FILM / The Source of Horror: An Anthropological Perspective on "Midsommar" and "The Witch" / Eleri Denham
Image © A24
Now as much as ever, it seems that audiences crave folklore—stories that are, by definition, not fully rooted in the modern world, and instead come to us out of the shadowy, indistinct past. Movie-goers seem to seek a connection to long-ago generations, to stories with origins obscured by time. Perhaps it’s a reaction to our daily lives being so saturated in rapidly changing technology, or maybe to an era when we are constantly bombarded by new information. Whatever the cause, the past several years have seen a resurgence in films that use folklore as the basis for horror.
Broadly defined, folk horror is a subgenre of horror that draws on folkloric traditions, fairytales, or religion. It is generally set in rural places, and often features themes of isolation, hysteria, and the threat (real or imagined) of supernatural forces. Movies in this genre can be examined not only in terms of the folk elements with which filmmakers choose to engage, but specifically the narrative aspects from which the film’s horror derives.
Folk horror can take on different forms depending on the perspective of the protagonists, and some of these forms hold up to scrutiny better than others. What can be a thoughtful engagement of a country’s or religion’s past failings can also be little more than an excuse to prop up ethnocentric ideals. A comparison of two recent, popular folk horror films, Midsommar (2019) and The Witch (2015), reveals the wide spectrum of this genre.
Ari Aster’s 2019 film Midsommar stars Florence Pugh as Dani, a young woman recovering from a terrible trauma: a murder-suicide orchestrated by Dani’s sister that kills both of their parents. In the aftermath of this tragedy, Dani agrees to go on a trip with her long-time, generally unlikeable boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) and several of his friends, including Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren). Pelle is bringing the group to his native Hårga in the remote north of Sweden to see the traditional celebration of Midsommar, a festival that takes place once every 90 years. This festival is to be the subject of anthropological research by Christian’s grad student friend, Josh (William Jackson Harper). Over the course of the film, the group of American students becomes more and more enmeshed in the community of Hårga as they bear witness to the natives’ disturbing ritualistic behavior.
Four years prior to the release of Midsommar, A24, the production company that made Ari Aster’s movie, was behind another folk horror film: The Witch. Directed by Robert Eggers, the story is set in 1630s New England. It centers around a family that has recently left England, only to be exiled by the local Puritan colony over a religious disagreement. The family lives in isolation and slowly succumbs to supernatural influence as well as their own growing suspicion and hysteria. The film stars Kate Dickie as increasingly distraught mother Katherine, Ralph Ineson as devout but troubled father William, and Anya Taylor-Joy as their teenaged daughter Thomasin.
Besides the obvious discrepancies in time and place, these films contain a basic but significant difference. Relative to the folklore that drives the story, Midsommar is framed from an outsider’s perspective. Its premise lies in otherizing non-Judeo-Christian ideas, and it makes an enemy of those participating in non-Western cultural practices. The characters’ extreme reactions to those practices are not unmerited in the context of the film; they are, subjectively, horrifying. But the reading of them as horrifying relies on placing them in the context of one’s own cultural (in this case, American) background.
Midsommar is littered with elements to remind us of the strangeness of its setting, including the use of runes (the Elder Futhark, well-known in Nordic mythology) and the presence of traditional Swedish art styles in disturbing murals that provide the physical backdrop for much of the narrative. The nearly 24-hour daylight is used to disorient and discomfit the American visitors, a constant reminder of the otherness of their surroundings.
In an article published by The Guardian, Andrew Michael Hurley offers a definition that encapsulates folk horror’s social importance: he explains that the genre “engages in a deep mapping of place, connecting layers of history, ecology, folklore and memory. It accommodates the supernatural and the eldritch, both of which are often ramped up to provide the horror.” Obviously, this definition is most relevant when a filmmaker is utilizing folk elements of their own country or region. Otherwise, the narrative doesn’t offer a “deep mapping of place” so much as it presents an ungrounded outsider’s perception of what a foreign place may be.
The fact that several of the film’s protagonists are anthropologists is provided as the reason that these Christian-normative characters come into contact with a culture so far removed from the mainstream. But the underlying premise of the movie—that those of other ethnicities are disturbing, dangerous, and fundamentally different—runs counter to the underlying principle of anthropology: that all cultures have value and are valid as a way of understanding the world. Of course, cinema has a long history of taking artistic license with the ethical codes of scientists and researchers, so it does feel unfair to single out Midsommar for following in this tradition. But it’s hard to ignore the unprofessional and immoral anthropology carried out by Josh, who breaks into a sacred temple at night to take pictures of a holy book after being explicitly directed not to do so. Without a doubt, anthropologists have committed such disrespectful acts, and far worse, in pursuit of their research in the past; it’s an unavoidable stain on the history of the discipline. But one hopes it is not representative of the field in the 21st century.
