Milly Shapiro as Charlie in “Hereditary” (2018)
Hereditary, explained: the family’s grief is the disguise. Underneath it, a cult spends decades bringing a demon, King Paimon, into a human body. The grandmother groomed her granddaughter as Paimon’s first vessel, the girl’s death was the ritual that freed him, and the ending crowns her brother as the demon’s permanent, male host.
I want to take this film apart the way I would with my students, because Hereditary rewards it. It plays fair. Almost every answer is on screen the first time you watch. You just do not know yet what you are looking at.
What is Hereditary actually about?
Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018, A24) is about a demon-worshipping cult’s long plan to give King Paimon a male body, and about a family that never realises it has been the cult’s project for two generations. On the surface it is a story of mourning. Underneath, every death is a step in a ritual.
This is why I call Hereditary a modern Rosemary’s Baby. Both films tell the same story: a cult bringing a demon into our world, hidden behind something disarmingly ordinary. In Polanski’s film the disguise is a pair of eccentric, harmless-seeming elderly neighbours who turn out to have arranged the birth of the Antichrist. In Hereditary the disguise is doubled. First there is a mother’s depression and grief, so painfully real that we read everything through it. Then there is, once again, a circle of sweet, kindly old people. Aster baits us with those smiling old ladies, and the twist is that they are the ones who let the demon in.
Opening on a grieving mother is the first act of misdirection. The family tragedy is the cover story laid over the occult plot. We spend most of the running time asking “is she losing her mind?”, which is exactly the wrong question, and the film knows it.
What happens in Hereditary? The plot, explained simply
The film opens with the death of the family’s secretive grandmother. Her daughter, a miniatures artist named Annie, feels more relief and guilt than sorrow; her strange, withdrawn thirteen-year-old granddaughter seems to be the only one who truly grieves. Through a chain of “accidents”, the family is dismantled one member at a time, until the teenage son is possessed and crowned by the grandmother’s cult.
Here is the chain, in order:
1. The funeral and the grief group. Among the mourners are strangers who smile a little too warmly. At a support group the mother confesses her history: a father who starved himself in a psychotic depression, and a brother who hanged himself, leaving a note accusing their mother of trying to “put people inside him”. There she meets a warm older woman who befriends her.
2. The party. The mother makes her son take his little sister to a party. The girl, who has a nut allergy, eats cake with nuts and goes into anaphylactic shock. Racing to the hospital, the son swerves to avoid a dead deer in the road, and his sister, leaning out of the window for air, is decapitated by a telephone pole. In shock, he drives home, goes to bed, and leaves her body for his mother to find in the morning.
3. The séance. The kindly friend teaches the mother how to contact her dead daughter. It “works”, and from then on something else is in the house.
4. The discovery. The mother finds photo albums showing the grandmother beside the kindly friend, and a book about Paimon. A phone call tells her the grandmother’s grave has been desecrated; later the headless body turns up in the attic.
5. The collapse. The mother tries to burn her daughter’s sketchbook, believing that sacrificing herself will break the curse. Instead her husband bursts into flames.
6. The coronation. The possessed mother pursues her son through the house. He leaps from the attic window, something rises in his body, and it walks to the treehouse, where the naked members of the cult kneel before it.
Was Charlie’s death planned? What happened to Charlie in Hereditary?
Yes. The daughter’s death was planned, not accidental. The telephone pole that kills her bears Paimon’s sigil, and the whole sequence is the cult’s way of releasing the demon from a body it never meant to keep.
The key to the film is that the girl we meet was never quite a girl. Aster has described the film as the story of a long-lived ritual seen from the side of the people being used for it,[1] and on my reading the grandmother prepared Paimon’s place in her from the start, so in a real sense the child we think we know never existed. That is why she feels so off from the first frame: the drawings, the bird she decapitates with scissors, the way she does not belong to her own family. She is the grandmother’s project, the one child the mother let her own mother get close to.
