Follow TV Tropes

This is based on opinion. Please don't list it on a work's trope example list.

Following

Nightmare Fuel / Midsommar

Go To

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/capture_89.JPG
You don't want to know who she's looking at.

Hereditary was not deemed one of the scariest films of its time for no reason, and Midsommar embodies all of the most intense aspects of Ari Aster's horror, and then some.

As per wiki policy, spoilers are off on NF pages.


  • The opening tragedy which marks the trauma Dani deals with for the rest of the film. Dani's bipolar sister sends her an extremely distressing email and proceeds to not respond. The same night, Dani receives a call: her parents and sister are dead. The sister attached two garden hoses to the two car's exhaust pipes in the garage, one leading under the parent's bedroom door which is otherwise sealed off with duct tape, and the other taped directly to her mouth. Her sister and the taped hose are in the reflection pictured above.
    • The email in question:
      "i cant anymore - everything's black - mom and dad are coming too. goodbye."
    • Dani's agonized wailing over it is akin to Hereditary's depiction of a similar traumatic event for the main character, and equally devastating to listen to.
    • It gets worse when the camera gets closer to Dani's sister. While their parents simply died in their sleep and look relatively normal for corpses, we get a nice long look at the sister's dead face. It's apparent that one of her eyes is cloudy, and vomit has leaked out from the tape and onto her shirt.
    • In her parents' room, there's a vase of flowers in the background appearing to encircle a picture of Dani, hinting at how she will be crowned May Queen and also that her fate has been sealed since the literal opening frames of the film.
    • The song used during the whole sequence, "Gassed", perfectly captures its despondency and despair in a swarm of intense, groaning strings (that sound eerily akin to sirens at one point...).
    • If you look closely at the sheets when Dani is calling her parents, you'll see that they're still breathing. They were dying while she was making the call and probably could've been saved had Dani not followed Christian's advice. (According to the script, though, they're dead the whole time, so this could be either an accident that occurred during filming, or something added in production.)
  • The frighteningly realistic depiction of what a bad hallucinogenic trip looks and feels like. Dani is zoning out to nature on shrooms when Mark mentions "family" in a sentence, and as her recent traumatic event suddenly all comes back to her, she proceeds to spiral downwards in her trip quickly: nature begins to flow and ebb almost oppressively, she hallucinates that a nearby group of people minding their own business are all laughing at her, and a nearby friend offering her a helping hand almost appears to be leering at her in a subtle yet grotesque visual effect. She rushes to a nearby bathroom in the darkness in attempt to calm down, but this ends poorly...
    • As depicted in the page image, Dani then hallucinates seeing her dead sister's body looking back at her in the dark, with the hose still taped to her mouth, and then she looks in the mirror and sees her face becoming visually distorted with one of her eyeballs seemingly popping out. She immediately runs out into the woods panicking.
    • Before awakening, Dani dreams of police sirens and lights, before it cuts to both her dead family's bodies sitting side to side on the living room couch in the dark, and her sister looking back at her eerily smiling...
  • The disturbing "love story" tapestry depicting a girl creating a love potion made from her pubic hair and menstrual blood and using it to make a boy fall in love with her.
  • The ättestupa that Dani and the others witness. Two elderly members of the community jump to their deaths from a tall cliff. The woman jumps first, and the impact of her landing rips her face from her body (her open, bloody head is shown several times after that). She's dead on impact. But the man? He falls straight down, breaking his legs and letting out agonized sounds at the pain. It takes several villagers with a heavy mallet to finish him off.
    • The woman smearing blood from her hands onto one of the gravestones just before jumping from the cliff.
    • The woman appears to be looking at Dani eerily before jumping.
    • The audio becoming very distorted (like underwater) and everything around Dani in the background becoming blurry after the woman jumps to her death.
    • The brief gross close-up of the man's severely broken leg. Upon closer inspection, a bee is shown hovering around it.
    • The crowd's anguished cries and moans when the man survives his fall. What's worse is how abruptly and suddenly they silence themselves after the death blow, revealing that their lamentations were entirely performative.
