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. 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”. 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. Annie’s grief is not coincidental the cult has strategically orchestrated the pain that follows her, unable to leave her alone. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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’. The possessed woman is often shown as repulsive, terrifying and hysterical, due to the forces taking over her body and mind. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Hereditary’s opening scene informs us of Annie’s trauma before anything else. 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. But in more recent offerings, alongside horror’s recent exploration of complex female characters, possessed women are more complicated to dissect. 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. 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.
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