Movies Like Hereditary: 15 Disturbing Psychological Horror Films

September 16, 2026 • Victoria Taylor

September 16, 2026 11 min read

Few horror films have left as deep a mark on modern audiences as Hereditary (2018). Ari Aster’s debut turned grief into a slow, suffocating descent — a family unraveling under the weight of something ancient and inherited, told with a stillness that makes every jump feel earned rather than cheap. If that film left you rattled, the good news is you’re not alone, and there’s a whole lineage of psychological horror built on the same foundations: dread that builds instead of jolts, families that cannot escape what runs in their blood, and endings that refuse to look away.

Here are 15 movies like Hereditary — slow-burn, disturbing, and unwilling to let you off easy.

1. The Witch (2015)

Robert Eggers’ New England folk tale shares Hereditary‘s patience and its interest in a family destroyed from within. A Puritan household is cast out to the edge of the wilderness, and as crops fail and a baby vanishes, suspicion turns the family against itself long before anything supernatural is confirmed on screen.

Like Aster’s film, The Witch earns its horror through accumulated dread and a puritanical sense of doom — the feeling that this family was never going to make it out, no matter what they did.

Director: Robert Eggers · Starring: Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie

2. Midsommar (2019)

Ari Aster’s follow-up to Hereditary trades a dark, cramped house for blinding Swedish daylight, but the emotional architecture is nearly identical: a grieving woman, a family (of sorts) with secrets, and a cult that has been waiting for her the whole time.

Where Hereditary pulls you down into darkness, Midsommar does the opposite and somehow ends up just as unsettling — proof that Aster’s real subject is always grief itself, dressed differently each time.

Director: Ari Aster · Starring: Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, Will Poulter

3. The Babadook (2014)

Jennifer Kent’s breakout is one of the clearest precursors to Hereditary‘s approach: grief given a monstrous shape, a mother pushed to her breaking point, and a child who may or may not be in danger from the thing that’s moved into the house — or from his own mother.

The film’s real horror is watching a single, exhausted parent lose her grip, one sleepless night at a time, until the line between protecting her son and becoming a threat to him disappears entirely.

Director: Jennifer Kent · Starring: Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman

4. The Dark and the Wicked (2020)

Bryan Bertino’s bleak farmhouse horror is about as close as anything gets to Hereditary‘s specific brand of dread: adult siblings return home as their father is dying, and something has already gotten into the house — and possibly into their mother.

There’s no mystery to solve here and very little hope offered. It’s a film about watching a family lose members one at a time to something that was never going to be reasoned with, and it earns every bit of its reputation as one of the bleakest horror films of the last decade.

Director: Bryan Bertino · Starring: Marin Ireland, Michael Abbott Jr., Xander Berkeley

5. Saint Maud (2019)

Rose Glass’s debut follows a private palliative-care nurse convinced God has chosen her to save her dying patient’s soul. It’s a character study first and a horror film second, building its dread almost entirely from one woman’s unraveling certainty.

The connection to Hereditary is in the slow accumulation of religious and psychological horror — the sense that faith, grief and mental illness have become impossible to tell apart, and that the ending, when it comes, will not offer comfort.

Director: Rose Glass · Starring: Morfydd Clark, Jennifer Ehle

6. The Lodge (2019)

From the directors of Goodnight Mommy, this snowbound chamber piece strands two children with their father’s new girlfriend — a survivor of a religious cult — at an isolated cabin. As the snow closes in, so does something that might be supernatural or might simply be trauma resurfacing at the worst possible time.

Its glacial pacing and refusal to fully explain itself put it firmly in Hereditary territory: a film more interested in dread than answers.

Director: Veronika Franz, Severin Fiala · Starring: Riley Keough, Jaeden Martell

7. A Dark Song (2016)

A grieving mother hires an occultist to help her perform a months-long ritual, locking themselves in a remote Welsh house until it’s complete. Almost the entire film unfolds within those walls, and the ritual itself is treated with an almost documentary-level seriousness.