In fact, there’s only one significant moment where a character espouses a standard anthropological principal by encouraging the main character Dani to “keep an open mind.” It comes after they’ve witnessed the ritual suicide of two of the community members who have reached what they believe to be the end of their life cycle. The line is played as an almost villainous invalidation of Dani’s shock. It’s spoken by her emotionally distant boyfriend, who is repeatedly shown to be callous and uncaring. Yet refraining from culturally based judgment is exactly what he is, in fact, there to do.
There is no supernatural enemy in Midsommar. It is only the people of Hårga that present a threat. Otherized cultures as the sole agent of horror is not a new concept, but it is a weak one. At worst, it’s a problematic expression of colonist, Judeo-Christian ideals. At best, it’s lazy storytelling.
This is not to say that Midsommar isn’t a worthwhile piece of cinema in its own right. Visually, it is an extremely well-made film. It is beautifully shot by director of photography Pawel Pogorzelski, and the production design by Henrik Svensson is some of the best in the last few years. The performances, particularly by Florence Pugh, are excellent.
However, there’s something distasteful about using elements—like anthropological research—as a vehicle for plot development insofar as they are convenient without acknowledging the thematic implications of those elements. There were other ways to get a group of grad students into a remote village. The anthropology angle could have been dropped fairly easily if Pelle had simply invited the protagonists to the festival and they had agreed to an unusual but intriguing summer trip with their friends. But the fact that they were, nominally, anthropologists creates a dissonance with the very premise of the narrative.
Consider another version of this story where the community the American students visit is not comprised of light-skinned Swedes. It feels in a way as though the movie had to be set in northern Europe, because it needs a certain exoticism in order to work and if it had been set almost anywhere else that served that purpose—Asia, Africa, Polynesia, any indigenous community in any colonized country—the narrative would have been flagrantly problematic.
The implication here is that these horrifying rituals had to be carried out by white people, because we, as the audience, are meant to understand that this is not representative of white people in general. In an American context, only white people can be negatively represented in such a drastic way and not be perceived as a stand-in for all whites. Although it seems necessary that the villains, so to speak, as the source of horror for the film, are light-skinned, the underlying message is the same as if the story took place in any other country outside of America: those from foreign lands who speak foreign languages are, at least, misguided and strange, and, at most, unhinged and dangerous.
The film’s reliance on pagan ritual feels somewhat akin to using mental illness in the same role. (Here, “pagan” is used in an extremely loose sense to mean any of the world’s many non-Abrahamic, indigenous religions.) Of course, there are, historically, aspects of religion and ritual that we would consider frightening and inhumane—to say nothing of the atrocities being committed in the name of religion, including Christianity, in the modern day. Similarly, there are plentiful examples of mental illness manifesting in violence against others. However, the number of stories in popular culture that depict mental illness as the thing to be feared are hugely over representative of what mental illness looks like in the real world. By the same token, indigenous—i.e., non-Abrahamic, or “pagan”—religions are disproportionately represented as violent or sadistic.
Midsommar utilizes both of these tropes. The fact that Dani’s sister is bipolar is mentioned in an almost throwaway line towards the film’s beginning, as if this is a reasonable explanation for her behavior. But, of course, most bipolar people do not murder their parents. The representation of these two elements—non-Christian religion and mental illness—has a long and fraught history in popular culture, far beyond this film or this genre, and for that very reason they are deserving of additional scrutiny when they appear in mainstream movies.
While the film received generally positive reviews from Americans, it did not have the same reception from Swedish audiences. In the Swedish entertainment magazine Nojesguiden, film critic Nora Makander writes, “In Midsommar, the mixture of Swedish traditions with pagan rites… becomes an absurd and sometimes comical Swede fascination seen from an American perspective. … After several dubious rituals, the film feels more bonkers than unpleasant and the movie's climax amazingly empty. Is Midsommar scary? Not really.” (This translation is quoted in “Midsommar: What do film critics in Sweden think?” from BBC.com on July 10, 2019.) When the movie played in theatres in Sweden, there are reports of audiences laughing throughout the film, finding it more of an over-the-top caricature of Swedish tradition than a horror story. This reemphasizes that the film relies on American ethnocentrism in order to succeed in its goal: that is, to horrify.
