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15 Movies Like Hereditary — Elevated Horror That Gets Under Your Skin

If Hereditary broke you, these slow-burn horrors will finish the job. Family trauma, dread that builds for an hour before it hits, and images that don't leave.

15 FILMS·April 2026·By MoviesPack

Section 1

What Makes Hereditary Work

Ari Aster's debut opens with a funeral and doesn't let you breathe from that moment forward. Toni Collette gives arguably the best performance in modern horror history as Annie Graham, a miniaturist artist whose family disintegrates after the death of her deeply secretive mother. The horror isn't the supernatural elements — those are real and they're terrifying — but the way the film shows grief, guilt, and family trauma as the soil in which something monstrous grows. The scene that made audiences gasp in theaters — you know the one — happens in the first hour, before the real horror has even arrived. That's the film's thesis: the thing that destroys you isn't always what you expect, and it can arrive without warning at any moment. When you want more like *Hereditary*, you're after **dread that builds without relief, family dynamics that carry genuine horror, and images that stay with you because they mean something.** Here's the full list. [Use our tool to find more: Movies Like Hereditary](/similar/hereditary)

Section 2

The Essentials (Start Here)

Midsommar

2019

★7.1IMDb

A young woman suffers a catastrophic loss and travels to Sweden with her boyfriend and his friends for a midsummer festival that happens once every ninety years. The community there is warm, transparent, and genuinely interested in her grief — in a way that turns out to have a purpose. The horror happens entirely in broad daylight, with flowers in everyone's hair. The film is about how grief makes you vulnerable to exactly the kind of community that Hårga offers: one that will witness your pain, name it, and transform it into something it can use. The horror and the relief are the same thing.

Why it matters

Same director, same commitment to emotional realism as the container for supernatural horror, same final act that delivers catharsis and terror simultaneously.

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The Witch

2015

★6.8IMDb

A Puritan family is banished from their New England settlement and builds a farm at the edge of a dark forest. Their crops fail. Their infant disappears. Their twins begin speaking to the goat. The oldest daughter is watched with growing suspicion by a family that needs someone to blame. Shot using only natural light and period-accurate dialogue, the result feels like it was made in 1630 — a horror film where the dread comes from the family as much as the forest. The connection: Hereditary's Paimon and The Witch's Black Phillip are both making an offer — not forcing. Both films are about a family that isolates itself (by choice, by exile) and discovers that isolation has a cost, and something has been waiting patiently to collect it. Thomasin's final scene and Charlie's final scene are the same scene: a girl accepting something her family's terror had been preparing her for all along.

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The Babadook

2014

★6.8IMDb

A widowed mother struggling with depression and an increasingly difficult young son discovers a pop-up children's book in the house — a book about a creature called the Babadook who, once you've read about him, will not leave. The creature arrives. The horror film about grief and depression and the way unprocessed pain makes you someone you don't recognize. The monster is real. The metaphor is also real. Both work simultaneously. The connection: Both films use a mother's grief as the ground from which the monster grows. Annie Graham's miniatures are her way of processing what she can't say out loud; Amelia's grief is buried so deep it's become the creature living in her basement. The Babadook is the more explicit metaphor. Hereditary is the more terrifying film precisely because the horror is also literal.

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It Follows

2014

★6.8IMDb

After a sexual encounter, a young woman discovers she's being followed by something — a supernatural entity that only she can see, that looks like different people, and that walks toward her at walking pace, constantly, without stopping. It cannot be outrun. She can pass it on, but then it comes back when it finishes. David Robert Mitchell's film is less about the sexual politics than it seems and more about the particular dread of something relentless and inevitable. The synth score by Disasterpeace is one of the best horror soundtracks in decades.

Why it matters

Sustained dread without cheap jump scares, a threat that operates on its own inexorable logic, a film that makes you feel the protagonist's terror rather than just observe it.

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Rosemary's Baby

1968

★8.0IMDb

A young woman moves into a gothic New York apartment building with her ambitious husband and slowly becomes convinced their unusually attentive neighbors have a plan for her unborn child. Her husband tells her she's imagining things. Her doctor agrees. Mia Farrow gives a performance of extraordinary fragility and strength, and the film's horror is as much about marital betrayal and the loss of bodily autonomy as it is about what the neighbors actually are. The original elevated horror.

Why it matters

The original elevated horror. Family as the source of threat, paranoia that might be real, an ending that offers no comfort.

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Section 3

The Dread Builders

The Exorcist

1973

★8.1IMDb

A 12-year-old girl in Washington DC begins behaving strangely, then violently, then in ways that defy medical explanation. Her mother, a successful actress, exhausts every doctor before calling in a priest. The horror sequences are still disturbing after fifty years — not because of the special effects but because of what Ellen Burstyn's face does in every scene, a mother watching her daughter disappear and being able to do nothing. Remains the high-water mark of religious horror.

