Sunday, June 23, 2019

Putting the "Fun" back in Funeral




Hidey-ho, everybody and welcome to another edition of WTFHM! Now, as you might’ve noticed, I’ve been gone for a while. Went on a little vaca. Got a little sun, etc, etc. Well, to be honest, it was only part vaca. I was visiting a very good friend and fellow author Roxanne Rue – who, by the way, has a new series of very steamy novels – the “Like a Demon” series. I’m aware that if you’re reading this, then in all likelihood, you’re probably going “Ew. Boys and girls kissing. Gross! Bring on the scary already!”

Well, first of all, it’s not boys kissing girls. It’s Demons kissing girls…and boys…and other demons. And it’s demons! Dude. Tell me demons aren’t a little scary.

Anyway, do yourself a favor and check her stuff out. Book one is out now and Book two will be out in July!



Okay, so enough shameless plugging. On with the show:



Hereditary starring Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Ann Dowd, Alex Wolff and Milly Shapiro.




Sooo...

Once upon a time in Utah, there was a miniature artist named Annie (Collette). You know, a person that creates tiny versions of things – houses, people, and so on and so forth. Annie has a husband, Steve (Byrne) and her two kids Peter (Wolff) and Charlie (Shapiro). At the beginning of this story, the family is dealing with the death of Annie’s mom.




From there, we’re kind of taken through Annie’s way of dealing with her mother’s death and how that relates to the mental illness in her family. On top of that, she is worried about her daughter Charlie, who (and this is an assumption) has some kind of mental deficiency that they never really speak of. What we do know is that she suffers from a severe nut allergy...which will be pretty important information later.




All right, so Annie’s son Peter wants to go to a party. Annie tells him to take his kid sister because she needs to engage in more social activities. Peter doesn’t want to because, well, who really wants to take their little sister to a party with them. He relents under pressure from his mom, however and takes Charlie to the party.




At the party, Peter is hanging out with his friends and leaves Charlie to her own devices at the party. Everything is relatively okay until Charlie gets hold of a cake that has nuts in it. Charlie goes into anaphylaxis and Peter freaks out.




Peter immediately gets her into the car and starts driving like a bat out of hell for the hospital. During the ride, Charlie sticks her head out of the window in an effort to get air just as Peter swerves the car to avoid a dead deer on the road. The car comes a little too close to a big telephone pole and…




Yeah. Yeah. That happens.

We’re taken into this moment when Peter is just sitting in shock in the car, too afraid to move and too afraid to look in the back seat. His stunned reaction is palpable.



Peter, still in shock, drives home, parks the car in his parent’s driveway and goes to his room where he waits in his bed for his mother to find the body of his sister the next morning...her head still on the highway.




Okay, so, here we are with an already grief stricken family now having to deal with the loss of one of their children. Annie’s relationship with Steve becomes strained and she starts acting really cold towards Peter, which, if we’re being honest, I wouldn’t say I personally condoned...but I kind of understood the logic.




In the meantime, Peter is being plagued with visions of Charlie and other strange occurrences...like creepy reflections and such.




Annie goes to group therapy and there she meets a woman by the name of Joan (Dowd). Among all the other problems she’s having while she’s mourning, she confides in Joan about how she used to sleepwalk in times of stress and one time she woke up with her and Peter covered in paint thinner and a lit match in her hands.




Joan tells her that she should try doing a seance to talk to Charlie and that might make her feel better. Annie decides, hey, that’ll be a great idea and convinces Steve and Peter to help her perform the seance. It doesn’t go very well.




After everything goes all poltergeist and Annie is briefly possessed by Charlie, Annie decides that the ghost of her child is now malevolent. Annie takes Charlie’s sketchbook and goes over to Joan’s for answers. 



Joan isn’t home, but Annie notices the welcome mat that looks a lot like the one that her mother used to craft. She goes back home and finds a box of her mother’s things which is full of photos of her and her mom and bunch of other women doing really witchy things. She also finds some information on a demon named Paimon. As you can imagine, Annie’s a little freaked out. But wait! There’s more!

She does a little more snooping and finds her mother’s headless body in the attic.




Yeah. Her mother’s. HEADLESS BODY. IN. THE. GEE-DARN. ATTIC.

Okay, so Annie flips out. As would anyone.




Meanwhile, Peter’s body is taken over while he’s at school. Well...taken over and abused. He ends up with a broken nose and is sent home from school.




Annie in the meantime tells Steve what she found. She shows him her mother’s body and tells her that according to the “Have you heard the good word from Paimon” reading material that Joan has, they needed to burn Charlie’s book to stop all the haunting.

Steve thinks she’s crazy and accuses her of desecrating her mother’s grave and such. So, Annie takes Charlie’s sketch book and throws it into the their fireplace and…




No more Steve.




So, Peter, who was asleep through all this, wakes up to find his mother is trying to kill him. She chases him through the house and into the attic where they find a whole demon ritual going on with Joann and all of gramma’s buddies.




Yeah. So. Believe it or not THIS is about the time when things get weird.




Under the spell of the ritual, Annie ends up levitating to the top of the room and gets beheaded with piano wire.




Freaked, Peter tries to escape by jumping out of the window. You’d think he was dead, but nah. A light enters him and wakes up. He, then, ends up in the family treehouse where the bodies of his mother, grandmother and sister are all posed so that they’re kneeling before an altar in front a big congregation of demon worshippers. They pull Peter in and crown him the new incarnation of the demon Paimon.











What was the point? Well, there were a lot of points to this movie as it deals with death and guilt and mental illness and demon worship, but I think a good friend of mine put it best by describing this flick as kind of like a Lars Von Trier/Cronenberg kind of movie in that the horror is kind of incidental. The true scary in this kind of movie comes from the depth of the story. In other words, this is the kind of horror movie that doesn’t really scare you - like a slasher movie or your atypical ghost story might, but instead, you end up being left with big, dirty footprints on your soul.




Does it get a jewel? Yeah, I’ll give it a jewel. I did like it, I thought it was particularly well done considering the fact that the story could have easily have been convoluted and confusion to the point of nonsense. I would have liked the story to lean more on the side of finding out what the heck Paimon is and what it might mean for the world to have a human/demon walking around the earth, but, my guess is that this was not the point of Hereditary. As stated before, the horror is merely incidental.




Okay, so next week's movie is The Hidden...which sounds like a movie I've seen before, but Alexander Skarsgard is in it and I've seen very few things outside of True Blood with him in it, so we're working under the assumption that I haven't seen it. See you next week!

 O~
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