Every household develops traditions that make perfect sense internally and sound unhinged when explained aloud.
Ours includes Hereditary.
It lays within a larger holiday atmosphere: finishing a semester, putting up the Christmas tree, ordering holiday cards, baking cookies, baking oatmeal cookies, traveling to San Antonio and Wichita, and building a gingerbread version of the treehouse from the movie. Somewhere in that collection of domestic rituals sits one of my favorite horror movies.
It should not fit. That is part of why it does.
Hereditary is interested in family, grief, inheritance, the structures passed down without consent, and the terror of realizing that a household contains forces its members do not fully understand. Christmas traditions are usually built to produce warmth and continuity. Pairing the two creates a strange but honest tension. Family life contains comfort and history, but history is not always comforting.
Over time, the film stopped belonging only to itself. It became attached to a season, a room, a person beside me, the smell of baking, and whatever version of our household existed that year. This is how traditions form. Repetition wraps new meaning around an unchanged object.
Originally, we saw A24 release a cast iron mold of the treehouse from the movie for gingerbread. It clicked instantly. The tradition was born just like that.
Now Hereditary does not only signify family. It signifies return.
That may be the oddest and most useful thing about tradition: it can domesticate almost anything. Also, it’s just a straight up fantastic and gripping movie.