Most overrated horror movie of the past decade
As a long time horror fan I am worried about the state of horror if "Hereditary" is considered to be "one of the best horror movies in XZY decades".
I am not too hard to please when it comes to horror movies, I enjoy bad horror movies equally as great ones, and when I finally got a chance to see Hereditary I went to see it with an open mind.
Movie started well with some really nice scene transition so I had my hopes up. "These people know what they are doing" I thought to myself. Turns out, while production looked really nice, with few well directed scenes, screenplay and pace were horrible. We are treated with family drama for about 3/4 of the movie with last half an hour being mash of horror scenes. This could work if pace was better and we didn't have to watch long monologues by a lead actress. She did her part well and she literally carries the entire movie, but after second 10 minutes long monologue where I see nothing but her face, my tolerance for her and her character has dropped significantly.
Once the horror actually starts, it does get from bad to worse, but as someone who has watched dozens of horror movies I could easily spot "homages" (or if you want to call them ripoffs) of scenes from plenty of other horror movies, mainly Conjuring, Exorcist 3 and The Sentinel.
Ending is really messy and looks like it was made on spot. It wants to be intelligent, but once you break down the scene you'll realize that someone watched The Conjuring on Monday, Exorcist 3 on Thursday, and watched The Sentinel on Wednesday.
Another problem is pace. Some scenes just drag on and on without real reason. I understand that director wanted to establish some atmosphere, however he isn't good at staging suspense so lot of scenes just drag on. Add in that some of those scenes don't really have strong payoff and you get long badly paced scenes with no real plot progression.
Some characters just show up and wonder off the movie. I nearly forgot that one such character is even in the movie until he showed up to be cannon fodder. It was supposed to be emotional and horrifying but since we know so little about him it becomes a bad joke.
I really don't know how anyone could by into hype. Did bunch of people just said "It's great!" without even seeing it, or bars for horror are so low these days that we consider cinematic mess like Hereditary and Insidious to be called "greatest of XYZ"?