Ari Aster pitched his first feature as a family drama and kept the word horror out of the room. Eight years after Toni Collette led it to an A24 box-office record, Hereditary is a reference point for a whole wave of studio horror, and its director now has a prequel script he says he may never shoot.

Hereditary opens with a funeral in northern Utah. Annie Graham (Toni Collette), an artist who builds detailed miniature scenes, buries her mother Ellen, a secretive woman she had been estranged from for years and who nevertheless took a central role in raising Annie’s younger child. At home are her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne), a psychiatrist who tries to keep the peace, their 16-year-old son Peter (Alex Wolff) and 13-year-old Charlie (Milly Shapiro), a withdrawn girl who seems the most affected by her grandmother’s death. Soon after, Steve takes a call telling him that Ellen’s grave has been vandalised, and decides not to tell his wife.

The first great rupture comes at a teenage party. Annie insists that Peter take his sister along; left on her own, Charlie eats a slice of cake containing walnuts and goes into anaphylactic shock. Racing her to hospital, Peter swerves to avoid a dead deer on the road, and the accident that follows kills Charlie. In shock, he drives home without telling anyone, and it is Annie who discovers what happened the next morning. Ari Aster places this event early in the film, at a point where most horror stories would still be setting up their rules.

What follows is a family coming apart under guilt and blame. Annie turns her bitterness on Peter, Steve tries to mediate between them, and Annie finds an unexpected ally in Joan (Ann Dowd), a warm stranger from a bereavement support group who offers to teach her how to contact the dead through a séance. Strange things begin to happen in the house, and when Annie goes through Ellen’s belongings she finds photographs and books suggesting that her mother’s private life was very different from the one the family knew. The final stretch, which this piece will not spell out, is the reason the film still divides the people who have seen it.

A family drama pitched without the word horror

Ari Aster, born in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1986 and raised between New York and England, arrived at Hereditary through short films. At the AFI Conservatory he wrote and directed The Strange Thing About the Johnsons (2011), a deliberately provocative short about an abusive family that leaked online and became a calling card, followed by Munchausen (2013). The attention those shorts generated brought him to PalmStar Media and then to A24, which greenlit Hereditary as his first feature, made on a budget of around $10 million.

Aster has said he pitched the project as a family tragedy and was careful not to describe it as a horror film, worried that the label might cost him the funding. He is an admirer of domestic drama, and the script was built around family dynamics, trauma and mourning before anything supernatural enters the frame. Among his influences he named Brian De Palma‘s Carrie (1976) and Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989). He has described the film as two halves that cannot be separated: a story that begins as a family tragedy, keeps going down that road and gradually turns into a full nightmare.

The supernatural layer is not invented from scratch. The mythology at its centre comes from real occult literature, the grimoires of European demonology such as The Lesser Key of Solomon, which describe a crowned demon king who commands legions of spirits and is announced by trumpets and cymbals. That detail found its way into the music: the score brings in trumpets at the climax as a direct nod to the old texts. For anyone curious about the film’s mythology, those old texts are the place to start.

Building a dollhouse in Utah

Principal photography began in February 2017 in Utah. The exteriors of the Graham house and the treehouse were shot in Summit County, the cemetery sequence at Larkin Sunset Gardens in Sandy, and the school scenes at West High School and the Utah State Fairpark in Salt Lake City. Every other interior, including both versions of the treehouse, was built from scratch on a soundstage. Because the walls of those sets could be removed, the camera could be placed much further back than a real house would allow, and that is the documented origin of the film’s dollhouse look, a visual idea that rhymes with Annie’s profession.

Aster surrounded himself with people he knew. The cinematographer, Pawel Pogorzelski, was a friend from the AFI Conservatory who had shot several of his shorts and would go on to shoot Midsommar. Jennifer Lame and Lucian Johnston edited the film, and the saxophonist and composer Colin Stetson wrote the score, produced with Rob Kleiner. Judy Collins’s 1967 recording of Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides, Now plays over the end credits. The shoot also left one theatre anecdote: Aster later recalled that Alex Wolff warned him not to say the name of Shakespeare’s Scottish play on set, that he said it anyway, and that a light burst during the next scene.

