Since it’s Halloween season, streaming services are packed with horror films, and one of the best is Hereditary, writer-director Ari Aster’s (Beau is Afraid, Eddington) feature-length debut. Toni Collette stars as Annie Graham, a miniature artist who constructs highly detailed and weirdly unsettling dioramas of houses. She lives with her psychiatrist husband, Steve (Gabriel Byrne), and their son and daughter, troubled 16-year-old Peter (Alex Wolff) and just plain weird 13-year-old Charlie (Milly Shapiro).
HEREDITARY
What’s it rated? R
When? 2018
Where’s it showing? HBO Max
Aster’s film nods to horror classics like Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), and The Shining (1980), but Hereditary is really its own beast—a psychological thriller tied up with Annie’s recently dead mother, Ellen.
Collette is intense as a mother dealing with grief, worried about her increasingly disturbed children, and generally barely containing her trauma at her unspooling domestic life. Annie’s truly coming undone before our eyes. It’s a gut-wrenching performance.
There are also many deeply disturbing scenes, and I mean some batshit-crazy, didn’t-see-that-coming moments. Maybe the most unsettling horror film I’ve seen … until Aster released the equally disturbing Midsommar the following year in 2019. It’s also streaming on HBO Max, so make it a horror double feature. (127 min.) ∆
This article appears in Oct 30 – Nov 9 2025.