10 God-Awful Scenes In Otherwise Perfect Horror Movies
2. Hereditary: The Unintentionally Hilarious Climax
If it wasn't for this ending, Hereditary could easily have been a full-blown horror movie masterpiece. After all, most of the film is a home run; a twisty, visually breath-taking and emotionally bruising meditation on grief and intergenerational trauma led by a powerhouse, Oscar-worthy performance from Toni Collette.
Unfortunately, the film completely drops the ball in its concluding moments. The mature, emotional terror of much of the film is replaced with B-Movie schlock as possessed people start flying around and comically decapitating themselves. At the screening your writer was at, the entire audience was howling with laughter.
It's also a very cliched ending; after being so original for much of its run-time the film instead becomes just another film about possessions and secret cults and the like.
The thing about writer-director Ari Aster is that he's an unreal visual stylist but a terrible screenwriter; watch his short film The Strange Thing About the Johnsons if you dare, it's one of the worst things you'll ever watch.
Aster is a talented man with many great ideas in his films, but this terrible ending and his second film Midsommar - a silly and thematically incoherent folk horror that wasn't particularly good overall - indicate that he struggles to represent these interesting concepts in a satisfying way on-screen.