'Hereditary' Trailer: The Scariest Horror Movie at Sundance

When Hereditary, the new horror movie from the producers of Split and The Witch, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, critics were terrified and delighted. One critic said it was “so disquieting, you’ll be gasping for air in the theater,” while USA Today called it “insane.” There wasn’t an official trailer for the movie at the time, so we had to take their word for it. But on Tuesday, the first trailer hit the web, and it’s easy to see why everyone was raving about it, because this movie looks really, really intense and unsettling.

The official synopsis for the A24 film, which was written and directed by the rookie Ari Aster, lays out the plot like this:

When Ellen, the matriarch of the Graham family, passes away, her daughter’s family begins to unravel cryptic and increasingly terrifying secrets about their ancestry. The more they discover, the more they find themselves trying to outrun the sinister fate they seem to have inherited.

The trailer is light on plot details other than that there is something wrong with the family, and something is haunting them, somehow, after the death of Toni Collette’s mother. But, it makes up for that with gobs of really horrifying imagery. Milly Shapiro, who plays the family’s young daughter, might just go down as the creepiest horror movie kid of all time, because she looks and acts in a really upsetting way. She’s quiet, sunken-eyed, and, uh, cutting the heads off of dead birds. There’s also immolation and a dollhouse motif that’s effectively disconcerting.

Hereditary will hit theaters on June 8, 2018.