Like Hereditary‘s final act, A Dark Song takes the occult completely at face value, and the payoff is stranger and more emotionally raw than most horror films dare to attempt.

Director: Liam Gavin · Starring: Catherine Walker, Steve Oram

8. The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) poster

Yorgos Lanthimos’s clinical, deadpan horror follows a surgeon whose family begins suffering from a mysterious paralysis — a curse tied to a debt he doesn’t want to pay. The tone is colder and stranger than Hereditary, but the core idea is the same: a family punished for sins that predate them, with no way out once the mechanism is set in motion.

It’s one of the more purely dread-soaked entries on this list, precisely because it never once raises its voice.

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos · Starring: Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, Barry Keoghan

9. The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015)

Osgood Perkins’ debut is glacially slow and structurally strange, following two abandoned boarding-school students and a third young woman whose story only connects to theirs in the final minutes. It’s less concerned with scares than with atmosphere and inevitability.

Fans of Hereditary‘s patient dread and non-traditional structure will find a lot to sit with here — this is a film built entirely around a growing, wordless sense that something has already gone terribly wrong.

Director: Osgood Perkins · Starring: Kiernan Shipka, Emma Roberts, Lucy Boynton

10. Relic (2020)

Three generations of women — grandmother, mother, daughter — confront a mysterious presence that has moved into the family’s aging home along with the grandmother’s worsening dementia. Relic uses horror as a direct metaphor for watching a parent decline, mirroring Hereditary‘s use of the genre to process real, unglamorous grief.

The house itself becomes a character, decaying and rearranging like a mind losing its grip — and the final stretch is as emotionally devastating as it is frightening.

Director: Natalie Erika James · Starring: Emily Mortimer, Bella Heathcote, Robyn Nevin

11. It Comes at Night (2017)

Trey Edward Shults’ post-outbreak chamber piece is less about a monster and more about what fear does to a family under pressure — trust collapsing, paranoia spreading, a father willing to do anything to protect what’s left of his own. It’s a slow burn that many viewers found too slow on release, but its reputation has only grown since.

The connection to Hereditary is tonal rather than plot-based: both films use horror-movie mechanics to tell a story that’s really about a family destroying itself from the inside.

Director: Trey Edward Shults · Starring: Joel Edgerton, Christopher Abbott, Kelvin Harrison Jr.

12. The Night House (2020)

A recent widow begins uncovering disturbing secrets about her late husband’s past inside the lake house he built for her — secrets that may explain why something has started appearing in the house’s negative spaces. Rebecca Hall’s performance carries the film almost single-handedly.

Grief as a literal, stalking presence is the clearest throughline to Hereditary here, and the design of its antagonist is one of the more genuinely inventive scares of the last several years.

Director: David Bruckner · Starring: Rebecca Hall, Sarah Goldberg

13. Talk to Me (2022)

A group of teenagers use an embalmed hand to conjure spirits at parties, treating possession like a party trick — until one of them goes too far and lets something back with her. The Philippou brothers’ breakout hit is louder and more contemporary than most films on this list, but its emotional core is the same: a teenager processing grief in a way that opens a door she can’t close.

It’s proof that the psychological-horror-through-grief lineage Hereditary helped popularize is still producing some of the genre’s best new work.

Director: Danny Philippou, Michael Philippou · Starring: Sophie Wilde, Alexandra Jensen

14. Possession (1981)

Andrzej Żuławski’s notorious Cold War-era body-horror melodrama follows a marriage disintegrating in real time, with a wife’s affair — and what she’s actually having an affair with — spiraling into some of the most unhinged imagery ever put to film. It’s a genuine outlier even among horror classics.

Decades before Hereditary, Possession was already using extreme horror imagery as a direct expression of a family collapsing under a weight the story never fully explains, and it remains one of the most purely disturbing films ever made.

