Hereditary

The film Hereditary provides a good medium with which to test and observe Barbara Creed's many ideas on the monstrous feminine. The movie also lends itself to interpretations based on Carol Clover's ideas of the "occult", perhaps more so than last week's film, Creature from the Black Lagoon". The film is a clear example of the "monstrous mother" trope in horror cinema.

One of the central arguments Creed utilizes is that of the "abject", the definition for which she largely borrows from Julia Kristeva's work. This abject is "the place where meaning collapses," but most importantly, it represents a boundary between the self and the "other". The corpse is the ultimate in abjection, Creed asserts. It is at once a person, and not a person at all. There are several examples in Hereditary where horror is derived from this sort of abjection. Firstly, the grandmother's open casket near the beginning of the film causes a sense of mild unease. When Charlie finds the corpse of the bird and cuts off its head, the softening of the boundary behind the clean, and the living, and the dead, morbid and dirty increases this sense of uneasiness. Later on in the film, the sight of ants crawling inside the house is horrific even before the human corpse is revealed. Ants, bugs, or rodents inside the house mean "wild", non-human creatures intruding upon the home. This intrusion constitutes a crossing of the boundary, and thus evokes unease through abjection. 

The "woman as monster" trope was also heavily at work in the film. Both Charlie and her mother are female, and they in turn serve as the doors through which the occult expresses itself in the movie. The brother and father are responsible for representing the side of "reason" in the face of the uncanny and occult. The mother, while at first skeptical, accepts the idea of the occult (communication with the dead) much more readily than the brother or father, who are resistant (the father more so than the brother).

I found it interesting that in the end, Charlie is revealed to be "Kind Paimon", who was dissatisfied with the female body he had been inhabiting. The spirit prefers male bodies, yet was stuck within a female one, limiting him. This insertion of a male spirit in a female body reinforces the role of the female as the window through which the occult is presented to viewers in these films.