Steve catching fire when Annie burns Charlie’s notebook is one of the most shocking moments in Hereditary, but despite the complaints of some viewers, the reason for the scene isn’t cheap shock value. Hereditary tells the story of the Grahams, an upper-middle-class family afflicted with multi-generational mental illness. As the title suggests, the mental illness is hereditary: the mother Annie (Toni Collette) exhibits symptoms of Dissociative Identity Disorder (D.I.D.), the grandma Ellen was a sufferer of D.I.D. and, late in life, dementia, Annie’s late father and brother were respectively driven to suicide by depression and schizophrenia, and the daughter, Charlie, has an unspecified disorder noted by antisocial behavior and a tongue-clicking tic. However, when the back-to-back deaths of Ellen and Charlie set off a string of seemingly paranormal occurrences, the family’s affliction seems more supernatural than natural.
After the horrific decapitation of Charlie in Hereditary, Annie joins a grief support group where she meets Joan, who claims to be able to communicate with her dead grandson. The process involves a “link” (in Joan’s case, a chalkboard her grandson owned) with which the deceased can communicate and the recitation of an archaic spell. Annie finds a link (Charlie’s sketchbook) and recites the incantation. Instead of a joyful reunion, the ritual seems to unleash a malevolent force, later identified as the demon Paimon. Annie tries to set the sketchbook on fire, only to have to put it out when the flames mysteriously jump to her sleeve. However, as Paimon wreaks more havoc on the family in a Rosemary’s Baby-like quest for a human host, Annie resolves to sacrifice herself and throws the lighter fluid-soaked sketchbook in the fireplace. In a shocking twist, it isn’t Annie who goes up in flames, but her husband Steve.
To many viewers, Steve catching fire instead of Annie is a cheap betrayal of Hereditary’s own logic, but according to the director, Ari Aster, the betrayal of logic is the whole point. When asked in a Reddit AMA why Steve catches fire instead of Annie, Aster said, “When Annie finds the book about Paimon, he is also described as being the “god of mischief.” Steve going up in flames reinstates the cruel logic of the film. Annie decides to sacrifice herself for her family, but that’s not her choice to make. Whether read as a demonic ritual or mental illness, the multi-generational (a.k.a. hereditary) tragedy unfolding for the Graham family is out of their hands. Paimon’s search for a suitable male host (Peter) by way of its temporary female host (Charlie) has been generations in the making, and there’s nothing the family can do about it. Annie trying and failing to apply human logic to the non-human problem reinforces this theme of determinism, which echoes throughout the film, including in discussions of Greek tragedy in Peter’s classroom, demonic runes carved on the very telephone pole that would decapitate Charlie, and Annie’s career as a miniaturist, a metaphor for the larger forces creating and organizing their lives.
Why the Sketchbook in Hereditary Was Never a Link to Charlie in the First Place
Even Joan, Annie’s friend from the grief support group, seems to have been in on it the whole time. Hereditary makes this clear by the ending, but careful viewing reveals her motives much earlier. When Joan first tells Annie about her séance with her grandson, they’re in an art supply store parking lot. In one of Joan’s shopping bags, a chalkboard can be seen – the very chalkboard her grandson supposedly owned and could communicate with from beyond the grave. This implies that the sketchbook isn’t a link to Charlie at all and that the séance Annie thinks she’s conducting is just a ploy to get her to recite the demonic incantation and summon Paimon.
Hereditary is full of foreshadowing clues to encourage and reward multiple viewings, allowing careful viewers to suss out what’s really going on. Unfortunately for the Graham family, pausing, rewinding, and re-watching were never an option.