Director: Andrzej Żuławski · Starring: Isabelle Adjani, Sam Neill

15. Blood Star (2024)

Britni Camacho as Bobbi Torres · John Schwab as Sheriff Bilstein

Bobbi Torres fighting for her life in Blood Star (2024)

Blood Star trades the haunted house for the open desert, but the psychological pressure is just as relentless. Bobbi Torres finds herself hunted across an unforgiving landscape by a man who won’t stop, with nowhere to hide and no one coming to help — a survival thriller built on the same sustained, inescapable dread that makes films like Hereditary so hard to shake.

If you’re drawn to horror and thrillers that trap you in a character’s unraveling instead of relying on jump scares, Blood Star belongs on this list.

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Why Hereditary Is So Disturbing

Hereditary works because it commits fully to its own internal logic. The grief is real before anything supernatural is confirmed, the family dynamics are painfully believable, and by the time the film reveals its hand, you’ve already been conditioned to accept that nothing good is coming. It’s disturbing horror movies filmmaking at its most patient — dread built from character first, imagery second.

Best Psychological Horror Movies Like Hereditary

If it’s the psychological unraveling you’re chasing — the sense that the real monster might be grief, guilt or inherited trauma rather than anything supernatural — Saint Maud, The Babadook and The Killing of a Sacred Deer all scratch that same itch. For more in this vein, see our roundup of psychological horror movies built around the same slow, character-first dread.

Horror Movies About Grief Like Hereditary

The Night House, Relic and The Babadook all use horror-movie mechanics to dramatize loss in ways that hit far harder than a straightforward drama could — a haunted house, a stalking figure or a decaying mind standing in for the parts of grief that are hardest to say out loud.

Slow-Burn Horror Movies Like Hereditary

For horror that trusts its audience to sit with discomfort rather than jumping straight to the scare, The Blackcoat’s Daughter, It Comes at Night and The Witch are essential viewing — patient, atmospheric, and more interested in inevitability than surprise. Our guide to slow-burn horror covers more of the genre’s best patient builds.

Occult Horror Movies Like Hereditary

A Dark Song and Hereditary itself are two of the rare horror films that treat occult ritual with genuine, researched seriousness rather than as set dressing. If that specific flavor of dread appeals to you, both are must-watches, and our broader occult horror coverage has more in the same vein.

Horror Movies About Generational Trauma

Hereditary‘s central idea — that something passed down through a family can be as dangerous as anything supernatural — echoes through The Witch, Possession and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, all of which suggest that some family patterns were never going to be escaped no matter what anyone did differently.

Movies About Families Falling Apart

Strip away the supernatural elements and Hereditary, The Dark and the Wicked and It Comes at Night are all, at their core, about families that stop trusting each other under pressure — the horror comes as much from the silence between characters as from anything that goes bump in the night.

Disturbing Horror Movies That Stay With You

Some horror films fade the moment the credits roll. These don’t. Possession, The Dark and the Wicked and Hereditary itself are the kind of films that linger for days, less because of any single scare than because of the accumulated feeling of dread they leave behind.

Movies Where the Characters Cannot Escape Their Fate

The Killing of a Sacred Deer, A Dark Song and Hereditary all share a sense of mechanism — a feeling that once the story’s terrible logic is set in motion, nothing the characters do will change the outcome. It’s one of the bleakest and most effective ideas horror can build around.

Modern Horror Movies Like Hereditary

Talk to Me, Saint Maud and Midsommar represent the current generation of filmmakers carrying Hereditary‘s DNA forward — proof that the appetite for smart, disturbing, character-driven horror hasn’t gone anywhere.

What to Watch After Hereditary

If you’ve made it through Hereditary and want more of the same unrelenting patience and dread, start with Midsommar for more Ari Aster, Relic or The Night House for grief-driven horror, and A Dark Song or The Killing of a Sacred Deer if it was the occult logic and inescapable fate that got under your skin.

Looking for one more? Blood Star channels that same sustained, inescapable dread into a desert survival thriller — different setting, same refusal to let you look away.