Cult Clash

On Midsommar, fascism and climate change

(A version of this article appeared in Tribune magazine, 10/08/19)

Ari Aster, writer-director of Midsommar, knows you might’ve watched 70s British horror classic The Wicker Man. But he hasn’t cribbed from it (nor its modern, bear-punching remake) so much as anticipated your familiarity with the sub-genre of ‘the creepy cult’ or at least with the wider genre conventions. One such convention is foreshadowing, which in horror is more than a screenwriting cliché or a roundabout way to say ‘telling a story’ — but an essential device to sustain the note of dread.

By now, though, double-edged dialogue, symbolic details, doomy music have all gotten groaningly obvious. In response to our genre savvy Midsommar leans in to its foreshadowing — to the point of being knowing and tongue-in-cheek. When the mysterious Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren) tells bereaved American student Dani (Florence Pugh) how glad he is she’ll be joining the midsummer festivities among his Hårga people in the remote Swedish countryside, we’re meant to think: Uh-oh!

This ‘knowing foreshadowing’ encourages you to look out for which details — the mural at the start of the film, a photo of Dani crowned with flowers — might be an omen. And by looking so closely we might catch the omen behind the omens. Twenty minutes into the film we see a college…