  • Dani's nightmare that her friends and boyfriend sneak away in their cars, promptly abandoning her at the village. Dani screams, but her screams only come out inaudible and thick with black smoke. The next shots are a brief Gross-Up Close-Up of the old woman's destroyed face from jumping to her death, Dani's late sister staring back at her, the old man getting his head caved in and then reforming, and Dani's dead parents and sister lying at the bottom of the sacrificial cliff with the exhaust fumes and water hose still taped to her sister's mouth.
    • Eagle-eyed viewers might also notice that near the nightmare's end, Terri's eyes open up and she stares directly into the camera. What the hell..?
  • When the characters are tripping, elements of the world around them move and writhe as if the audience is tripping with them. It's subtle and disturbing. While some examples include background trees moving or a flower breathing on Dani's crown, it's been noted that when Dani is transported to the dinner table atop a pedestal, you can see her dead sister's face, cloudy eye and exhaust tube and all, among the trees. Aster and his team have really Shown Their Work on how surreally disturbing a bad trip can be.
  • When Dani is crowned the May Queen, the villagers' faces become distorted and she briefly hallucinates seeing her dead mother and father.
  • There are moments where the camera shows close ups of a villager named Ruben, the oracle. However, his face is horribly deformed as the result of deliberate inbreeding. Highlights include his first shot in the film, and in a later scene witnessing the fertility ritual between Christian and Maja.
  • Mark goes off with one of the village girls and is never seen or heard from again. Whatever was done to him, all we know is it ended with his face being torn off and worn as a mask. His sacrificial effigy in the final scene is a straw-stuffed scarecrow wearing the skin mask. So what happened to the rest of him?
    • The children earlier were play-acting what adults do, including a game called "Skin The Fool". Since Mark is basically a fool by his antics and to the villagers, that's pretty much his fate topped off with a jester hat on his effigy. Even worse is that his skin was worn by Ulf, the man he angered before that.
    • If you look closely while the straw dummy is in the wheelbarrow, there's clear wrist skin and blood on the incision where it was separated from his hands. It's quite literally a skin suit. Though there's no evidence to support they'd do such a thing, there are ways to get rid of skinned bodies. On a less, but still squicky note, maybe they used him as fertilizer. Blood, bone meal, and meat are all excellent fertilizer.
  • Josh meets his end being confronted by a half-naked Ulf wearing his friend's face before being hammered in the head from behind. The blow busts open Josh's skull and immediately brings him to the floor, but rather than knocking him unconscious, he remains aware enough to let out several muffled screams before being dragged away.
    • How can this possibly get worse? Simple. Word of God states that Pelle was the one wielding the hammer. A Freeze-Frame Bonus can even confirm it's him when the camera shifts from the Rubi Radr to Ulf.
      • Even worse? It wasn't just the skin of Mark's face — it was all of him, save for his hands and feet.
  • Three concurrent scenes end with Josh, Dani, and Mark faintly hearing Connie screaming in the distance. We never find out what she saw or what was done to her that caused her to scream. The next time we see Connie, her dead body is lying in a wheelbarrow pale, soaking wet, and distended, so we can only imagine how harrowing her final moments were.
    • Mark mentions that he saw Connie "trying out for the sprinting Olympics" earlier. This implies that he may have witnessed her last moments and did nothing.
  • Christian coming across Simon's flayed body spread out as a blood eagle and being pecked at by chickens is bad enough. Then he (and the audience) sees that his lungs are still moving. Hopefully it's just another instance of the film's images warping, right? Nope — Simon's labored breathing is included in the audio mix. Fuck.
  • The whole. Damn. Ending. Where to begin?
    • The nightmarish fate of Christian, regardless of if you think he deserves it. First made to impregnate another woman against his will, and then paralyzed and burned alive inside a bear skin — the last one done so at his own girlfriend's command. Delightful.
      • At one point, over the music and fire, you can just hear his still-very-much-alive screams as the entire suit is engulfed in flames, although his paralysis renders them more as wheezes...or bear-like growls.
      • A version of the scene with isolated dialogue and sound effects allows you to hear his gurgling, wheezing, attempting to scream, and struggling to breathe in its full glory. Sweet dreams.
