Movies Like Hereditary: 15 Films That Will Make You Uncomfortable

Hereditary (2018) doesn’t just scare you. It traumatizes you.

Ari Aster’s debut feature follows the Graham family as they unravel in the wake of a grandmother’s death — and unravel is exactly the right word. The film works through accumulation: dread layered on dread, grief that curdles into something monstrous, and a third act that earns every shock by making you feel the horror including short horror films under 90 minutes, long before you understand it. Toni Collette’s performance alone could carry the film, but Aster surrounds it with one of the most precisely designed horror experiences in modern cinema.

So what are you actually looking for when you want movies like Hereditary? Not just “scary movies.” You’re looking for films that create unease from within — that use family dysfunction, folk religion, or slow psychological pressure to make you feel that something is deeply, fundamentally wrong before anything explicitly terrible happens. Dread over shock. Atmosphere over gore. Meaning under the horror.

These 15 films deliver exactly that.

15 Movies Like Hereditary, Ranked

1. Midsommar (2019) — Folk Horror, Cult Ritual, Relationship Grief

Director: Ari Aster | Streaming: Prime Video, Peacock
Why it scratches the same itch: Same director, same DNA, entirely different texture

If Hereditary is night terror, Midsommar is a fever dream you can’t shake even in bright daylight. A grieving American woman travels with her emotionally checked-out boyfriend to a Swedish midsummer festival that turns out to be anything but festive. Aster trades darkness for blinding pastoral sunlight and makes it more disturbing — the rituals are visible, the horror is cheerful, and the community is warm in the most unsettling way possible. If you loved Hereditary for the way grief and horror intertwine, Midsommar is the essential companion piece.

2. The Witch (2015) — Puritan New England, Family Disintegration, Genuine Evil

Director: Robert Eggers | Streaming: Shudder, Tubi (free)
Why it scratches the same itch: The family unit as the site of horror; slow dread that earns the ending

A Puritan family is banished from their plantation and must survive alone at the edge of a vast forest. Something is in the woods. Robert Eggers’ debut is meticulous and unrelenting — the period language is real, the production design is obsessive, and the horror emerges from the inside out: family members turning on each other, faith offering no protection, and a young woman left alone in a world that has decided she’s a witch. The Witch and Hereditary are sister films in the way they use family collapse as the true horror engine.

3. Talk to Me (2023) — Teen Horror, Possession, Grief Exploitation

Director: Danny and Michael Philippou | Streaming: Max, Prime Video
Why it scratches the same itch: The horror of loss weaponized; a protagonist who can’t stop pulling the thread

Australian horror that somehow managed to be both the best-reviewed horror film of 2023 and a genuine crowd-pleaser. A grieving teenager discovers a ceramic hand that, when held and lit, allows the user to invite spirits in — briefly, thrillingly, until the line between visit and possession blurs. The film shares Hereditary’s core wound: grief that becomes something dangerous. Sophie Wilde’s performance as Mia is phenomenal, and the film doesn’t flinch when the consequences arrive. One of the best horror debuts in years.

4. Pearl (2022) — Origin Story, Obsession, Violence

Director: Ti West | Streaming: Shudder, Max
Why it scratches the same itch: A character study that turns into something monstrous; performance-driven dread

The X prequel and, by many measures, the more disturbing film. Set in 1918 on an isolated Texas farm, Pearl traces the psychological unraveling of a young woman who desperately wants to be a star and finds herself trapped by circumstances and family. Ti West shoots it as a lush, Technicolor melodrama while Mia Goth delivers what may be the performance of the decade — a smile that gradually reveals itself as something terrifying. If Hereditary unsettled you with how far a person can fall, Pearl will stay with you for the same reason.

5. Men (2022) — Folk Horror, Grief, Masculine Menace

Director: Alex Garland | Streaming: Hulu, Showtime
Why it scratches the same itch: Rural isolation plus the supernatural; a woman unraveling in a place that wants her to

A recently widowed woman retreats to the English countryside to process her grief and finds the village populated by versions of a single unnerving man. Alex Garland’s most divisive film is also his most ambitious — a folk horror poem about masculine entitlement and the way grief makes you vulnerable to exactly the things trying to exploit it. The final sequence is deeply weird in the best possible way. Men and Hereditary share the quality of feeling like something is wrong that you can’t name before you can name what it actually is.

