fact that the people bringing it to me were
very sweet, very smart, and wanted to give
me a lot of freedom,” recalls Aster. “Then
I found a way of using it as a way of
telling a personal story.” He surrounded
himself with Scandinavian fairy tales and
folklore, as well as more unconventional
inspirations: a 19th-century study of
mythology and religion titled The Golden
Bough, Albert Brooks’ 1981 comedy
Modern Romance and, strangest of all,
the books of Dr. Seuss. ‘Horton Hears A
Human Sacrifice’, anyone?
Midsommar, Aster promises, is
a film packed with desecrated bodies,
unnerving nudity, people drinking
mind-altering potions and other
distressing horrors unfolding in a field.
If that sounds a lot like your last
Glastonbury, rest assured Midsommar
has a few extra shocks up its sleeve. Even
those who’ve watched The Wicker Man,
Robin Hardy’s 1973 genre-defining folk
horror, won’t see its twists coming, Aster
warns. “It’s a fantastic film with fantastic
performances, but I basically let go of
The Wicker Man as an influence the
minute I decided to make this,” he says.
“I tried to avoid it as much as I could.
I think what the movie tries to do is
point to The Wicker Man and set up
expectations native to that film, then
take a left-turn from there and go
somewhere surprising.” He won’t be
drawn on what those surprises are, but he
will say this: “If I have a philosophy, it’s
that ideas frighten me. Not jolts or
jump-scares. Jolts are great — I try to
deliver a few in Midsommar. But that’s
not what lingers in the mind. They’re
not what you carry home with you,
what festers in your brain afterwards.”ASTER DOESN’T LOOK like the
kind of person responsible for sending
cinemagoers into anxious spirals.
“People expect me to be like a member
of [German industrial metal band]
Rammstein,” he laughs. “They’re
sometimes surprised to find me not really
like that at all.” It’s easy to understand
why. Aster’s films are troubling
explorations of mourning, the macabre
and man’s darkest psychological recesses.
Aster, meanwhile, is endlessly smiley and
painfully polite. He describes himself as
a “nebbishy Jew” prone to hypochondria
and OCD, and is endearingly geeky
about the technical side of his craft (the
excitement with which he talks about
camera lenses, most people reserve for
Beyoncé). He speaks in the soft, soothing
semi-whispers of a late-night radio host,
and appears genuinely untaken in by the
hype surrounding him. It takes a full
minute of needling to get him to nameAbove: Let th
spooky pagan
festival celeb
begin.film, centred on a son with a dark, violent
sexual obsession towards his own father
(probably not one to stick on after Better
Homes & Gardens during your next visit
to your parents’ house).
A love of boundary-pushing cinema
wasn’t the only thing he inherited
from his mother during these formative
years. When Aster’s grandmother
became gravely ill, his mother, a talented
writer and visual artist, used poetry as
a medium to work through her feelings
and fears. “The way my mom approached
her work had a very serious influence on
me,” says Aster, who developed a similar
instinct for picking up a pen in times of
turmoil. “Almost all of the screenplays
I’ve written have been written in times
of total crisis.”
Midsommar was no different. “I was
going through a very painful break-up
at the time. It was very fresh. Not even
a month had passed. I really wanted to
write something about it as a form of
therapy.” Aster had written Hereditary
but hadn’t yet filmed it. A Swedish film
company named B-Reel, however, had
read the script. Impressed, they reached
out with a loose idea — a folk horror
set in Sweden, about Americans lured
into a pagan cult. “Which at first wasn’t
especially intriguing to me, except for the ❯