Hey y’all! It’s time I get a little personal again. Not too much, though! I’ve gotta keep my therapist fed. As you may know, I’ve taken to writing personal essays recently. Above all things, I like that it offers an opportunity to reflect on how I identify with the films I love. Every Skeleton Key entry will (hopefully) spotlight a different person with their own key for you. This a little different from my usual newsletters, but that’s the point. Let’s have a little fun, dissect some horror, and even ourselves if the mask fits.
Mental health is a common topic in the horror genre. Is it always represented well? No. However, those films have helped many fans process their own mental qualms. Henri Magdalen, a horror Substacker and reviewer, and I look at Ari Aster’s Hereditary to discuss our own.
We Are All Ghosts
Avery Coffey
“Why do you like horror?”
“You don’t get scared?”
“How can you watch it without having a nightmare?”
These could very well be filler questions to keep awkwardness from intruding on small talk. But my answer is the same every time. Mainly because I know they’re not looking for the real answer. They don’t want to know that I cry watching Hereditary because death has wedged itself in my family tree, too.
It’s easy to face those tough emotions when they’re underlying themes to a movie about the occult. At the time I first watched his film, Hereditary, I had experienced two familial deaths within a year of each other. Both to cancer and both were women that glued holidays together with ribbon and icing. How can I be scared of horror movies when reality is terrifying? The final girl escaped death, but my family can’t. Horror is fiction, but cancer isn’t. Watching this family mourn two deaths at once, there were times that I envied them and times that I saw myself in them.
The world doesn’t stop for mourners. It didn’t stop for the Graham family, and it didn’t stop for me. But at least they could scream. At least Annie could hole herself away in her studio and avoid face-to-face encounters. Ultimately, she was using her work, her art, to distract her from her mother’s death, because boxing up your grief to collect dust in your attic is easier than looking at it every day. So, though I couldn’t kick and scream and agonizingly lay with that emotion, I could go to that cramped dorm party, sit in front of my to-do list checking boxes, and spend more money on the stuff that keeps the attic door locked.
With enough force, enough pressure, the wood frame and hinges began to split. Annie started seeing dead people, and I eventually could too. She saw her mother in the darkened corner of her studio. I saw my grandmother’s humor in my friend’s jokes. I hear my aunt’s compassion in my partner’s voice. I never considered ghosts to be pieces of a person that you used to know: dead or alive. Ghosts can be a sticky note reminding you of what you loved them for. And how their light can keep shining through all that breathes life into the world. And I guess, in a way, that’s kind of what Hereditary is about. I mean, Peter’s grandmother definitely passed something down.
Inevitability of the Anxious Mind
Henri Magdalen
The first time I watched Hereditary, I told my then-boyfriend I’d have to stay the night.
It was June of 2022, only a couple months before we’d break up. I was grappling with my mental health. I’d started taking anxiety medication, but I was still having panic attacks.
This one had been building throughout the film, but only really settled in at the end, when Joan crowns Charlie-Peter-Paimon and renounces the trinity.
I’ve seen Hereditary four times now; it’ll be five this week, when it re-releases in IMAX, and one of my consistent favorite things about it is its artful circumvention of catharsis.
The film builds and builds and builds—it makes you question your perception of its reality and the characters’ perception of their reality. By the end of the movie, violins crescendo-ing, we’re standing there with Peter in the treehouse, taking in the bells and worshippers. Everything stops except the sound of cultists shouting “hail Paimon!”—and where there should be release, Hereditary only offers us intertwined inevitability and discomfort. There’s no narrative catharsis. You panic instead of breathe.
I’m hesitant to claim that I like horror movies because of my anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. That feels reductive, and I worry it would somehow mischaracterize both the OCD and the horror. The two run parallel, though, occasionally dipping into the same pools.
Movies like Hereditary superimpose my anxiety on something outside of myself. They offer a respite from internal anxiety, instead cultivating dread through artfully cohesive narratives. Hereditary lets me recognize my own anxiety in a film form. It’s eerie and a bit panic-inducing to be confronted with anxieties like that, and it seems counterintuitive that the discomfort would make me feel more comfortable in my own brain.
But it does. Hereditary is about inevitability, and maybe that appeals to my anxious mind. Or maybe it’s just the depiction of spiraling anxiety in a film form.
Either way, I’m grateful for it. There’s no catharsis in Hereditary’s narrative. When it makes me panic, though, it at least moves me outside my own anxiety and lets me breathe.