ARI ASTER IS trying not to lose his
head. It’s a drizzly May afternoon in New
York, where the man behind last year’s
most disturbing, decapitation-filled
horror, Hereditary, has been frantically
finishing its follow-up. Locking yourself
in a dark room for weeks on end to edit
a movie is an intense experience at the
best of times. It’s even more intense when
that movie is Midsommar: a “bleak adult
fairy tale”, as the 32-year-old calls it,
brimming with blood rituals, pagan
cults and revelations about death and
the human condition. Throw into the
mix the fact that Hereditary was among
2018’s biggest critical smashes, rocketing
the first-time director from film school
anonymity to horror’s top table, and
you’d forgive him for looking like the
moviegoers as they left cinemas after his
terrifying debut: stressed, dishevelled,
brought to the brink of madness.
“I’m hanging on in there,” the
filmmaker insists with a smile, surfacing
from his edit suite to meet Empire in
a Manhattan café. “It’s a little bit crazy
right now but I’ll survive.” The same
likely can’t be said for the tourists at the
centre of his latest chilling tale. Set in
a remote Swedish village, Midsommar
follows Dani (Florence Pugh) and
Christian (Jack Reynor), an American
couple who, despite their relationship
hitting a rocky patch, embark on
a round-the-world holiday adventure
with pals to a mysterious festival held
once every 90 years. Judging from the
mangled corpses, mutated faces and
levitating bodies teased in its trailers,
it’s probably safe to predict they regret
not checking TripAdvisor first.
“Midsommar is a different beast
to Hereditary, but in some ways it’s a
spiritual companion,” says Aster. “Both
films deal with grief. Both films are about
family. Both films happen to have cults
in them. I’d say what ties them together
is that they’re both, at heart, dramas —
operatic, existential character studies
passed through a horror filter.”
Just like how Hereditary was, deep
down, a kitchen-sink study of a family
fractured by grief, preying on primordial
fears about passing our traumas and
flaws on to the ones we love, Midsommar

is a relationship drama beneath its

folk-horror exterior. Or, as Aster has

previously put it, an “apocalyptic

break-up movie”. Forgetting Sarah

Marshall by way of The Wicker Man,

then? “You’re not far off,” he laughs. “It

starts off as this character study, then

warps into this really perverse wish-

fulfilment fantasy. You’ll see. The entire

movie is constantly moving towards

a certain... explosion.”

Speaking of things blowing up

— Midsommar might be the movie that

catapults Aster into a new life as one of

American cinema’s most sought-after

young directorial talents. The New

Yorker’s first film announced him as an

exciting, emerging horror philosopher

with an arthouse auteur’s eye for allegory

and a blockbuster crowdpleaser’s knack

for giant scares (that decapitation, those

naked demon-worshippers, that shot

of Toni Collette lurking like a spider in

the shadows of a ceiling). Edgar Wright

hailed it as a “beautiful, shocking

must-see”. Barry Jenkins called it

“masterful”. No other movie rattled

audiences last year like Hereditary, the

$80 million-grossing surprise success that,

hot on the heels of Get Out, The

Babadook et al, seemed to epitomise

a new wave of sophisticated, soul-

searching horror rooted in character and

emotion as much as jumps and bumps in

the night. How the hell does Midsommar

plan to top it? What are the secrets of

Aster’s bleak new fairy tale? And who

exactly is this writer-director blazing new

trails for horror in Hollywood? Like all

good fairy tales, it’s a story that begins

once upon a time, in a land far, far away.

ASTER GREW UP in New Mexico. It

was a childhood as liberal as you’d expect

for a kid raised by a poet mother and jazz

Top to bottom:

Dani (Florence Pugh)

and Christian (Jack

Reynor) eye some

grisly goings-on in

Midsommar; Ari Aster

with cast and crew

on set; So what’s on

the menu? Best not

to ask...

drummer dad. Born in New York, he

lived for three years in Chester, in

north-west England, before relocating

to the southwestern US state for his

adolescence. It was here, helped by his

cinephile mum, that he developed an

interest in movies he describes as

“transgressive and weird” — Michael

Haneke’s twisted erotic thriller The Piano

Teacher, Todd Solondz’s taboo-smashing

Happiness, the work of Lars von Trier,

and whatever else he could get his hands

on. When he began years later making his

own short films, he reached for similarly

shocking subject matter: The Strange

Thing About the Johnsons, a 2011 short

A