Hello and welcome to another Slate Spoiler Special.

I'm Dana Stevens, Slate's movie critic, and today we are spoiling Hereditary, the new horror film from the first time writer-director Ari Aster.

Here to talk with me about the film, our freelance writer and friend of the podcast, Rachel Sime.

Hi, Rachel.

Hi.

We saw this movie a few nights ago and you're still traumatized. I gather. Yes, Dana made me go to this, but I'm actually

very grateful to her. I made you go because I was scared to go myself, but the fact is, you needed a buddy.

Yeah, but I think I took it better than you did in terms of getting back to sleep afterwards. I'm also joined today by

Lena Wilson. Hi, Lena. Lena is a former Slate intern. You actually just left Slate, right?

Quite recently. And so you're freelancing too now and out writing on stuff, including this movie

hereditary. Including this movie, yes. And the last time we saw each other, we were jeweling together

on the Slay Culture Cab Fest. We were

sucking on mango-flavored zip drives or whatever they are. Yeah, Dana and I babe together. So that's,

that's our history. We've been through a lot. Maybe not as intense as hereditary, but pretty intense.

Yeah. Okay. So what I want to do first is go around and just get a sort of thumbnail sketch

of your reaction to this movie. Essentially,

would you send a friend if that friend was able to tolerate horror movies in the first place?

And because this is a horror movie and kind of an intense one, I also want to hear just your general background with horror. So, Lena, I will start with you. Yeah. So my critical position is generally

that horror is my favorite genre, if not one of my favorite genres, just because I think it is doing the most interesting and subversive things consistently, especially not only in terms of representation and final girls and messiness, gender and sexuality-wise, but also just in terms of form and sound. And I think this

movie is a especially great example of that. But that said, I am kind of a wimp, and all of the

emotional trappings of movies work on me a thousand percent all the time. So I like fully almost

had a panic attack in the theater watching this movie. I actually watched it next to Slate Video

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