Things that go bump in the night—artfully

PERHAPS EVERY ERA GETS THE HORROR movies it doesn’t yet know it deserves, pictures that seep into our souls even before they infiltrate our minds. Ari Aster’s debut feature Hereditary is a movie for the mood of today, unsettling in its arid, controlled creepiness, but largely distinguished by Toni Collette’s intricately layered lead performance, a portrayal of a woman whose love for her family spirals into mad decay. Collette plays Annie Graham, an artist and mom who comes to learn that she’s carrying a terrifying multigenerational secret—that she is, in effect, passing along a curse to her children, the very people she has been entrusted to protect. As the movie opens, Annie is mourning the death of her mother Ellen, a remote, secretive woman who didn’t exactly foster warm fuzzies when she was alive. There’s early evidence that Ellen was involved