Warning: Spoilers for Hereditary
Ari Aster’s debut feature film Hereditary gave the entire horror genre a sH๏τ in the arm when it was released in 2018. The movie uses an idyllic mountain setting as the backdrop for gruesome tragedy and demonic forces, which tear Toni Colette’s Graham family apart. For all of its external scenes, Hereditary features real locations in a specific area around Utah’s Wasatch Mountains, that help to ground its premise in everyday family life.
It’s the presence of everyday locations in the movie which makes the grisly fate which awaits the Grahams all the more horrifying. From the high school of Graham children Peter and Charlie to the nondescript funeral home where the mother of Colette’s character Annie is buried, nowhere in Hereditary feels particularly unusual. That is, until a ᴅᴇᴀᴅ mountain deer becomes the indirect cause of Charlie’s brutal death by decapitation, the first of several scenes throughout the film in which a character’s head is detached from their body.
The Graham Family Home Is A Real House Outside Salt Lake City
It Was Used For All Exterior SH๏τs Of The Graham House
The principal location of Hereditary is the woodland home of the Grahams, which seems like an innocent enough place to begin with. During the course of the story, however, it turns into the setting for demonic seances and gut-churning body horror. Ari Aster has explained that the sets for the interior scenes where most of this horror took place were built from scratch on a soundstage, as was the exterior of Charlie’s treehouse (via MovieMaker). According to the movie’s miniatures supervisor, Steve Newburn, this stage was located in Toronto (via Stan Winston School of Character Arts).
On the other hand, the exterior of the Graham house itself is a real place, located in the area where the entirety of Hereditary is set. It’s a large wooden house near Park City, a small community on the other side of the Wasatch Mountains from Salt Lake City, Utah, which is popular with skiers in the winter. The house on White Pine Canyon Road, adjacent to the Timberline cable car that goes to the top of nearby ski slopes. Meanwhile, the house of Joan, a friend of Annie’s mother in the movie who turns out to be part of a coven worshiping Hereditary’s demon king Paimon, is in a real residential building in Salt Lake City itself.
An Actual Funeral Home And School Were Used For Scenes In The Movie
They Were Other Locations Around Salt Lake City
Residential buildings weren’t the only real locations used for Hereditary. The funerals of Annie’s mother Ellen, the secretive leader of a Rosemary’s Baby-style demonic cult, and daughter Charlie take place at an actual funeral home called Larkin Sunset Gardens. The home is located in a suburb to the southeast of Salt Lake City called Sandy, and offers spectacular views of the Wasatch Mountains as we see in the movie. It’s also a realistic choice for Ellen and Charlie’s burials, with Larkin Sunset Gardens little more than half an hour’s drive from the location of the Graham house.
Likewise, Hereditary’s school scenes were sH๏τ in a real high school in Salt Lake City. West High School in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of the city was used for all interior classroom and corridor scenes, including the terrifying moment Peter prefigures his possession and death by smacking his own head against his school desk. But for the exterior sH๏τs of the building itself, the Grand Building of Utah State Fairpark was repurposed to serve as a high school campus.
Where Hereditary Is Supposed To Be Set
The Answer Makes The Movie Even More Terrifying
Although Salt Lake City and its surrounding area were used consistently for all of Hereditary’s exterior and on-location interior settings, the movie never actually specifies where it is set. This lack of specificity is an unusual choice for a horror movie of its type, especially in light of how much the atmospheric landscapes of the Wasatch Mountains appear to have inspired Aster in particular scenes of Hereditary. His decision not to mention Salt Lake City or Utah in the script was likely deliberate, in an effort to give the events of the story a more universal character.
If the audience doesn’t know where Hereditary is set, what happens to the Grahams could have happened anywhere, to anyone, which makes the film even more terrifying. If, on the other hand, location names were mentioned at any point, the wilderness of Park City or the grand backdrop of the Wasatch peaks could be misconstrued as factors in the plot. Aster would rather we simply enjoy the view, than ᴀssume it has anything to do with the horrors that befall the Grahams.