But Paimon, in the film’s mythology, needs a male host to reach his full power. A girl’s body is a temporary vessel. So the girl has to die, and the method has to be specific. Look at the chain of “coincidences”: the nut cake at a party where, conveniently, no adult checks; the dead deer in the road; the pole marked with the sigil standing exactly where the car swerves. And look at what links every death in the film: the severed head. The pigeon, the girl, the grandmother’s corpse in the attic, and finally the mother. Decapitation is the film’s signature for Paimon.
People also ask whether she “comes back”. In a way, she does. The tongue click that was her private tic returns at the end from her brother’s mouth, and the cult hails the new host by her name. What comes back is not the girl but the thing that wore her.
Who is King Paimon in Hereditary, and what did the cult want?
Paimon is a king of Hell drawn from real occult literature: he appears in the Ars Goetia, part of the seventeenth-century grimoire known as the Lesser Key of Solomon, as one of the spirits a magician could summon.[2] The film adopts him as “one of the eight kings of Hell” and invents its own rules around him, chiefly that he must take a male human host, and that whoever offers him one will be rewarded with knowledge and wealth.
So the cult’s goal is simple, and patient: give Paimon a male body from the grandmother’s bloodline. The mother’s brother was the first attempt, and his suicide note (“she was trying to put people inside him”) is not madness. It is a confession of what was being done to him. That attempt failed. The father was never a candidate, since he married into the family and is not of the blood. The girl was the stopgap vessel. The son is the prize.
The mother is not in the cult. She is its victim and its unknowing instrument: her grief, rage and guilt are fuel the cult uses to steer her toward exactly the actions it needs.
Who is Joan in Hereditary?
Joan is the cult’s operative on the ground: the kindly older woman from the grief group, the grandmother’s close friend and fellow cult member, posing as a fellow mourner. Her friendship is the trap.
Played with great warmth, she is the Rosemary’s Baby type exactly, the friendly, chatty older woman bearing comfort, and the misdirection works on us as well as on the mother. She teaches the séance, which is the door the cult needs opened. She chants a strange incantation across the schoolyard at the son. And the photo album the mother discovers later, showing this woman beside the grandmother, is the moment the whole film flips.
What does “Zazas, Zazas, Nasatanada Zazas” mean? Satony and Liftoach Pandemonium
“Zazas, Zazas, Nasatanada Zazas” is a real occult formula. Aleister Crowley used it in his 1909 working to summon the demon Choronzon and in his self-initiation rite, and occult tradition reads it as a call to open the gates of Hell.[4] In Hereditary it works as a summoning: the cult reaching through the walls of the house toward the son.
The other searched-for words are written faintly on the walls, where you only notice them on a second viewing. “Satony” and “Liftoach Pandemonium” belong to the same incantatory vocabulary. “Liftoach” is commonly read as Hebrew for “to open”, so the phrase reads as “open Pandemonium”, Pandemonium being Milton’s name for the capital of Hell in Paradise Lost. I would treat “Satony” more carefully. It functions in the film as a word of invocation alongside “Zazas”, and I would not trust anyone who gives you a confident dictionary definition of it.
What matters more than etymology is function. These words are the cult’s handwriting inside a home whose family never sees it, which is the whole film in miniature. And “desecrated”, the other word people look up, is simply what the cemetery tells the mother on the phone: her mother’s grave has been disturbed.
Hereditary ending explained: the treehouse and Paimon’s coronation
The ending is a coronation. The son’s body, now fully occupied by Paimon, climbs into the treehouse, where the cult has built a shrine around the girl’s severed, crowned head, with the headless bodies of the grandmother and the mother kneeling before it. The kindly friend from the grief group crowns him, addressing him as “Charlie” and naming him King Paimon.
Why does the son finally break? Paimon needs the host’s will to give way. The school scene, where an invisible force slams the boy’s face into his desk, is the demon trying the door. The final night, with his mother crawling on the ceiling and severing her own head with wire, is the door kicked in. When the son jumps from the attic window, the trauma empties him, and a small light drifts into his body. He stands up, clicks his tongue, and walks to the treehouse.
The cult calls him by his dead sister’s name because that is the only identity Paimon has worn among them. The demon spent thirteen years in the girl’s body, and the name has transferred with the occupant. The cult’s address, hailing King Paimon as one of the eight kings of Hell and offering him the crown, mirrors the final scene of Rosemary’s Baby almost beat for beat: the smiling old believers gather around the newborn ruler and proclaim his reign. “Hail, Paimon.”
