Horror is having a serious moment right now, with movies like Get Out and IT doing work at the box office. Another box office hit that debuted earlier this year was Ari Aster's Hereditary. Unfortunately, that film stands out because, for all of its success, it was not widely accepted by mainstream audiences, earning a D+ CinemaScore. That said, star Alex Wolff doesn't seem concerned, because he thinks the movie is not built to measure up to scores of that nature. Wolff explained:
I think if you start looking at a movie like Hereditary in terms of scores and percentages, that's going to drive you crazy because that's really not what it's about. If Rosemary's Baby probably had percentages and Cinemascore in the '70s, or The Exorcist, people would've been giving it an F- and whatever amount of percent.
Hereditary continues to draw comparisons to The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby, and this is yet another example of how close they may be. Review aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes and CinemaScore are relatively new, and Wolff thinks those classic horror romps would receive similar scores if they had debuted in an era defined by those quantifiable metrics. In his mind, Hereditary is not that type of movie that appeals to specific demographics or surveyable elements of the moviegoing populace, so the D+ is to be expected.
Of course, that leads us to examine the differences between something like Hereditary and a movie like John Krasinski's A Quiet Place -- which handily turned into a critical and commercial sensation when it debuted. Alex Wolff addressed those differences in his interview with Comicbook.com and explained that the biggest substantive difference between those films is that A Quiet Place is far more hopeful. Wolff said:
I think that the difference between a movie like A Quiet Place and Hereditary, even though nothing is similar, one of the main differences is A Quiet Place gives you an inspirational, puffy feel at the end. It's a fun movie. I wouldn't call it a very dark, disturbing movie. I would call it really fun, and fun scary, where Hereditary kind of crawls in your bones, and sits there, and just kind of eats at your every paranoia and fear. A lot of people look at horror movies as escapism, and I think Hereditary does the opposite. I think Hereditary stops you and makes you answer for everything you've ever felt terrified about, or deeply upset about. So you walk in there, I'm sure audiences wanted to just be brought out of the world they're in, and they didn't have the patience for a movie building it up, and making you feel for these characters.
Hereditary is currently available on Digital HD, and the Blu-ray and DVD editions of the film will hit shelves next month on September 4. Make sure to pick up a copy of the film, and head over to our movie premiere guide to read up on all of the movies set to premiere on the big screen in 2018.
