The Exorcist influenced Hereditary

Both films are about a mother watching her child become someone else, and both refuse to let her be believed until the last act. Aster has cited The Exorcist among the possession films he was working against, and the inheritance is visible in the shape: a domestic drama played straight for an hour, a medical or rational explanation offered and exhausted, and only then the admission that the supernatural reading was the correct one. Filed MEDIUM. The lineage is real and the grief-first structure is genuinely Aster's own; what he takes is permission to spend an hour on a family before anything happens.