No survivor, no doubt: this is the cult’s happy ending.
The hidden meaning of Hereditary
Now that the puzzle is solved, I want to be honest about what kind of film this is, because much writing about it gets this wrong. It is often described as a profound film “about grief” or “about inherited trauma”, as if the demon were a metaphor. I do not think it is. Hereditary does not work like most “deep” films. It tells itself through plot. Paimon’s arrival in the world is literally the solution to the mystery, not a spiritual revelation you feel your way toward. The film is a puzzle, and both the pleasure and the horror are in the solving.
That is not a weakness. It is Aster’s method, and it is exactly why an explainer is the right way to meet this film: it wants to be decoded. Its meaning is its mechanism. The grief is real, and Toni Collette plays it with ferocious truth, but grief is the disguise, not the subject. The subject is a plan, and its lineage is Rosemary’s Baby. So my reading of what the film is really about comes down to this:
Evil in Hereditary does not break into the family from outside. It is patiently invited in by the nicest people in the room, and the family’s own grief is the costume it wears on the way through the door.
The film never states this outright. It is carried by the staging, by who the camera teaches us to trust, and by the slow reveal that the kindest faces were the trap. And if I had to carry one line onto set, the beacon that keeps every scene honest, it would be shorter:
The devil does not arrive in a storm. He arrives wearing the face of a grieving family and a circle of harmless old ladies.
How Aster makes you look the wrong way (the craft of misdirection)
As a filmmaker, what I notice is that the misdirection lives in the form as much as in the script, pointing your attention at the most sympathetic faces in the frame so you never think to suspect them.
Start with the opening shot. The camera glides across the mother’s workshop and pushes into one of her model houses: the son’s bedroom. Without a cut, the miniature becomes the real room, and the father walks in to wake him. Before a single line of dialogue, Aster has told us the theme. These people are figures in a model, arranged by an unseen hand. They were never free. The cult was holding them from the beginning, and the mother’s art, recreating her own life in tiny rooms, is a sad echo of a woman who thinks she is the one doing the arranging.
Then watch how the camera frames the house. Aster favours static, symmetrical compositions and long holds, often looking into rooms as if from outside, like a dollhouse with its wall removed. The stillness makes you scan the frame, and he rewards the scanning with figures standing in dark corners, smiling, that you may not consciously register. The cult is literally in the background of the family’s life, and the composition puts it there.
Sound does the same work. The girl’s tongue click is planted as a character tic and paid off as plot: later it marks Paimon’s presence, in the dark of the house at night and finally from the son’s mouth.
The biggest trick, though, is casting the ordinary. Polanski hid Satanists in a nosy elderly couple; Aster hides them in a grief group and a crowd of nodding funeral guests. Every choice of performance and framing teaches us to trust the old ladies and fear the mother, and the final shock is realising we were watching the wrong person the whole time.
Seeing that second film running underneath the first, the one the camera and the staging are quietly telling you, is a skill, and it can be learned.
If you want to learn to see that second film, the choices a director makes that an audience feels but never notices, that is exactly what I teach in Understanding Films: Decode the Invisible Meaning.
Quick answers
Does the dad die in Hereditary, and why?
Yes. The mother believes destroying her daughter’s sketchbook will sacrifice herself and break the curse, but when she throws it into the fire, it is her husband who burns. On my reading, he was never of the bloodline and of no use to the cult, so the film simply removes him.
What disease does the girl in Hereditary have?
In the story, the daughter has a severe nut allergy, which is what triggers the fatal car ride. Her distinctive look comes from the actress herself, Milly Shapiro, not from the story.
Is Hereditary based on a true story?
No. The cult and the possession are fiction, though Paimon himself comes from real occult literature. Aster has spoken about drawing on painful feelings and a run of blows that struck people he loves,[3] which may be why the drama feels so real.
Who is in the cast of Hereditary?
Toni Collette plays the mother, Alex Wolff the son, Milly Shapiro the daughter, Gabriel Byrne the father, and Ann Dowd the kindly friend from the grief group.