Hereditary explanation and some Easter Eggs you probably dind´t paid attention to.

Royale With Cheese
May 3, 2020
5 min read

So, I´m a huge fan of Ari Aster and I love his work, Midsommar and Hereditary are some really good horror movies. And as I was watching Hereditary for the third time the other day, I realized most of the people didn´t follow the movie quite well and also, the fact that there are lots of details in the movie which seem to be irrelevant but in fact, they are super important.

The film starts with the family getting ready to go to the grandmother´s funeral, later in the movie it is shown that the grandmother was into demonology and spiritualism. Annie Graham, played by the MARVELLOUS Toni Collete, works as a miniature artist and after her mother´s death, she starts seeing her in her workshop. Steve, Annie´s husband, gets a call for the cemetery saying that the grandmother's tomb as been desecrated but he doesn´t tell Annie as he doesn´t want her to freak out.

Annie´s son, Peter, asks her to go to a party, where he plans to smoke some pot, and she tells him he can just go if he takes his younger sister who is allergic to walnuts to the party. He takes Charlie, his younger sister, to the party and tells her to wait for her in the living room with the other kids because he is going to another room to smoke. Charlie starts to eat some cake and turns out the cake was full of walnuts, she starts having trouble breathing and looks for her brothers. Peter takes her to the hospital and in their way, Charlie gets his head out of the car to breathe or try to, some fresh air and she gets beheaded by some post in the road.

Charlie´s death makes the whole family break apart and Annie starts to attend some workshops for people who are struggling with grieving. There she will meet Joan, an older woman who lost her son and grandson and also attends those workshops. Annie continuous to see her mother and some weird things start to happen around the house.

One day, Joan invites Annie over and shows her how she can communicate with her dead grandson during a spiritualism session, Annie gets scared and leaves. As she becomes more desperate to communicate with Charlie, her dead daughter, she tries what Annie told her and wakes up the whole family to do it together. Annie´s husband, Steve, tells her to stop because she has taken things too far and starts arguing. Later, Annie will see the beheaded rotten corpse of her mother in the attic, she will tell Steve and he will accuse her of desecrated and of being crazy.

I´ve forgotten to mention but throughout the whole movie, we get told how obsessed Annie´s mom, Ellen, was Charlie being a boy and with a certain demon called Paimon, who is male. Another really important thing to mention is the fact that Joan had a doormat exactly the same as some doormats Elle did for her family members.

Throughout the whole movie, we can see Peter suffering a lot and being scared of his mom, as she´s a sleepwalker and she has tried to kill him several times when he was sleeping and one day at school he sees Joan, who he doesn´t know, and she says something like "Paimon, I free you from that body". Peter doesn´t pay attention to it and some days later at school, he has some weird attack and starts to hit his school desk with his own head and breaks his nose. They take him home.

Later, Annie realizes that Ellen and Joan were close friends and belong to the same cult in which they worship Paimon. And that Ellen had spent her whole life trying to offer a male host to Paimon, first Annie´s brother (which killed himself accusing his mother of "trying to put things inside of him"), later Peter, but Annie didn't allow her being close to him so Ellen didn´t succeed and later Charlie, which was a girl, and Ellen always said that she wanted Charlie to be a boy. So, Charlie was never. Charlie was Paimon waiting to be offered a male body, Peter´s body.

So, Annie tries to get rid of Charlie´s notebook in order to protect her son but as she throws the notebook to the fire her arm starts burning. Later she tells Steve, and she asks him to burn the notebook even though she is gonna die as she wants to protect Peter. Steve doesn´t accept and Annie ends up throwing the notebook herself expecting to get burned but to her surprise, the one who starts burning is Steve and dies. She first looks really shocked and then her face changed completely, she gets possessed by Paimon.

So, while Annie is getting possessed by Paimon and Steve is dying, Peter is sleeping. When he wakes up, his mother is levitating in the corner of the room but Peter doesn´t see her. He looks for his father and finds him dead, he also sees some weird naked man looking at him and his possed mother starts to run after him. Steve runs away and hides in the attic, Ellen ´s body has disappeared, possessed Annie manages to enter to the Attic and Peter throws himself out the window. Annie starts to cut her own head off. Later we can see Peter on the floor seeing her beheaded possed mother levitating and entering into the treehouse. He ends up going there too and he finds: his mother and grandmother beheaded and some random naked people kneeling. Joan crowns Peter and starts addressing him as Charlie, and then offers Paimon Peter´s body. Then all the cult members start to worship Paimon and the movie ends.

So, basically what has happened (just in case you didn´t follow) is: Ellen is a member of a cult where they worship a demon called Paimon who stays in male bodies. She tried to get Paimon in her son´s body but he ended up killing himself. She later tried again when Peter was born but Annie tried to keep her away for Peter, so Ellen didn´t succeed. Finally, Ellen will get Paimon into Charlie´s body when Charlie´s born. Years later, Ellen dies and after Charlie´s death, Joan, Ellen´s friend, approaches Annie and starts to introduce her into spiritualism in order to get Paimon inside of Peter. And finally, Paimon gets inside of Peter.

Now that I´ve already explained the movie I´ll write about some of the most interesting easter eggs or details that got unnoticed the movie has!

1. In the scene at the beginning of the movie, when Peter is smoking in the window of his room, we can see someone´s breath outside. (Probably someone from the cult).

2. Paimon´s symbol throughout the whole movie. We can see paimon´s symbol in many scenes in the movie, in Ellen´s funeral, we can see Annie wearing a necklace with the symbol. We can also see it in the road post which beheaded Charlie, which probably was organized by the cult.

3. One creepy man who was in Ellen´s funeral is also seen, naked, in the end scene. He belongs to Ellen´s cult.

4. In the scene where we can see some letters in the mailbox for a second, we can see a seance flyer, which is for a spiritist session. This means the cultists tried to get Annie before Joan approached her.