Beyond the Final Girl: Hereditary and The Possessed Woman

Since its most famous iteration with 1978’s The Exorcist, the trope of the possessed woman has become a somewhat lazy narrative within the horror genre. Films like The Devil Inside and The Last Exorcism employ the notion of a woman embodying the spirit of an evil outside force to elicit easy scares and depict disturbing imagery. But in more recent offerings, alongside horror’s recent exploration of complex female characters, possessed women are more complicated to dissect. In Ari Aster’s evocative 2018 debut Hereditary, Toni Collette’s rightfully lauded turn as matriarch Annie Graham provides an interesting entry into the genre of possessed women: while the film revels in its supernatural influences and symbols, it’s an intergenerational trauma that weaves its way into Annie’s psyche and ultimately ruins her life, more so than the actual demonic forces at play. 

Hereditary’s opening scene informs us of Annie’s trauma before anything else. We’re shown the obituary from her mother Ellen’s funeral, which also tells us that Annie’s brother and father have already passed away. When Annie delivers a eulogy on her “secretive, private” mother to the group consisting mostly of strangers to her, we can sense that their relationship was fraught, without even having met Ellen. Annie and her own family, husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne), son Peter (Alex Wolff) and daughter Charlie (Millie Shapiro) appear strangely distant from each other, mostly occupying different rooms of the house and having conversations which are seemingly devoid of emotion or honesty. Just as Annie’s childhood was marked by the death of her dad and brother—and the rest of her life clearly affected by her strange, domineering mother—throughout Hereditary’s runtime she is plagued by grief, anxieties, and an unravelling state of mind that she slowly becomes convinced is a result of something supernatural.

Possessed women in horror are more often than not the antagonists; hysterically and/or demonically taunting the likeable protagonists, their erratic and disturbing behaviour driving the narrative forward. Part of the horror of the vomiting, vulgar person that The Exorcist’s Regan becomes while possessed, is due to the sweet, innocent 12-year-old girl that we expect her to be instead. In Jennifer’s Body, the possessed titular character must be destroyed by the film’s protagonist Needy (Amanda Seyfried), but Needy is ultimately punished by being admitted to a mental hospital herself. The possessed woman is often shown as repulsive, terrifying and hysterical, due to the forces taking over her body and mind. As Emily Gaudette posits, “the promise of seeing a virginal, innocent girl manipulated into something monstrous” is exciting to an audience in a genre where if a woman isn’t the victim, she’s often the monstrous-feminine, posing a threat to the equilibrium fought for by the protagonist or ‘hero’.  

Hereditary’s Annie is stalked and traumatized, at the hands of the force she will later be possessed by, for the majority of the film. Not long after her mother’s funeral, she persuades Peter to take Charlie with him to a party, where he leaves his sister unsupervised while she unwittingly eats nuts, to which she is severely allergic. As Peter drives Charlie to the hospital, a strategically placed deer in the middle of the road causes him to swerve, veering past a telephone pole that decapitates his sister. An earlier shot of the same telephone pole reveals the ominous symbol that Annie and her mother wear on their necklaces, the symbol we later understand to represent the terrifying cult that Ellen was the de facto leader of, and that plagues Annie’s entire life. Annie’s grief is not coincidental; the cult has strategically orchestrated the pain that follows her, unable to leave her alone. As opposed to horrors where the previously happy, usually ‘pure’ woman becomes a completely different person once possessed, Annie’s very existence is predicated on her ultimate possession, a counting down that began with her birth and continued throughout her life and her children’s. When discussing her traumatic life at a grief support group after Ellen’s death, Annie reveals that her brother killed himself due to schizophrenia as a teenager, blaming his mother in his suicide note for “putting people inside him”. Though the support group is supposed to be a safe environment, even here Annie is being watched; one of the other group members, Joan (Ann Dowd), later encourages Annie to perform a séance to speak to Charlie, as we slowly realise she is another member of the cult.

