Spoiler Warning: This article contains spoilers for Midsommar.
Ari Aster has described his follow-up to Hereditary as many things; a “post-apocalyptic breakup movie,” a “Scandinavian folk horror film,” and even a “Wizard of Oz for perverts.” All of which are true. The folk horror aspect makes Midsommar ripe for comparisons to seminal folk horror film The Wicker Man, but it far more closely aligns with an unexpected classic horror movie – The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
Tobe Hooper’s game-changing entry in horror followed a group of five friends as they traveled across Texas, under the blazing summer sun, and found themselves caught in the crosshairs of a deranged family. In Ari Aster’s Midsommar, five friends travel to a remote village in Sweden to ring in the mid-summer festival during a time when the sun never really sets. Those friends soon realize the welcoming villagers don’t have their best interests in mind.
Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) is the central character in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and her journey is motivated by loss. She and her brother and friends set out to check on the grave of her grandfather after news of grave robbing and vandalism. For Midsommar’s Dani (Florence Pugh), it’s the devastating loss of her entire immediate family and the subsequent depression that prompts her to take up a half-hearted invitation to accompany her boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) and his friends on their trek to Sweden.
Like the cannibalistic clan of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the villagers don’t take kindly to trespasses upon their beliefs. Though that’s not immediately apparent. Will Poulter plays the comic relief of the group as Mark, the American friend more interested in getting drunk and laid than learning anything about the culture he’s ventured into. This means he also doesn’t treat his surroundings with care. He makes social blunder after social blunder, finally earning the wrath of some of the villagers when he openly urinates on their ancestral tree, which serves as a mass gravesite for their departed loved ones. When he’s called away by the woman he’d been coveting, we know it doesn’t bode well.
Later, William Jackson Harper’s Josh sneaks into the village archive to take photographs the elders explicitly forbade him to take, Mark reappears behind him, though nude from the waist down. It’s when Mark gets closer than Josh understands the reality of what he’s seeing. This isn’t Mark; it’s someone wearing Mark’s face. Just like Leatherface.
Similar to Kirk in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, who finds himself bludgeoned overhead with a hammer, Josh is murdered in the exact same fashion. Right down to the body spasms on the floor. Both paid dearly for their trespasses.
Leatherface and his clan live by a very different standard and moral code than the rest of the world, and their isolation allows them to exist in that bubble. Both the Swedish villagers and the Texas cannibalistic clan live a strange life where their rituals and ceremonies often require taboo sacrifice and bloodletting that horrifies outsiders and normal society. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Midsommar feature intense dinner table scenes, too.
Sally and Dani’s story arcs have similar emotional beats, too, both culminating in the same crazed grinning in the closing shots of their respective films. Both leading ladies survived seemingly insurmountable horrors that tested their mental fortitude in extreme ways. And both came out of it, well, different.
Aster wears his cinematic influences on his sleeves, and he’d be the first to tell you he borrows more from non-horror than horror. Midsommar is like The Wizard of Oz for perverts, and it’s also similar to The Wicker Man in many ways. But most of all it’s like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, sun-soaked summer heat, depraved family, pitch black humor, and all.
