Editorials
[Spoilers] The Surprising Influence of ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ on ‘Midsommar’
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.
Some movies are just so beloved that you can experience them through cultural osmosis without ever sitting down to actually watch them. From loving parodies to meticulous recreations of iconic scenes, memorable filmmaking lives on even after the curtains close on the silver screen. And when it comes to horror, few films can compete with the massive impact that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining had on popular culture as a whole.
Whether or not you think the flick is a good adaptation of Stephen King’s seminal novel, 1980’s The Shining slowly but surely grew into one of the most influential genre movies ever made, inspiring everything from surprisingly heartfelt sequels to classic episodes of The Simpsons. However, not all The Shining references are created equal, and today I’d like to shine a light on six unexpected homages to Kubrick’s iconic film.
In this list, we’ll be focusing on references and Easter eggs that either came out of the blue or came from creators that you wouldn’t expect to be fans of this classic ghost story. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own favorite references to the Torrance family and the Overlook Hotel if you think we missed a particularly memorable one.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
5. A Nightmare on FaceTime – South Park (2012)
Regardless of the brand’s iffy reputation among former employees, the death of Blockbuster Video was a serious blow to fans of physical media. Of course, some folks were more affected by this than others, and South Park’s Randy Marsh definitely took things a little too far in the twelfth episode of the show’s sixteenth season.
Titled A Nightmare on FaceTime, the main plot of this 2012 story is a surprisingly faithful recreation of The Shining where Randy purchases an empty Blockbuster store and begins to go mad once he realizes that his investment may not have been a very good idea due to the rise of streaming and the now-defunct RedBox storefronts.
4. The Overlook Hotel Level – Ready Player One (2018)
I was never really a fan of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, so I viewed Stephen Spielberg’s divisive adaptation of the novel as an improvement over the source material despite having its own narrative issues. In fact, I actually prefer how Spielberg changed the story by removing several references to his own work and replacing a lengthy Blade Runner detour with an over-the-top homage to The Shining.
A CGI-heavy recreation of the film’s most iconic moments that feels like a big-budget ghost train ride set within the Overlook Hotel, this intense sequence is more of a recreation of the freaky aesthetics of The Shining rather than its mind-bending narrative. However, it’s still fun to see Spielberg make a heartfelt tribute to a filmmaker that was once his close personal friend.
3. IKEA Singapore Halloween Ad (2014)
It makes sense that commercials don’t typically borrow from the horror genre, as it might be a bad idea to scare away potential customers, but some references are just too much fun to pass up.
That’s probably why the publicists behind this Ikea ad from Singapore were allowed to turn their commercial into a genuinely unsettling recreation of Danny’s tricycle scene from The Shining. After all, nobody cares if your store is haunted so long as it offers late-night shopping hours and a large selection of merchandise that you can become lost in forever and ever…
2. The End of ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’ – Community (2014)
Community is no stranger to recreating iconic movie moments within the show, and the series had previously tackled horror tropes in episodes like the fan-favorite Epidemiology. However, the most laugh-out-loud moment on this particular list comes from a brief gag towards the end of the season five episode ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’.
The majority of this episode has nothing to do with scary movies, but there’s a brief subplot involving supporting character Chang and a possible encounter with ghosts that leads him to question his own existence. This subplot culminates in the episode’s hilarious ending where the camera zooms in on a black-and-white photograph of Chang in period clothing at some kind of celebration, just like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.
However, the picture’s subtitle eventually reveals that it’s merely a conveniently placed keepsake from the ‘Old Timey Photo Club’.
1. The Overlook Hedge Maze Sequence – Zootopia 2 (2025)
Disney movies are pretty far removed from both the gruesome horror of Stephen King and the heady filmmaking of Stanley Kubrick, so I don’t think anyone was expecting the climax of last year’s Zootopia sequel to take place in an animated version of the snowy hedge maze from The Shining.
In this unexpectedly intense sequence, friend-turned-villain Pawbert Lynxley (an unhinged lynx cat played by Andy Samberg) chases our protagonists through a creepy labyrinth in a loving recreation of Jack Nicholson’s icy demise outside the Overlook Hotel. The actual ending here might be a little more child-friendly than what’s being referenced, but it’s amazing that the filmmakers were able to push the horror elements as far as they did – especially since the scene doesn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the movie.
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