Is this a 'horror' movie?

Rating: 2/10 (23 December 2018)

I'm not sure if Hereditary can be called a horror movie. Although there is plenty of gore, which often comes off as hilarious rather than horrifying, and many hints of supernatural events -- which, again, often come off as funny rather than eerie because of poor execution and lack of context -- I see Hereditary as an otherworldly family drama that fails to entertain.
The title itself implies there is something wrong with this family. Ellen was surrounded by mentally ill people her entire life, Annie has repressed emotional issues and a sleepwalking disorder (NOT explained, but it's implied to be her mother's evil cult controlling her in her sleep), and Charlie...is a strange bird, pun intended for those of you who have already seen this. The IMDB poster shows Annie standing over Charlie to hint that it's the women in the family who harbor evil. It's later revealed that Ellen was the Queen of a cult, Annie was the interim -- the one would deliver the children Ellen needed to conjure King Paimon -- and Charlie was the catalyst whose death would break the family apart and allow King Paimon to take over Peter.
I'll insert my critique as I try to explain this movie, which is extremely formulaic: a creepy event happens that's supposed to scare the audience (but never quite succeeds), followed by 20-odd minutes of boring filler. After the death of her mother, Annie is shaken. Charlie is sad, because she was connected to the grandmother; it's later explained by Annie that she was 'given' to Ellen, since Annie kept Ellen away from Peter. (There is a LOT in this movie that isn't explained, keep that in mind.) Ellen's grave is robbed, and for no reason Annie's husband literally has no f%cks to give and keeps it secret. Charlie goes into anaphylactic shock at a party; Peter drives her to the hospital, and she gets decapitated by a pole when she sticks her head out the window. Like father, like son: he also doesn't say a word, just lets his mom find her headless daughter the following day (nice family).
Annie meets a woman named Joan at a grief counseling group. Joan convinces her to watch a seance where she talks to her 'grandson' who I read is actually Paimon. The sequence of events afterward aren't entirely clear to me, but at this point Paimon was already inside of Charlie and waiting to be transferred into Peter's body. Annie conducts a seance using Charlie's sketchbook, and for a minute Charlie seems to take over her body. Annie's husband sees all of this, and KNOWS that his mother-in-law's body is missing, but doesn't believe some freaky sh#t is going on. Peter is traumatized and hasn't said much since he accidentally killed his sister; he doesn't smoke weed anymore, even though that would probably help his anxiety.
Peter is tormented by a weird beam of sparkling light (yes, really) partly controlled by the demonic cult led by his grandmother. Apparently, the sparkling beam of light is the form Paimon assumes when he isn't in a human body. Joan is revealed to be Ellen's wing-woman, which Annie learns about only after she finally goes through her mother's things. Yes, Annie and Ellen were estranged, but isn't it a BIT weird that Annie waited until the last 30 minutes to look at Ellen's belongings? There are also plenty of other dead ends...for example, WHY Charlie cut the head off of a pigeon and then drew it in her sketchbook...does this even matter for the story, or is it just creepy fodder to try and convince us that yes, we're watching a horror movie with a disturbed child who does disturbing horror movie things?
Although he's pivotal to the plot, I don't know who Peter is as a character, since he barely has ANY lines and we receive no interiority about him. We don't get to see him interact with anyone but his mother and Charlie, whom he hardly speaks to. He had friends, but his throat conveniently closes up when he's around them. When he jumps out of the attic and kills himself, I couldn't care less that he died. When Annie uses two wires to cut off her own head, I was cringing and also kind of laughing because the CGI was really...bad. I didn't give a damn what happened to these people by the last twenty minutes. The naked cult members inside and around the house were also obvious creepy fodder to make the final scene more demented. The naked old men were extremely distracting and didn't scare me.
Like many others, I thought the ending was an awful pay-off. The fact that Ellen's cult is so SMALL is a head scratcher and also implies that King Paimon isn't actually a threat. A dozen-odd people and a demon that's too stupid to know its own name or speak once inside Peter isn't...actually scary, because there's no tension. If we had ANY idea about the horrors Paimon can raise in a human body, maybe I would have been worried. Peter acts like a two-year-old at the end of the movie and I doubt he's going to bring about the apocalypse.