      • To double down on the overall horror, in the director's cut, when the Hårga men are preparing Christian for the bear suit, one of them picks up a saw after they bare Christian's legs. Before Christian is burned, it's implied he's Half the Man He Used to Be.
      • Also, it is hard to see through the fire, but the last shot of Christian, long after he's dead, shows his face melting off of him. One side of his face is distinctly sagging down.
      • The screenplay confirms that the bear still has guts and blood inside, and bear meat is known to be very greasy. Not only is Christian burning, not only is he steam-boiling — the poor guy is deep-frying.
    • Ulf and Ingemar being left to burn alongside Christian, with Ulf emitting full-on shrieks out of nowhere and Ingemar looking on in horror. Doubly scary if you consider that they were given yew tree samples beforehand to "feel no pain" and "feel no fear" (respectively), and essentially have to spend their final moments in complete agony with the knowledge that they were sent to a horrible death with completely empty promises, and on a wider note the cult they've dedicated their lives to is a self-destructive sham.
    • The corpses of the other sacrifices as well are more than enough to make anyone a tad squeamish. Mark's "corpse" is simply just his skinned face placed over a scarecrow with a jester hat on top and both Josh and Simon's corpses have been mutilated with something stuffed down Josh's throat and flowers placed in Simon's empty eye sockets. Then there's Connie's corpse which is sheet white and grossly distended as she was (presumably) drowned offscreen by the cult. Her corpse is also dressed up like a tree with greenery pinned to her as well as what looks like photographs.
    • Dani essentially ends the film going from dating one gaslighter to joining an entire community of them — and she couldn't look happier about it. With the allusion to Pelle being "a great judge of character", it's difficult to shake the thought that Dani is just another victim, probably even being chosen by Pelle because she was easily manipulable due to her trauma and desperation (a tactic commonly used by real-life cults). And Pelle might very well have been added to the cult the very same way.
      • Not to mention the unnerving smile Dani gives in the film's final shot, especially after witnessing the death of Christian and the other sacrifices. The true terror, however, perhaps doesn't come as much from what's happening throughout all this as it does from what's written in the film's script. Look through all the way to the end, and you'll find the film's final moments described with chilling language that paints the entire ending in a new, far more indescribably horrifying light.
        A SMILE finally breaks onto Dani's face. She has surrendered to a joy known only by the insane. She has lost herself completely, and she is finally free. It is horrible and it is beautiful.
        CUT TO BLACK
    • To make the scene even more disturbing, a version without the background score has been released. While the original felt as if from the perspective of the Hårga — in which the imagery is victorious and upholding tradition — this version displays the true barbarism of the scene from an objective, detached view, and it is absolutely horrifying to watch.
  • It's heavily implied from Pelle's comments about his parents dying in a fire that the villagers are lying about the festival "only" being held every 90 years, and that this is actually a much more regular occurrence. Just how many people have this cult sacrificed?
    • Ari Aster himself seems to imply that the actual "sacrifice" in the fire temple is the only thing that happens every 90 years, and the rest of the "festivities" up to the May Queen crowning is what takes place every year, which should make it better, but it really doesn't.
      • Aster also said it is indeed a nine-day festival...but the movie didn't last nine days. This asks one very important, very terrifying question that we never get the answer to: if what we saw wasn't even the first half, then what does the rest of the festival entail?
  • Maja is only sixteen years old during the sex ritual where she is impregnated by Christian. How fucked up is a sex scene where one (if not both) of the party does not consent?
  • One of the scariest things is that despite what you'd expect from a cult like this, the Hårga aren't isolated and cut off from society. They actively encourage their young people to go out and travel, Pelle seems totally adjusted to life outside the commune—they even watch Austin Powers! They all know they have other options, and they do this anyway.
  • All of the children shown throughout the film are condemned to this fate. They'll grow up, lure innocent outsiders into the village, and allow them to suffer the same fates as Dani and her friends. And this is all treated as normal.

Top