A24’s horror movie Hereditary wasn’t the craziest movie to premiere at Sundance this year—that honor goes to Sorry to Bother You—but it was definitely the scariest. Time Out called it “a new generation’s Exorcist” and the Hollywood Reporter immediately dubbed it the “most effective domestic horror chiller since The Conjuring and The Babadook.” Even the trailer is fucking terrifying, full of little girls cutting the heads off birds and what is probably the most unnerving use of a dollhouse ever.
Now, according to AV Club, A24 has found an entirely new way to traumatize people with its new movie—namely by secretly leaving weird dolls on the doorsteps of Hereditary audience members.
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Multiple people who attended a late-night screening of Hereditary at SXSW this week—including Moonlight director Barry Jenkins—reportedly woke up to hand-delivered packages outside their front doors featuring nightmare-inducing toys and strange notes. Because nothing is better than going to see a movie that is “life-ruining levels of scary” and then waking up to a horrifying package someone definitely left on your doorstep while you were sleeping, right?
A24 went on to post photos of the whole collection of dolls on Twitter, and each of the 15 freaky figurines is uniquely weird in its own way, including one particularly fucked-up guy who has a wine cork for a hand and a plastic pumpkin face permanently stuck mid-howl. They look like the kind of haunting, handmade dolls that Sid from Toy Story would sell if he grew up and opened an Etsy shop.
Unfortunately, not everyone was lucky (or unlucky) enough to wake up to one of A24’s gifts. Elijah Wood, who reportedly bugged out about how scary Hereditary was during a SXSW Q&A, really wants one, too—so whichever A24 intern was responsible for the first batch better fire up the glue gun and start working on round two.
Hereditary was written and directed by first-timer Ari Aster and stars Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, and Milly Shapiro. The movie is set to hit theaters on June 8, but it’s unlikely A24 will launch some kind of nationwide, freaky-ass doll giveaway like when the Pokémon movie gave away those Mew cards. Honestly, that’s probably a good thing.
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