Movie Mixtape: 6 Movies To Watch With 'Hereditary'

Summer means seeing movies with the whole family. Something breezy. Something light. Something like Hereditary, which should give your family plenty to talk about at the ice cream parlor afterward. If anyone can still speak that is.

Even in our exaggerated world, it's incredibly rare for a movie to be dubbed "the scariest of the year" by so many different critics and fans, which is reason enough to get hyped for the Toni Collette-starring grief fest. Trust me. I googled "scariest movie of the year" for every year for the past 10 years, and the sentiment is hardly ever common enough to earn a consensus (shout out to The Witch). There were years that no one used the phrase at all, but not this year! Hereditary and A Quiet Place are dueling for the honor by making it difficult to eat roast pigeon or popcorn during your movie.

Here are 6 movies to watch after (after!) you see Hereditary and stop screaming. Or while you're still screaming. Either way.

Joe Dante's fearful comedy is more complicated than most give it credit for. It's Rear Window played for laughs. The excruciating anxiety coursing through Tom Hanks's overwhelmingly average suburbanite dude is the fear of being catastrophically wrong about your benign neighbors. Of seeming crazy or bigoted. Or of doing nothing when you suspected the people next door ("He was always so quiet!") of doing something heinous.

The denizens of Mayfield Place all have their quirks, but their Spidey sense tingles when vaguely Eastern European neighbors The Klopeks move in and start doing strange things at night. At the tail end of the Cold War and the middle of suburban suspicion aided by The Stepford Wives and Poltergeist, The 'Burbs turned bored men into vigilantes. Anchored by Hanks's performance, Carrie Fisher's arid wit as his wife, and "Illinois Nazi" Henry Gibson's shifty-eyed mastery as the Klopek patriarch, the movie is really about a longing for adventure in a world of little boxes that all look the same.

Another Sundance shocker about what's hiding in your neighbor's basement, Lucky McKee's feral delight is one more example of the bored middle-class white bro deciding to take out his jollies on a woman he wants to "civilize." Unfortunately for him, Chris Cleek (Sean Bridgers) never saw Offspring, because the woman he netted (Pollyanna McIntosh) is a cannibal who probably won't be too forgiving when the chains come off.

Allegiances shift and fracture as the family project intensifies, and the whole damned thing is supercharged by dueling virtuoso performances from McIntosh, who snarls and contorts and slaps Darwin in the face, and Angela Bettis, who demures and explodes as the wilting wife and mother. It's an audacious, thoughtful film that doesn't disappoint in the blood department.

An artistic mother, a detached young daughter, a past shrouded in secrecy. The emergence and success of Hereditary practically begs for cheerleading the Dutch slow-burn horror Two Eyes Staring. In her family's creaky new digs, nine-year-old misanthrope Lisa (Isabelle Stokkel) befriends the ghost of her mother's twin sister, but her mother says she never had a sister, so it's complicated.

This isn't the type of haunted house story where lamps fall over and breath gets visible for a second and lights blink to signal a spiritual entity. The ghost in Two Eyes Staring is a physical presence we get to spend a lot of time with, which is a bold move that pays off greatly, making this a different beast altogether.