2018’s scariest movie

Even if you haven’t seen it, you’ve heard that Hereditary is the scariest film of 2018. Every so often, there is one horror movie that really breaks through to the mainstream, that resonates (and terrifies) a larger audience. Previously it’s been films like It Follows, The Babadook and Get Out, and this year, it is Hereditary. Like the best scary movies, to tell you too much about the plot would ruin the plot, but essentially it is about a family, headed up by Toni Collette and Gabriel Byrne, getting over the death of a grandparent. Of course, there is more to her death than it seems, and it runs through a load of horror tropes, like creepy kids, haunted houses and supernatural possession, but with a strange, unpredictable tone all of its own. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6wWKNij_1M And it is not just torture for the viewers – it seems the actors went through a hell of a lot making it as well. Alex Wolff, who plays Collette and Byrne’s son Peter, has done an interview with Vice where he says that making the film has left him having disturbing flashbacks, has stopped him from sleeping and just screwed him up generally.

“It stuck with me while we were filming, and it stuck with me well after,” Wollf told Vice. “When I started talking about it, all these flashes with all this disturbing shit I went through sorta came back in a flood. It kept me up at night to where I got into a habit of emotional masochism at that point of just trying to take in every negative feeling I could draw from”. “It’s hard to describe eloquently, it’s just a feeling. I don’t think you can go through something like this and not have some sort of PTSD afterwards”.

He also says he doesn’t remember some scenes:

“I watched it the first time and I was like, holy shit, I don’t remember shooting that scene. I’m not even kidding, I was like, what the fuck is going on? I don’t even remember that 100%, it’s strange how that could all work.”

Oh, and for the record, A Quiet Place is *actually* the best horror film of 2018.