Midsommar

While writing (and writing and writing and writing) my latest post on “Murrain” (Nigel Kneale’s contribution to the 1970s ITV series Against the Crowd), I was struck by how Adam Scovell’s “Folk Horror Chain” manifested itself in Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019). I just want to quickly share these thoughts in this brief aside before they flit off into the ether. Think of this blog post as being kinda like Dumbledore’s pensieve.

For those of you who are new to the subject, Folk Horror is a genre of film that usually depicts the violent return of pagan rites to a more modern era. Most critics point to the “Unholy Trinity” of films made in England during the late-1960s and early-1970s as the genre’s starting point: The Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, 1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (Piers Haggard, 1971), and The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1975). It can be argued that the genre has a much older tradition – certainly Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Young Goodman Brown” could be seen as being an antecedent to the “Unholy Trinity” – but the films, television programs, novels, and music of the above time period were particularly pungent with an odd combination of a desire to return to a simpler past and a fear of the rituals that past entailed. In short, to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, it seems like the late-1960s were just Folk Horror time.

In his book, Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange, critic Adam Scovell theorizes that the genre manifests itself in a particular film in three ways:

• the use of the landscape and the environment as an isolating influence
• the skewed morality and belief systems of communities that develop in these environments
• the violent manifestations that proceed from these belief systems

Each of these elements is linked to the others, so that they form what Scovell calls the “Folk Horror Chain.”

In my review of “Murrain” (which...cough, cough...shameless plug...you can read here), I tried to show the ways that writer Nigel Kneale and director John Cooper play it straight with Scovell’s “Folk Horror Chain,” while at the same time they keep things ambiguous enough to make the viewer wonder if what is happening is real or not. Kneale and Cooper utilize a naturalism in their romanticism (or is it the other way ‘round?) knowing that each of these generic strains will cause fiction (and frisson) with the other.

As I wrote about “Murrain,” I was reminded of Ari Aster’s Midsommar. While I thought that Aster’s film was beautiful if a bit by-the-book, upon reflection, I was struck by how the writer-director also used the “Folk Horror Chain” in unique ways. What Aster is able to do in Midsommar is to equate the violence inherent in Hårga society that Dani (Florence Pugh) and her friends enter with the neglect inherent in the society they just left – America. In a sense, Dani is neither saved nor damned by joining the commune. What she experiences in Sweden is merely the flip side of the coin to what her life in America was.

In Midsommar, the events that unfold at the commune in Hälsingland, Sweden, follows Scovell’s chain very closely. The rural landscape acts as an isolating influence on the community of Hårga, as well as on Dani and the other newcomers. This isolation, in turn, allows the commune’s rituals to grow and flourish. The ease with which the academics in the group, Christian (Jack Reynor) and Jack (William Jackson Harper), accept the horrors of the ritual suicide of the community’s elderly members is nearly as cult-like as the cult that spawned it. These rituals build to a head with the violent finale of the film.

That’s Folk Horror, folks!

Where Aster adds a wrinkle to the Folk Horror goings-on in Midsommar is in his depiction of Dani’s trauma and the ways in which her community deals with it. Before we ever get to the psilocybin-induced undulating amber waves of grain in sun-bright, rural Sweden, we witness Folk Horror of a different kind in the dark and snowy (and in Dani’s case, Ativan-medicated) streets of urban America.

Midsommar begins with Dani unable to get into contact with her family. Her sister, Terri (Klaudia Csányi) sent Dani a troubling email that, when viewed through the lens of Terri’s bipolar disorder, causes Dani to worry about her and her parents’ safety. Dani reaches out to her boyfriend, Christian, who is also getting “medicated” (if you know what I mean) with his friends. Unfortunately, Christian is of no help to Dani. He downplays her sister’s email and assures her that everything is fine.

Famous last words...

Later, as Christian and his friends sit around a table at a local bar discussing Dani’s neediness and Christian’s inability to break free from her and her drama, Dani’s name appears in the caller ID of Christian’s phone. Christian is met with Dani’s howls of sorrow. The worst has come true: Terri has committed suicide. Worse still, she has also killed their parents.

If we take the “Folk Horror Chain” into consideration here, we see that this prologue serves as Folk Horror of another kind. First, the landscape we are presented with in the beginning of Midsommar is utterly isolating. Dani is alone in her apartment. Her only contact with others comes via the digital landscape of email on her computer and calls on her cellphone. On the one hand, she cannot get an answer from Terri via email; on the other, she gets no real empathy from her friends on the phone. Dani is also isolated by the environment. Outside her apartment, it isn’t exactly soothing and welcoming as it is dark and snowing furiously. One can only assume that this landscape and the environment was just as isolating to Terri. What Midsommar presents us with in this prologue is not so much an isolated community like Hårga, but a social system that isolates its members from each other – there is no connection between neighbors, friends, lovers, and families.

