You're listening ad-free on Amazon Music. 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... Yeah, 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.

Hi, Dana. 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 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 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 an 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 Editor Jeff Blumer, who is notoriously cool as a cucumber all the time.

And I had to pretend to be

also that and was failing miserably. My notes from the first screening of this I saw were basically

just journaling so that I didn't freak out outwardly. Literally, it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

So, yeah, that's, I contain multitudes. Well, as the movie shows us, repressing your feelings leads to bad things. So you and you, I think you're ahead of Jeffrey in that. Yeah. That came. True. Okay, Rachel, what about you? Recommend this movie or not? And what's your horror movie stance? I would definitely recommend this movie, Dina. I thought it was beautiful. I will say my tolerance for horror movies is very low as you experienced in the theater when I said, I hate this out at some point in the movie. And I knew. I somehow knew that I hate this didn't mean I hate this movie. It meant like, I can't tolerate this experience for one more second. It was right after a certain scene that I'm sure we will talk about soon that I think a lot of people talk about as the scene that turns everything in the movie.

And I just felt so sick to my stomach.

And again, it's not in that horror way where you're seeing so much gore and violence, you know, like saw or something where you feel like you're being actively tortured. It was much more subtle psychological depths of grief.

Like I remember somebody said to me about this movie, you know, it's not necessarily scary,

but it will make it so that you're not happy for about three or four days after you've seen it. Like the soul will just have been sucked out of your body. And that's kind of how I felt. I mean, my, my background with horror is that I've only very recently been able to watch it. When I was a little kid, I was really anxious. It was an anxious child. And so when I would see horror movies, I would stay up not just for a night, but for

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