There is a wholly separate conversation about whether it is ever acceptable to borrow another people’s culture as a backdrop for a film, particularly one that portrays that people in a decidedly negative light. It is worth discussing whether a culture, fictional although borrowing liberally from real life, should be used as a means to show gore and violence on screen. In folk horror, this question can be more narrowly focused: what is the protagonists’ relationship to the culture, and thus the folklore, being depicted, and from where does the horror derive? While the protagonists of Midsommar exist outside of the folklore that makes up the story’s infrastructure, this isn’t the only narrative configuration available to folk horror filmmakers.
While fitting squarely within the genre alongside Midsommar, The Witch frames its story in a decidedly different way. Like Midsommar, and in some regards even more so, Robert Eggers’ film is rooted in a rich body of real-life folkloric tradition. The film’s symbols and imagery are drawn from seventeenth-century trial records and first-person accounts relating to witchcraft, as well as pamphlets warning about the dangers associated with witches. (Incidentally, these pamphlets provided the inspiration for the stylized version of the film’s title, The VVitch—Jacobean-era printers frequently substituted two Vs if for any reason they didn’t have a capital W on hand.)
In The Witch, the enemy of the protagonists is not an otherized culture. The characters are living within their own, self-defined world. This single narrative choice radically affects every aspect of the story. The characters are never victims of malevolent outsiders, only their own vices and grudges, as well as the supernatural powers that exist within their own belief system.
For much of the film, the question of whether witchcraft truly exists is not front and center. There’s never any discussion about it: as of the beginning of the film, all of the characters fully believe that witchcraft is a valid threat. More predominant is the family’s unraveling in the face of tragedy and fear.
The film’s supernatural elements are only ever seen by those that perceive and recognize them within the context of their own worldview. As a result, it’s possible to view the film in a way that suggests that the supernatural does not, in fact, exist. In a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything), director Robert Eggers states that many potential interpretations of the film are valid. The crops of the family’s farm are shown to be failing because of an outbreak of black mold; Eggers suggests it’s not impossible that this is ergot, a type of fungus that can cause, among a host of physical symptoms, mania and psychosis. (In fact, a 1976 article in Science by Linnda R. Caporael proposes that ergotism was the culprit behind the Salem witch trials, although her theory has not been proven.) Regardless of the truth of the movie’s supernatural elements in the objective sense, the more relevant point is that they are real for the film’s protagonists. By contrast, in Midsommar, there can be no confirmation of the supernatural without validating the beliefs of the Hårga people. The absence of any supernatural elements in the film reinforces that the beliefs of the community are barbaric and unfounded.
It’s not irrelevant that the family in The Witch is Christian Protestant. Although their system of belief differs widely from the Protestants of today, it is still recognizably Christian in its language, symbols, and themes. For American audiences who—regardless of whether they as individuals are practicing Christians—are living in a Christian hegemony, the religious beliefs presented in The Witch will simply not have the same foreign quality as those in Midsommar. Since it is the foreignness of those religious beliefs that provide the horror element of Midsommar, it is impossible to separate our squeamish reaction to the film from the foreigners exemplifying those beliefs. This would be a different matter if Midsommar had been made by Swedish filmmakers—but it wasn’t.
Any discussion about Midsommar is almost necessarily a discussion by extension of The Wicker Man (1973). The film, directed by Robin Hardy and starring Edward Woodward as Sergeant Howie, is widely considered one of the foundational films of the genre (the other two being Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General, released in 1968, and Piers Haggard’s Blood on Satan’s Claw, released in 1971). The narrative shares many characteristics with Midsommar: an outsider travels to a secluded region—in this case Summerisle, a Scottish island—to conduct an investigation. Soon after he arrives, he finds that the local community holds unusual beliefs surrounding death and practices taboo forms of sexuality, both of which feature prominently in Ari Aster’s film.
The cultural practices of both Summerisle and Hårga are focused on ensuring a good harvest (which, socioreligiously speaking, is the underpinning for all agrarian societies with “pagan” belief systems). The worship of the old gods is explained by an industrious Victorian scientist having planted the customs among the local population within the last few generations. From an anthropological perspective, there’s something almost comical about the need to justify it this way, as if such heathen insanity could not exist organically—despite Celtic paganism (or at least strong elements of it) having existed, both before and alongside Christianity, for many centuries. The fictionalized version of Celtic paganism in The Wicker Man, like the heavily fictionalized Swedish traditions in Midsommar, exists solely in order to be manipulated to provide the maximum cinematic effect.
One of the only major deviations between Midsommar and The Wicker Man is that the protagonist of the 1973 film is overtly, vocally Christian. Sergeant Howie repeatedly scolds the Summerisle natives for having no knowledge of Jesus or the Bible, and forcefully reminds the leader of Summerisle (Christopher Lee) that he is still “the subject of a Christian country.” Howie faces his death in the titular wicker man with Psalm 23 on his lips: “The Lord’s my shepherd, I’ll not want; He takes me down to lie in pastures green.” The perceived acceptability of presenting the main character and audience proxy as a devout Christian has faded since the 1970s. The underlying assumptions of the Christian worldview—about sex, death, and the structure of society—are still present, virtually unchanged.
