Some ghosts don’t come from outside the house.
They come from your last name.

One of the oldest horror tropes—maybe even older than the vampire or the haunted house—is the cursed bloodline. From Greek tragedies to Southern Gothic, horror keeps coming back to the same chilling idea: You can’t escape your family.

You can try. You can move across the country, change your name, leave the church, bury the past. But in stories like Hereditary, The Witch, The Shining, or Pet Sematary, the evil isn...