Midsommar – Often Off Topic

Spooky season has well and truly arrived! The nights are getting darker, the air is getting colder, and you can’t go to a supermarket without being confronted by pumpkins or sweets! It’s the perfect time of year to hibernate indoors with a hot drink and a scary movie. This week’s Thursday Movie Picks theme is Teen Horror, and since finally welcoming horror movies into my life I’ve seen quite a few!

Here are my three favourites:

It Follows (2014)

Also known as the supernatural STD movie, It Follows is one of the few movies that genuinely scared the crap out of me both whilst I was watching it and for days afterward. Basically, it starts with one girl after a sexual encounter. ‘It’ follows her, only ‘It’ can take any form it wishes and moves at a slow pace until it finds you and kills you. You’re the only person who can see ‘It’, also. The only way to stop ‘It’ is to have sex with someone else and pass it on to them.

Happy Death Day (2017)

I’m so fed up with Groundhog Day-style movies that I avoided Happy Death Day until this year. It’s so good though! You can probably guess the plot, a teen girl is murdered one night and then wakes up at the start of the same day, only to die over and over again. It’s a bit jumpy, but it’s also quite funny and the sequel is surprisingly even better than the original!

Midsommar (2019)

It only feels like yesterday that Midsommar was released but I’m starting to learn that with Ari Aster’s movies, you aren’t likely to forget about them anytime soon. After suffering a family tragedy, Dani travels to Sweden with her awful boyfriend and his friends to visit a fabled mid-summer festival. It’s a quiet movie for a horror, and a lot of the worse moments happen off-screen, but it’s a glorious movie.

Director: Ari Aster

Genre: Horror, Drama

Runtime: 147 Minutes

Main Cast: Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, William Jackson Harper, Vilhelm Blomgren, Will Poulter, Ellora Torchia, Archie Madekwe, Dag Andersson, Isabelle Grill

Plot: A group of young Americans travel to a remote town in Sweden, at the invite of their friend, to take part in their Midsommar festivities. Dani, the girlfriend of one of the boys has recently suffered a traumatic incident and although not originally invited, joins the group as an escape.

My Thoughts: I’m marking this post as filled with spoilers, because it’s one of those where the less you know, the better the experience. Experience is definitely the best word I could use to describe Misdommar! After this and last year’s Hereditary, I will be racing to the cinema to see whatever Ari Aster makes next. The reaction from the audience once the credits rolled is a hilarious mixture of awe, disgust, bewilderment, and anger. It’s painfully obvious that some of the more casual movie fans were after a stereotypical horror!

Hereditary is still my favourite, but what I love about both is the most horrific things in the movie either happen off-screen, in the background or are so subtle that you might miss them if you aren’t paying attention. I’ve come to enjoy the movie more in the days after watching just from piecing some of the scenes together. It’s a long movie at just under 2 and a half hours, but it didn’t feel long to me – it’s a slow burner, but I couldn’t take my eyes away. That’s a lie, there was definitely more than one scene where I HAD to look away!

What surprised me was how funny Midsommar was in places too – I wasn’t expecting it and I pray to all the movie gods that Ari Aster makes a comedy at some point because it would be amazing. All in all, I highly recommend this movie – go in blind, don’t expect something exciting to be happening at every given moment, and just sit back and enjoy the festivities…

Best Bit: When Mark peed on the ancestral tree. It was funny enough alone, but then the villager’s reaction made it even better. Plus, the scene at the meal just afterward, with the way that guy was staring at Mark? I was laughing so damn loud whilst hiding in my own row at the cinema!

Worst Bit: The dance for the title of May Queen made me feel more ill than any of the gory scenes! It was possibly because I was sat in the second row from the front so I wasn’t sat with any groups of rowdy teens but the entire room was spinning for ages afterward…blergh!

Fun Trivia: According to Ari Aster, this was meant to be his first horror movie since Hereditary was intended to just be a family drama.
“Family drama” …ha!

My Rating: 3 and a half handmade pies. Oh, there’s a hair in yours? Uh…don’t worry about it…just drink your wine…

Tag: Midsommar

Thursday Movie Picks: Teen Horror

Midsommar (2019)