Through a gender lens, further differences between these films emerge. All three of the folk horror films discussed here—The Wicker Man, Midsommar, and The Witch—include some element of female sexuality being depicted as predatory. In Midsommar, a Hårga girl named Maja drugs Dani’s boyfriend Christian in order to have sex with him (the act includes the participation of numerous older Hårga women). In The Wicker Man, innkeeper’s daughter Willow (Britt Ekland) sings and dances naked in her room to seduce Sergeant Howie, although he manages to resist her (no doubt thanks to his God-given fortitude against such evils). If not inherently problematic to depict deviant feminine sexuality as a source of horror, from a storytelling standpoint, it feels at the least like a cheap shot.
In The Witch, however, the problematic female sexuality exists mainly in theory. Katherine, Thomasin’s mother, accuses Thomasin of seducing her younger brother, although there’s no indication that she is guilty of doing so. (Throughout the film, Thomasin’s mother accuses her of numerous misdeeds that she did not, in fact, commit.) In the context of the narrative, this feels more like a self-referential criticism about conservative Christian views of womanhood than an allegation against the gender itself. This, again, stems from the relationship of both the protagonists and the audience to the culture and folklore on screen.
Horror fans tend to talk about folk horror as if it emerged fully formed out of the 1970s, but in truth, the progenitor of the genre, The Wicker Man—later to be echoed by Midsommar—is one of the oldest stories that humanity has. It is a story that exists to tell us that the people of unknown places are dangerous, are frightful, are wrong. And this particular iteration—in which the unknown people are explicitly or implicitly deemed pagans—is certainly as old as Christianity itself. There are more interesting stories than this.
The Witch is one such story. In it, we inhabit the folklore that forms its premise. Rather than discovering horror in the form of an unfamiliar people, the characters instead find it embedded within their own beliefs, heightened by their insular surroundings and exacerbated by their human faults.
Can a movie like Midsommar still be enjoyable? Certainly. In its technical aspects, the film is expertly crafted and provides viewers with an engaging, atmospheric experience. But stripped of those aspects, it is a narrative that co-opts anthropology to sell a Christian morality tale.
Folk horror offers a chance to explore many of the universalities of the human experience: fear, yes, but also grief, trauma, and the breakdown of social, familial, and romantic bonds. Within the confines of the genre, it is the protagonists’ relationship to folklore that can greatly impact the tone and theme of the narrative. This is not to say that there is no place in the horror genre for cult films, or for those taking place in other cultures—merely that some narrative structures lend themselves to an artistically rich, socially responsible use of these themes more so than others.
Folk horror can help us grapple with the shortcomings of our present and engage with the wrongs of our past. As a type of storytelling that draws on our collective memory, it has been and continues to be a powerful cinematic form. But while the genre may have originated with certain recognizable, and perhaps regrettable, tropes, it’s time that folk horror outgrows its beginnings.
Works Cited
Aster, Ari, director. Midsommar. A24, 2019.
Caporael, L. “Ergotism: the Satan Loosed in Salem?” Science, vol. 192, no. 4234, 1976, pp.
21–26., doi:10.1126/science.769159.
Clark, Brenna. “Pagans and Proselytizers: Evidence of the Persistence of Celtic Pagan Eschatological Beliefs in Medieval Irish Christian Literature.” Constellations, vol. 10, no. 1, 2018, doi:10.29173/cons29359.
Eggers, Robert, director. The Witch. A24, 2015.
Haggard, Piers, director. The Blood on Satan's Claw. The Cannon Group, Inc., 1971.
Hurley, Andrew Michael. “Devils and Debauchery: Why We Love to Be Scared by Folk Horror.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 28 Oct. 2019, www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/28/devils-and-debauchery-why-we-love-to-be-scared-by-folk-horror.
“Midsommar.” IMDb, IMDb.com, www.imdb.com/title/tt8772262/trivia.
“r/Movies - I'm Robert Eggers, Writer/Director of THE WITCH – AMA!” Reddit, 19 Feb. 2016,
www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/46m0lf/im_robert_eggers_writerdirector_of_the_witch_ama/.
Reeves, Michael, director. Witchfinder General. American International Pictures, 1968.
Eleri Denham is a writer and editor of fiction, nonfiction, and screenplays. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Little Patuxent Review, Ghost Parachute, and Clover & White. She holds a bachelor's degree in anthropology with a minor in film and media production from Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State University.