‘Hysterical’ women are common in horror. Perhaps the most well-known example is Shelley Duvall’s Wendy in The Shining, a largely misogynist depiction of a damsel in distress which Stephen King has repeatedly expressed dissatisfaction with, claiming that the more proactive woman he created in his novel is completely missing from the adaptation, in which Wendy is “basically just there to scream and be stupid”. In this year’s iteration of The Invisible Man, Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss) is consistently undermined and dismissed as being hysterical, paranoid or mentally unwell when she is convinced that her late, abusive ex-boyfriend is stalking her; the unwillingness of those around her to believe her allows him to carry on making her life unbearable. In films where women are possessed by an outside force, ‘hysteria’ is an integral facet of their possessed self, from Possession’s Anna to The Babadook’s Amelia. 

But in Hereditary, Anna’s increasingly erratic behaviour cannot simply be categorized as hysteria or instability. Her life has been a series of incidences of which she had no control over, culminating in the ultimate sacrifice that she attempts to make when she realises that it may be the only way to escape her fate—deciding that she is willing to die to save her (remaining) family, she begs Steve to throw Charlie’s sketchbook into the fire, believing that it will cause her to catch alight and be killed. When he refuses and instead threatens to call the police, she throws it in herself, causing Steve to be burned alive instead. Ari Aster confirmed that “Steve going up in flames (re)announces the true, cruel logic of the film. Annie decides to sacrifice herself for her family, but that’s not her choice to make”. Being inhabited by Paimon’s spirit seconds later, becoming physically possessed for the first time in the film, the last sentient experience Annie endures is watching her husband go up in flames, confirming that she has never truly had control over the tragedy surrounding her existence up to this point.

While it is the cult that haunts Annie and her family at every turn, her apathetic, cold husband Steve can also be seen as an antagonist throughout Hereditary. In a film where conversations between family members are always strained and tense, Steve seems to distance himself from his wife after Charlie’s death. When he’s informed that Ellen’s grave has been dug up, he hides this from Annie, later going as far as to blame her for defacing the grave herself after he realizes how strange her behaviour has become. Rather than talking to her about how she feels, he decides to consult another psychiatrist behind her back to discuss her mental state, and when he comes home to discover her workshop and the entirety of her miniature artwork ruined, his response is “What the fuck happened here?”, before sleeping on the couch that evening. Ultimately, once Annie’s grief becomes too much for him to handle, he gives up on being supportive and instead undermines her, telling her she’s “sick” instead of listening to her terrifying (and real) fears. 

In writing about Hereditary, Madeleine Seidel references Betty Friedan’s 1963 text The Feminine Mystique, which alluded to a culture “where women were pigeonholed into giving up building careers or lives outside the home, in favor of pursuing the often thankless roles as wives and mothers; and as a result, breeding depression, anger, and resentment in these women”. While Annie works as an artist, her work creates issues within her family; when Steve sees Annie working on a diorama of the car accident that killed Charlie, he is furious with her, further fuelling their fraught relationship. However, as Annie becomes more traumatized by everything happening around her, she refuses to let her husband and son talk down to her. When Steve tries to belittle her mothering of Peter after an incident at school, and then hangs up on her, Annie immediately calls him back and shouts at him for it, before hanging up on him herself. And in one of the most memorable scenes in the film, she finally lashes out at Peter over dinner, reminding him not to disrespect her and chastising him for his role in Charlie’s death. As she angrily tells her son, “All I do is worry, and slave, and defend you”; long unappreciated by her family, she erupts into a well-deserved tirade of anger towards her son and husband.

While some may see Annie as the ‘monster’ of the narrative—with Peter appearing truly terrified of her on several occasions —  here, we empathise with her pain, after seeing how much she has suffered already without an adequate support system in place to help her grieve. Leila Latif claims that in the shocking dinner scene, Annie is “at once unhinged, apathetic and vicious”; Annie shocks and appalls us throughout the film, whilst we simultaneously root for her to overcome the relentless forces taunting her. It could be said that Annie’s lack of control over her life—the life that’s been decided for her by her mother and the cult—could make her simply a victim, but her three-dimensional character development, her increasing refusal to let her family take her for granted, and her unconventional motherhood make her one of the most memorable female characters in recent horror. Aided by a powerhouse of a performance from Collette, Hereditary’s ‘possessed woman’ defies the lazy characterization from past horror films, following the lead of Jennifer’s Body and The Babadook to carve a complex, empathetic portrayal of a woman, and mother, going through hell.