The production was not as smooth as the finished film suggests. In a 2023 interview the producer Lars Knudsen said that Aster had not held final cut, and that the financier who did, later identified as the producer Kevin Frakes, clashed with the director over the edit. Knudsen described the experience as unpleasant and said he would undo it if he could. He and Aster went on to found the production company Square Peg in 2019, which has produced Aster’s later films and those of other directors.

Toni Collette and the Graham family

Toni Collette, the Australian actress best known at the time for Muriel’s Wedding and The Sixth Sense, was one of the first people Aster approached for Annie. By her own account she was reluctant to make a horror film, and what changed her mind was how grounded the script was in the way families work and in the experience of loss. The role brought her best actress awards from the Gotham Awards, the Chicago Film Critics Association and several regional critics’ groups, plus nominations at the Critics’ Choice and Independent Spirit Awards. No Academy Award nomination followed, an omission that is still cited whenever the Oscars’ treatment of horror comes up.

Around her, Aster cast actors with shared history. Gabriel Byrne and Alex Wolff had already worked together on the HBO series In Treatment before playing father and son here. Milly Shapiro, a Broadway actress, was 14 when she was cast as Charlie in her first film role; Aster has said he had left Charlie’s personality more ambiguous on the page than the others and was relieved the moment he saw her audition. Ann Dowd plays Joan, Mallory Bechtel plays Peter’s classmate Bridget, Pat Barnett Carr appears uncredited as Ellen, and Aster himself voices Annie’s art dealer on the phone.

Sundance, an A24 record and a D+

Hereditary premiered in the Midnight section of the Sundance Film Festival on January 21, 2018, and its trailer arrived on January 30. That spring the trailer became a small news story of its own when a cinema in Western Australia accidentally played it before a family screening of Peter Rabbit on Anzac Day, in front of an audience that included dozens of children. A24 released the film in the United States on June 8, 2018, and Entertainment Film Distributors brought it to British cinemas a week later.

The commercial numbers made it a landmark for its distributor. Opening in 2,964 cinemas, the widest release A24 had attempted at that point, it took $13.6 million in its first weekend, the best opening in the company’s history until Civil War in 2024. Its takings fell by just under half in the second weekend, a gentler drop than horror usually sees, and by the end of July 2018 it had passed Lady Bird to become A24’s highest-grossing film worldwide, with more than $80 million, a record it held until Everything Everywhere All at Once in 2022.

Not everyone who bought a ticket was won over. Audiences polled by CinemaScore on opening weekend gave Hereditary a D+, and the gap between the critical response and that score became part of how the film was discussed, alongside other A24 horror titles such as The Witch and It Comes at Night. The occult turn of the final act is usually at the centre of that debate: for some viewers it makes everything that came before cohere, for others the human story was more frightening than the explanation.

Ari Aster after Hereditary, and the prequel on a shelf

Aster’s career since has moved fast and in unexpected directions. He followed Hereditary a year later with Midsommar (2019), another A24 release, then left horror behind with the surreal comedy-drama Beau Is Afraid (2023) and the neo-western satire Eddington, which competed at Cannes in 2025. His next film, Scapegoat, is scheduled to begin shooting in November 2026. Hereditary, meanwhile, keeps returning to lists of the best and scariest films of the century, and it is routinely cited as a reference point for the so-called elevated horror that followed.

In June 2026, during a question-and-answer session at the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles, Aster said he had already written a prequel to Hereditary but that the timing never seemed right to make it, adding that he did not know where a prequel would lead. He gave no details about the story and no production plans have been announced, so for now the script is a curiosity rather than a project. It does show that the world of the Grahams, and of Ellen before them, is still on its creator’s mind eight years after the first film.

Seen from 2026, Hereditary reads as a debut that announced most of the concerns its director has kept returning to: families as inheritances nobody asked for, mothers and children, and the uneasy line between mental illness and something worse. Whether its final act lands as a revelation or as a step too far is still the question that splits audiences, and that argument is part of why it remains one of the most discussed horror films of its generation. For anyone who has not seen it, the warning attached to that D+ is fair: this is not a fun-house scare, it is a family drama that refuses to let its characters go.