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Suspiria (1977 or 2018)

★7.4IMDb

An American ballet student arrives at a prestigious German dance academy and starts noticing that things about the school don't add up — the other students disappearing, the staff's strange behavior, the sounds from the floors above. The 1977 Dario Argento original is primary-colored horror opera, all style and synth dread. Luca Guadagnino's 2018 remake is a completely different film: bleaker, longer, more political, set against the backdrop of 1970s German terrorism. Both are worth watching. If you only watch one, watch the 2018 version.

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Saint Maud

2019

★6.5IMDb

A hospice nurse caring for a dying former dancer becomes convinced that God has chosen her specifically to save this woman's soul — and that any means to that end is sanctioned. Rose Glass's debut is claustrophobic, intense, and anchored by Morfydd Clark's terrifying commitment. The film refuses to tell you whether Maud's faith is genuine, delusional, or something worse until the very last frames.

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Relic

2020

★5.9IMDb

An elderly woman goes missing from her remote house. Her daughter and granddaughter travel there to find her — and she comes back on her own, after three days, with no memory of where she went. She seems fine, then less fine, then something else entirely. Natalie Erika James uses dementia and generational caregiving as the architecture for something genuinely haunting, and the film's final act is a physical metaphor that lands like a punch.

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Section 4

The Hidden Gems

His House

2020

★6.8IMDb

A South Sudanese couple survive the crossing to England and are placed in a rundown house while their asylum case processes — required to stay inside, not allowed to work, grateful to be alive. The house has something in it. Something that followed them from South Sudan. Remi Weekes uses the horror of the supernatural and the horror of the asylum system and the weight of survivor's guilt as the same story, told simultaneously. One of the most politically resonant horror films in years.

Talk to Me

2022

★7.1IMDb

Teenagers discover an embalmed severed hand that, when you hold it and say "talk to me," lets the dead possess your body for 90 seconds — and it feels amazing. Everyone wants a turn. A girl grieving her dead mother takes it one step too far. The Philippou brothers' debut is a drug metaphor with its most honest insight built in: the possession feels good, which is why they keep doing it. Confident, nasty, and the finale doesn't flinch.

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The Night House

2020

★6.5IMDb

A woman returns to the lakeside house her husband built for them after his unexpected death, and starts discovering things about his secret life — another house across the lake, plans she didn't know about, a woman she'd never heard of. Rebecca Hall gives a performance of extraordinary control as someone using anger and irony to hold grief at bay — until she can't anymore. The horror is subtle and precise, deploying negative space and architecture in genuinely unsettling ways.

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A Dark Song

2016

★6.6IMDb

A mother whose young son was murdered hires an occultist to help her perform a ritual that will grant her one wish. They lock themselves in a remote Welsh house for months — no leaving, no breaks, no shortcuts. The ritual is depicted with procedural seriousness that makes it feel entirely real, and the film's demands on the audience are exactly proportionate to what it delivers. Liam Gavin's debut is slow, demanding, and absolutely committed. The emotional climax is devastating.

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Possession

1981

★7.8IMDb

A spy returns home to Berlin to find his wife leaving him and refusing to explain why. Her lover is not what he appears to be. Something is growing in an apartment she visits alone. Isabelle Adjani's subway breakdown is one of the most extreme performances in cinema history — her most famous sequence, though not her most disturbing. Simultaneously a visceral horror film and one of the most accurate depictions of a marriage ending that has ever been put on screen.

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Section 5

The Indian Pick

Tumbbad

2018

★8.2IMDb

A boy in colonial-era Maharashtra discovers that his family's estate conceals a secret: a dormant god sitting on an infinite supply of gold, reachable through a womb-shaped passage in the dark. He learns the route. He comes back as a man. He comes back again. Visually unlike anything else in Indian cinema — soaked, dark, tactile — and it uses the curse of inherited greed with the same moral seriousness that Hereditary uses the curse of inherited darkness. The creature design is extraordinary. The ending has been living in viewers' heads since the film's release.

Why it matters

Hereditary uses demonic inheritance as a metaphor for family pathology passed through bloodlines. Tumbbad uses a literal familial curse about greed. Both films show horror as something a family passes to its children whether they want it or not — and both earn their monster by building the human cost first.

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Section 6

Quick Comparison

| Movie | Vibe | Best For | |-------|------|----------| | Midsommar | Daylight folk horror | Ari Aster's other masterpiece | | The Witch | Period Puritan dread | The most formally precise film on this list | | The Babadook | Grief-horror | Best horror metaphor | | Possession (1981) | Extreme relationship horror | The most disturbing film on this list | | Rosemary's Baby | Classic psychological horror | The genre's foundation | | Tumbbad | Indian mythology-horror | Most visually distinctive | | His House | Political refugee horror | Most emotionally resonant | | Talk to Me | Teen possession horror | Best recent entry for newer audiences |

Section 7

Want More?

- [Full list: Movies Like Hereditary](/similar/hereditary) — 20+ matched elevated horror films - [Scary movies](/mood/scary) — horror films that actually work - [Hidden gem horror](/hidden-gems/horror) — underseen films worth your time - [Best horror movies](/best/horror) — top-rated horror of all time

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