Trivia / Midsommar

• Actor-Inspired Element: Christian was supposed to run out of the fertility ritual wearing the robe he had when he entered, but his actor Jack Reynor suggested he do it fully nude, noting how rare it was for males in horror films to be naked before their demise.
• Author Phobia: Mark displays an extreme phobia of ticks, which is based on Ari Aster's real-life fear of bugs and illness. Like Mark, Aster wore two pairs of socks over his jeans to ensure he would not receive bug bites.
• California Doubling:
  • The film is set in Sweden but was filmed in Budapest, Hungary.
  • According to the script, the college Christian and his friends attend is in New York, while Dani's family live in Minnesota. Those scenes were filmed in Utah.
• Creator Breakdown:
  • While Ari Aster rejected the initial pitch of the film as a Swedish cult slasher due to having no personal entry point to the story, he found one using a then-recent bad breakup, basing Dani and Christian on his emotions at the time such that the film turned into what he summarized as a breakup film dressed as a cult horror. After the premiere of the film, Aster said he was "feeling much better".
  • Jack Reynor admitted that the scene of Christian in the fertility ritual took its toll on him, and "it really sat on [him]" afterwards, as they had kept it for the end of the shoot and he'd been getting anxious about it for weeks. He says it's lucky he had to move onto a short film immediately after and have something else to focus on.
    "There was a psychological toll making this film for sure..."
• Creator-Driven Successor: While Midsommar's story has no intended overt connections to Hereditary, it hasn't stopped many from noticing stylistic and thematic parallels that connect the two films (which Aster has only partially admitted to being intentional):
  • A Creepy Child with a wonky-looking face.
  • A soundtrack composed by a contemporary experimental artist that mostly consists of eerie drones.
  • A character with family and anxiety issues that get compounded ten-fold after a traumatic family tragedy unfolds, after which a villainous cult mostly comprised of Affably Evil old folks closes in on them, executing a plan that was set in stone when the film began, which leads to situations that completely shatter their mental state and turn them into Empty Shells, allowing them to be assimilated into the cult in what is portrayed as a triumphant moment.
  • A montage showing a traumatic event in a character's life where the only audio is the droning soundtrack and the sound of them screaming.
  • A subsequent shot of the character sobbing endlessly into their silent lover's arms.
  • A shot of a character lying in bed with an empty stare the morning after said traumatic event.
  • A theme of non-vocalized human sounds, which is emphasized in the trailer (sharp breathing here, tongue-clicking in Hereditary).
• Dawson Casting: It's said that Maja has just turned the legal age (the slang word "byxmyndig" is used, meaning "old enough to consent to sex"), which would make her fifteen. Her actress Isabelle Grill was twenty. Of course, given that she strips naked and takes part in a graphic orgy scene, casting an older actress would have been necessary.
• Enforced Method Acting: When Christian tries to comfort Dani as she howls in agony at the news of her family's deaths, Jack Reynor recalls not having to do anything at all — because his reactions to Florence Pugh's screams are all genuine.
• Fake American: The American characters of Dani, Mark, and Christian are played by two English people and an Irish person respectively. William Jackson Harper is in fact the only American actor in the movie.
• Fake Nationality: A handful of supporting actors in the film are Hungarians playing Swedes.
• Foiler Footage: The trailer includes a very brief shot (at 2:14 here) of the temple being set alight, but the bodies of the dead American characters have been covered with baggy, featureless full-body suits.
• Method Acting: Florence Pugh stated that her process to perform the levels of anguish Dani goes through consisted of putting herself in a similar emotional state — which she described as a choice made out of respect to the intense and raw emotions of the film — by visualizing incredibly dark things, such as picturing her family members in coffins to portray Dani's grief from her own family's demise.
  "...I was so aware that she needed every single emotion that was being written down, it couldn’t just be faked, it couldn’t be imagined, it couldn’t be something that you thought that’s how they would feel. In all honesty, I was scared, because I’d never come close to any sort of grief like that in my entire life. I didn’t know what that looked like, I didn’t know what that sounded like, and in a film where that is heavily based around anxiety and grief, it would almost be rude to wing it."
  "I’d never played someone that was in that much pain before, and I would put myself in really shitty situations that maybe other actors don’t need to do but I would just be imagining the worst things. Each day the content would be getting more weird and harder to do. I was putting things in my head that were getting worse and more bleak. I think by the end I probably, most definitely abused my own self in order to get that performance."
• Mid-Development Genre Shift: The film was initially conceived by its Swedish production company as a straight-forward Wicker Man-esque Slasher Movie, which Aster was initially averse to until he got the idea to fuse the proposed slasher story with a breakup story.
• Missing Trailer Scene: The trailer features a quick shot of feet levitating off the ground that doesn't appear in the film. It was cut from the beginning of Christian and Maja's sex scene, where it appears in the script, and the decision to cut it was made by Aster himself on the grounds that it was overtly supernatural.
• Out of Holiday Episode: Some Swedish fans were annoyed that the film was released there a few weeks after their midsummer had ended.
• Shrug of God: Regarding speculation about this film and Hereditary being connected, Aster has shied away from confirming concrete links but has admitted to inadvertent "spiritual"/thematic bonds.
• Similarly Named Works: There's another horror film set in Scandinavia called Midsommer (though that one is Danish).
• Star-Making Role: Alongside Fighting with My Family, the success of this film put Florence Pugh on the map. It was then solidified with an Oscar nomination for Little Women (2019).
• Those Two Actors: Jack Reynor and Will Poulter also starred together in Detroit and Glassland.
• Throw It In!: Florence Pugh and Jack Reynor were allowed to improvise a few of their conversations, and one of their improvised arguments made it into the final cut.
• Typecasting: Christian is one in a line of aloof or snarky jerkass characters played by Jack Reynor; other examples include What Richard Did, A Royal Night Out, and Sing Street.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The script had the local's freakout about Mark pissing on the ancestral tree make a bit more sense. In the script, one of their group climbs and accidentally breaks a branch off a tree, which the Hårga member was "healed by" as a child and thus has a sort of life bond with the tree. In the Hårga's eyes, having the tree break means that he will become gravely ill or dead because of their fooling around, so his vendetta is a bit more personal.
  • The script also reveals very early versions of Josh and Simon's deaths, in which Christian would've found them both in the chicken coop instead of just Simon. Josh would've been chained to a fence with his liver exposed, covered in feed and pecked at by birds; the reveal that he was still alive, with him suddenly gasping for air and convulsing, would've been something of a Jump Scare. Simon would've been hung by the heels with rope tied between his tendons and bones.
• Word of God:
  • Ari Aster has said that the person who hits Josh with the hammer after he's caught taking pictures of the Rubi Radr is Pelle.
  • As if it somehow wasn't obvious enough, Ari Aster has confirmed that the Hårga are white supremacists.
    Interviewer Tatiana Hullender: It also seems like there’s an undercurrent of racism or xenophobia in the story, in terms of how the way that Connie, Josh and Simon are treated is different from the way that Dani and Christian are – even if the end result is one. So what was it you wanted to say with that? Was that a conscious choice you made?
    Ari Aster: That was a very conscious choice, and I tried to sort of weave a lot of things into the periphery of the film. I think it’s there, and I’m reluctant to be too explicit about it. But it is there, and I’m glad you noticed that, and it’s a very important part of the film.
• Write What You Know: Aster said that he wrote the film during a bad breakup and based both Dani and Christian's characters on the feelings he was having during his own relationship, with him explicitly stating that he saw Dani as more of a reflection of him to the extent of being a downplayed Author Avatar.

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