A Hereditary Fate. Tragic Horror in Ari Aster's Cinema

Abstract

In one of the first scenes of 2018 Ari Aster’s horror film Hereditary, a literature teacher discusses with his students about the inevitability of fate using Sophocles’s Women of Trachis tragedy as a starting point. It functions as a meta-narrative element that anticipates the unavoidable tragic fate of the Graham family, the film’s protagonists, whose misadventures will provoke the audience’s terror. Horror cinema shares with Athenian tragedy the arousal of fear in the spectator. Aristotle, who considered the Sophoclean tragedy as the best expression of the genre, theorized about the importance of eliciting (and later releasing) emotions, such as compassion, éleos and fear, phóbos, among the audience of tragedy. Employing some of the great themes of Sophoclean tragedy as narrative shapers, such as the assumption of tragic error, the opposition between knowledge and responsibility or the limited human condition in contrast to the divine, in Hereditary Ari Aster composes a contemporary tragedy where the supernatural element converges with the familial trauma, inherited from generation to generation, as it does in the Athenian tragedy. Starting with the intertextual reference to Women of Trachis, this paper aims to analyze the way in which Aster recovers these tragic concepts and resignifies them to provoke horror in an innovative way that earned international critical acclaim.