This brings us to the second link in Scovell’s chain: the belief systems that develop in these isolated communities. The “rugged individualism” of America is of no help to people who require human contact and empathy. When Mark (Will Poulter) tells Christian that Dani needs a therapist, Christian informs him that she has one. That doesn’t stop Mark from further denigrating Dani by saying that by calling Christian instead of her therapist she is abusing Christian and their relationship. As Mary Beth McAndrews points out in her Polygon article “Midsommar takes a step forward and a step back in its portrayal of mental illness,”

“Mark equates having a therapist as having enough help and support for mental health issues, reflecting real world misunderstandings and attitudes about mental health care and support. Unfortunately, most therapists aren’t just a phone call away and can’t be reached 24/7. Boundaries are important, but you still need someone to talk to when your thoughts are racing and you just need a distraction. That’s why support systems are key to living with a mental illness.” 

There are no support systems in Dani’s community. Each person is on their own. Anyone who cannot pull themselves up by their own bootstraps doesn’t count. In fact, it might be better for those who can forge ahead under their own steam if the weaker members of the community left them alone.

This leads us to the third link of the “Folk Horror Chain:” the violent manifestations that proceed from these belief systems. When people are isolated from one another to the extent that Dani and Terri are, the possibility of self-harm must be taken seriously. The murder-suicide ritual Terri performs is extreme and, from a real-world diagnostic point-of-view, out of the ordinary. Indeed, as McAndrews, herself diagnosed with “rapid-cycling bipolar disorder,” notes,

“There are stereotypical behaviors associated with [Terri’s] diagnosis, and the one Aster chose for [her] adds to the perception that people like myself are inherently dangerous and on the precipice of snapping...I try to tell myself my diagnosis does not define me, but in films such as these, it is difficult not to feel despair, and difficult to feel that my diagnosis may strike fear of such acts into the minds of those I choose to tell. The images from Midsommar only reinforce my own personal fears about myself and what people expect from me.”

From a dramatic standpoint, however, the violence that blooms from American soil is shocking, but to be expected. As Scovell says in Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange,

“Folk Horror is often about death in the slowest, most ritualistic of ways, occasionally encompassing supernatural elements, where the group belief systems summon up something demonic or generally supernatural.”

Isolated individuals who sense that they have no connection to anyone else will feel that their lives do not matter in the grand scheme of things. The group belief system that encourages this kind of thinking shouldn’t be surprised when “The Savage God” is summoned into their midst.

In Midsommar, Aster presents the viewer with not just one Folk Horror community, but two. Neither is to be thought superior to the other, and both are to be feared. While America is shown to be dark and cold, Hälsingland is bright, sunny, and warm. However, during the middle of the summer, the sun only sets for a few hours a day. Even then, there is never total darkness. There is nowhere to hide from the sun’s (and your neighbor’s) glare, nowhere to be by yourself, which is just as important to a healthy mindset as connection to others is. This landscape, therefore, creates an isolation of another kind: constant connection to others and the suppression of the individual self.

The anti-isolation fostered in Hårga can be seen in every aspect of their community, and it stands as a dark, mirror image of America. Whereas in America Dani and Terri take medication to dampen their thoughts, in Hårga, the community takes psychotropic hallucinogens to open their minds. In Hårga, everyone sleeps in communal quarters. No one has their own bedroom, their own space. This open space is a dark reflection of Terri’s and her parents’ bedrooms and shows them to be lonely and dangerous spaces.

The lack of empathy in America is supplanted by its extreme opposite in rural Sweden, as well. When Dani witnesses Christian engaged in ritualistic sex with a member of Hårga, she breaks down. The women in the community follow and surround her. As she sobs, so do they; her screams are matched by theirs. It’s not enough to tell someone else in Hårga that you understand their feelings; one must share the pain and pleasure of others immediately, without any differentiation between “yours” and “mine.”

By the end of the movie, Dani has become fully enveloped by the Hårga commune. She is their May Queen, and as such, it is up to her to choose the ninth and final sacrificial victim in order to complete the ritual that will purge evil from the community. Dani chooses Christian. The end result of communal values in America and Hårga, then, is the same: death. In America, Terri’s murder of her parents and her own suicide come about through that society’s lack of empathy for and understanding of people with depression. Like other aspects of the Hårga culture, murder and suicide are embraced by the members. Just as there are no boundaries between people in Hårga, there are no boundaries between death and life.

Viewing Midsommar through the lens of Scovell’s “Folk Horror Chain” adds an extra layer of inevitability and fate to Dani’s story. Depending on your own perspective, Dani’s laughter at the end of Midsommar can be seen as either triumphant (she’s broken away her past and found a community that supports her) or horrific (she’s given up her individuality and joined a cult). However, if one views modern America as a Folk Horror society, then Dani is still trapped at the end of the picture. In every good horror film, there comes a point when the main character thinks they have escaped from danger only to find themselves right back in the soup [think: Sally in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974), Alice in Friday the 13th (Sean Cunningham, 1980), and the three filmmakers in The Blair Witch Project (Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick, 1999)]. Dani’s fate is no different. Thinking that she is leaving behind the trauma of America to find a new beginning in Hårga, Dani doesn’t seem to realize that there is no real difference between the two. At the end of Midsommar, she remains trapped in a society that erupts periodically into violence, which may, in the future, be turned on her.

Maybe her laughter is a sign of her recognition of that irony? Now that would be really scary.