6. Lamb (2021) — Icelandic Folklore, Grief, Something Wrong with the Baby

Director: Valdimar Jóhannsson | Streaming: Hulu, Peacock
Why it scratches the same itch: Quiet Scandinavian dread; the horror of accepting something you shouldn’t

A childless Icelandic couple discovers an unusual lamb and decides, with the specific logic of grief, to raise it as their own. The film shows you what’s wrong almost immediately and spends the rest of its runtime asking whether the couple will acknowledge it — and what happens when nature sends a reminder. Lamb is patient, bleak, and strange in the way that the best European folk horror is strange. If Hereditary showed you family horror built on secrets, Lamb shows you family horror built on willful ignorance.

7. Raw (2016) — Body Horror, Coming-of-Age, Appetite

Director: Julia Ducournau | Streaming: Shudder, Tubi (free)
Why it scratches the same itch: A character we watch transform into something dangerous; horror rooted in biology and family legacy

A lifelong vegetarian begins veterinary school and, following a hazing ritual, discovers she has a taste for meat — and then for something worse. Julia Ducournau’s debut is visceral, funny, gross, and genuinely emotionally complex in the way the best body horror is. The sisterhood at the film’s core gives it real emotional weight, and the ending recontextualizes everything. Raw shares Hereditary’s DNA in its interest in what we inherit from our families, what we can’t escape, and the horror of becoming what you feared you might be.

8. Saint Maud (2019) — Religious Obsession, Isolation, Sanity Collapse

Director: Rose Glass | Streaming: Shudder, Max
Why it scratches the same itch: A character in spiritual free fall; the horror of believing the divine is speaking directly to you

A devout young nurse becomes convinced she’s been called to save the soul of her terminally ill patient. Rose Glass’s debut is tightly coiled, deeply uncomfortable, and culminates in one of the most devastating final shots in recent horror. What makes Saint Maud feel adjacent to Hereditary is its interest in the line between genuine spiritual experience and psychosis — and how the film refuses to settle the question comfortably. Morfydd Clark’s performance is extraordinary.

9. Lake Mungo (2008) — Found Footage, Family Grief, Hidden Lives

Director: Joel Anderson | Streaming: Shudder, Tubi (free)
Why it scratches the same itch: A family destroyed by a death; horror that is inseparable from grief

Shot as a documentary, Lake Mungo follows an Australian family after the drowning death of sixteen-year-old Alice Palmer — and the eerie footage that surfaces afterward. The film is less about supernatural horror than about grief, secrets, and the people we think we know. It’s quiet, devastating, and builds to a reveal that reconfigures the entire film. If Hereditary showed you grief warping into something monstrous, Lake Mungo shows you grief revealing something hidden. Genuinely underseen.

10. It Follows (2014) — Dread as Concept, Sexual Horror, Inescapable Pursuit

Director: David Robert Mitchell | Streaming: Shudder, Tubi (free)
Why it scratches the same itch: Sustained atmospheric dread; a horror that cannot be outrun or reasoned with

After a sexual encounter, a teenager is told she’s now being followed by a supernatural entity that will walk toward her, always, until it kills her or she passes it on. It Follows is a film-school case study in sustained dread: the wide-angle lenses keep backgrounds dangerous, the synth score is relentlessly menacing, and the concept is elegant in its bleakness. No resolution, no escape — just management of the unmanageable. The same quality of inescapable doom that defines Hereditary’s final act runs through every frame of It Follows.

11. Veronica (2017) — True Crime Horror, Adolescent Protagonist, Possession

Director: Paco Plaza | Streaming: Netflix
Why it scratches the same itch: Based on true events; the horror of being the only one who can see what’s happening

Set in 1991 Madrid and loosely based on a genuine police report, Veronica follows a teenage girl who uses a Ouija board during a solar eclipse and invites something in. The film is genuinely unsettling in its specificity — the school setting, the sibling dynamics, the claustrophobic apartment — and Plaza (co-director of the [REC] series) builds the haunting with real craft. Veronica is in conversation with Hereditary in its portrait of a young woman overwhelmed by forces she didn’t summon on purpose.

