The Signature in the Swarm — Hollywood

Where the Flies Gather

Here the swarm is not an attack. It is a map of where the coven has been.

Hereditary — 2018. The most recent entry, and the most open about crowning what it worships.

The Fly on Screen

A family buries a grandmother. Not long after, the young daughter is decapitated in a car accident, and the camera cuts to her head lying in the road, collecting ants and flies in the sun.

Later the son climbs into the attic and finds flies, candles, and a photograph of his own face with the eyes punched out. The grandmother's body is gone from where it was put.

The insects do not attack anyone in this film. They simply appear wherever the group has already been at work.

The picture ends with that group gathered in a treehouse, bowing, hailing a spirit named Paimon as king. A human body is handed over as a dwelling place, and the daughter's severed head sits on the statue.

What the Fly Is Doing

The flies are an index. By the end of the picture a viewer could trace the coven's work through the film using the insects alone — the head that will be crowned, the attic where the body was kept.

That is colder than the other four, and in one way more honest. It uses the swarm for what the swarm has always meant: something has died here.

What the film refuses to ask is the next question. Something died — who is guilty of it, and by what standard? The picture has no answer, because its doctrine is in its title.

Guilt runs down a bloodline. The family is doomed by descent, and nothing any one of them chooses makes the slightest difference. The grandmother's devotion becomes the mother's madness becomes the son's body, and there is no exit anywhere in it.

And Paimon is not invented either. He is listed as a king in the old European grimoires, and the film takes his name and rank as written, then crowns him on screen while the audience calls the whole thing a film about grief.

The Name Behind It

Ahaziah, king of Israel, was badly hurt and sent men to ask Baal-zebub, the god of Ekron, whether he would live. Baal-zebub means lord of the fly. Elijah met the messengers on the road with a question and a sentence — is there not a God in Israel, and the king will not come down off that bed (2 Kings 1:2-4). He did not build the fly-god a temple. He asked him one question. That was enough. The same name is the title of the prince of devils in the gospels (Matthew 12:24).

Ekron's fly-god was called prince of devils. This picture ends with a coronation — a different name, the same insect gathered around it, and a body handed over.

What Scripture Says

The title is the lie, and one verse takes it down. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, and the father shall not bear the iniquity of the son. The soul that sins, it shall die (Ezekiel 18:20). Nobody else's.

That is the difference between a curse and a court. A curse follows blood down a family. A court tries the man standing in front of it, on a written standard, for what he himself did.

Calling up the dead is named directly and forbidden — no enchanter, no consulter with familiar spirits, no necromancer (Deuteronomy 18:10-12). It is called an abomination, and it is why nations were driven out of the land.

Saul went to the woman at Endor and got exactly what he asked for. He also died for asking, and the record says so in plain words (1 Samuel 28; 1 Chronicles 10:13-14). The door opens. That was never the question.

The Line

The title is the lie. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father.

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