We Need To Talk About THAT Hereditary Moment

How it achieved that surprise, though, is through a technique we've seen other movies in 2018 use to a similar effect: misleading marketing. The trailers for the horror put the focus on Charlie, manipulating footage to make it seem like the funeral scenes were for the dead grandmother and not her, and even including footage which didn't show up in the final film.

Of course, this is the same technique Avengers: Infinity War used, manipulating trailer footage to make it appear as though Thanos didn't have all the Infinity Stones in scenes where he actually did. That again made for a better, more surprising movie, but the practice does raise a few questions.

Moving forward we're no doubt going to see more and more movies putting out misleading trailers to hide important plot points and characters. On the one hand that's refreshing, as marketing has long been hellbent on seemingly spoiling the biggest movies from beginning to end. It's refreshing to go into the theatre and genuinely be surprised by what you see, and if it takes misleading TV spots to do that, then it might be the sacrifice we as viewers have to make. Of course that's a risk, as leading trailers and doctored footage could easily be abused, to the point where a trailer misrepresents the final product to a fault.

In the case of Hereditary it enabled a rare cinematic surprise which will no doubt make the movie one of the most memorable of the year. But will it open the door to more misleading marketing in the future, and would that even be a bad thing?