12. Apostle (2018) — Cult Horror, Folk Religion, Island Isolation

Director: Gareth Evans | Streaming: Netflix
Why it scratches the same itch: A closed community with terrible secrets; religious horror that goes fully dark

A man infiltrates a remote island cult in 1905 Wales to rescue his sister. Gareth Evans (The Raid) brings his action-director precision to folk horror and the result is brutal, atmospheric, and deeply strange — the kind of film that escalates past the point you think it will stop. Apostle shares Hereditary’s willingness to go to genuinely dark places and its interest in the violence that institutional religion can sanctify. The cult mythology Evans invents is genuinely original.

13. Beau Is Afraid (2023) — Psychological Horror, Maternal Guilt, Total Surrealism

Director: Ari Aster | Streaming: Paramount+, Prime Video
Why it scratches the same itch: Same director, same obsession with maternal relationships and psychological horror

Ari Aster’s third film is three hours of pure anxiety — a neurotic man’s odyssey to reach his mother after she dies, through a nightmare landscape that may or may not be real. Beau Is Afraid is not for everyone (it’s genuinely, deliberately exhausting), but for viewers who want to understand what Hereditary was doing thematically, it’s the purest expression of Aster’s obsessions: maternal guilt, male passivity, the horror of the family you can’t escape. Joaquin Phoenix carries it. Divisive, unforgettable.

14. The Lodge (2019) — Isolation Horror, Religious Trauma, Psychological Manipulation

Director: Severin Fiala & Veronika Franz | Streaming: Hulu, Tubi (free)
Why it scratches the same itch: Snowed-in family horror with a deeply unreliable reality; the horror of what trauma does to people

A soon-to-be stepmother is left alone with her fiancé’s two children at a remote winter lodge — children who resent her, know her traumatic backstory, and are not above using it. The Lodge is cold in every sense: the cinematography, the performances, the emotional register. It shares Hereditary’s quality of making the audience feel they’re watching something they shouldn’t be watching, and its ending offers no comfort whatsoever. Riley Keough is exceptional.

15. Pyewacket (2017) — Teen Protagonist, Real Consequences, Ritual Gone Wrong

Director: Adam MacDonald | Streaming: Shudder, Tubi (free)
Why it scratches the same itch: A teenager who summons something and immediately regrets it; the horror of not being able to take back what you’ve done

A grieving, angry teenager — isolated, newly moved to the middle of nowhere with a mother she resents — performs a ritual from an occult book to summon something to kill her mother. Then she changes her mind. Pyewacket is a smaller-scale film than most on this list but it uses that intimacy well: the horror of irreversible action, the horror of what we’re capable of in our worst moments, and the horror of getting exactly what you asked for. Quietly devastating.

FAQ

Is Hereditary based on a true story?

No, Hereditary is entirely fictional. Director Ari Aster has said the film draws on his own experiences with grief and family dysfunction, but the Graham family, Paimon cult, and supernatural events are all invented. Some viewers have noted thematic parallels with certain historical accounts of grief and inherited trauma, but there is no real-world case behind the film. The “based on a true story” impression comes from Aster’s commitment to emotional authenticity — the grief feels real because it’s drawn from real emotional experience, even when the events are not.

What makes Hereditary so scary?

Hereditary is scary for reasons that are harder to articulate than most horror films. It doesn’t primarily rely on jump scares — it creates dread through accumulation: wrong composition choices, performances that feel just slightly off, sounds at the edge of hearing. The film frightens in layers: first emotionally (the grief is genuinely devastating), then psychologically (the paranoia about what’s real), then finally supernaturally. By the time the explicitly horrifying events arrive in the third act, the audience has been softened up by 90 minutes of slower, deeper unease. Toni Collette’s performance is central to this — she plays grief with an intensity that makes the supernatural feel like a natural extension of emotional devastation.

What’s the best movie like Hereditary?

The best single recommendation depends on what you responded to most strongly in Hereditary. If it was the director’s hand and the folk horror atmosphere: Midsommar (same director, essential companion). If it was the slow-burn family dread and the feeling that something is fundamentally wrong: The Witch (Robert Eggers’ debut is the other cornerstone of modern elevated horror). If it was the grief wrapped in horror and the emotional weight: Talk to Me (2023’s best horror film delivers both). Any of these three will give you the specific experience you’re looking for.

Films like Hereditary are out there — they’re just not always labeled as folk horror or elevated horror. The common thread is filmmakers who trust audiences to feel something before they understand it. Start with Midsommar and The Witch. Then follow the thread wherever it takes you.