone in the car).
A lot of the similarities in the two films come from the genre format itself, such as the pacing or the way creeping dread is used to increase tension. But some of the similarities come from the films themselves. They both play on family dynamics, they both show us occult symbols hidden in the house, and they both use the house as a kind of prison that locks the family in together for maximum damage. While Paranormal Activity doesn’t delve too far into these themes, Hereditary feasts on them.
And this is where Hereditary whollops popcorn films like Paranormal Activity: it possesses those themes and makes them as terrifying as a levitating woman sawing her head off with piano wire. From the miniature scenes of Annie’s mother’s intruding into Charlie’s infanthood to the twisted house built upon the graves of other houses, the film is thick with metaphors of family as a disease, of mental illness as an inescapable lineage, of the many ways that grief scars us permanently. Dealing with a loved one’s terminal illness, dementia and ensuing death is traumatic enough; when that loved one has sold the entire family into demonic servitude, you have Hereditary.