Ari Aster’s first feature film, Hereditary, was one of the most talked about horror movies in years. An emotionally overwhelming allegory for mental illness, wrapped up in folk horror archetypes with a bravura finale and brutally violent head trauma, it’s the sort of film that sticks with you.
So if you watch Ari Aster’s second film Midsommar – an emotionally overwhelming allegory for mental illness, wrapped up in folk horror archetypes with a bravura finale and brutally violent head trauma – you might pick up on a few similarities!
In an interview with Bloody-Disgusting, Aster explained that the connections weren’t entirely intentional, but that the films are, in a way, connected.
“They’re spiritually connected inadvertently,” Aster said.
“I became aware of how they are connected while I was making Midsommar but it wasn’t by design. I realized ‘Oh, I’m making a film about family and making films that happen to feature cults that are very important to the story.’”
But ultimately [in] Hereditary and with this film there is an attempt to have these things serve as both standing metaphors that don’t cease being metaphors, even as they are revealed to be very literal. And they’re designed to be taken totally literally,” Aster explained. “So for me, it’s my way of hoping to make a satisfying genre film that works as a genre film and at the same hoping to make something that can hold some allegorical weight without losing that by the end.”
When it comes to that head trauma, our question is simple: What’s your thing with head trauma?
“I don’t know,” Aster said. “It may be best for me not to mine it, myself. But it’s a good question. People have brought it to me and it’s a very obvious thing that I somehow have not picked up on until now.”
But, according to Aster, just because he repeats this motif in horror movies doesn’t mean that head trauma personally scares him.
“No, if anything there’s something particularly satisfying about taking a person’s head off or collapsing a head. I don’t know. It’s like there’s something visceral about it that, I guess, it’s when imagining a violent end, that’s a fun place to go for some reason,” Aster explained.
“‘Fun’ being an elastic word,” the filmmaker clarified, to make sure we don’t think he means it’s a good thing.
“If I think about other films that I’ve written that I haven’t made yet, there is more head trauma to come,” Aster laughed.
And given how thematically and narratively connected Hereditary and Midsommar are, does that mean Aster is going to produce a trilogy?
“I’m wrestling with two movies right now that I want to make,” Aster revealed. “I don’t know which one I’m going to do next, and they would both fit into a trilogy if I decided to announce it as that.”
Midsommar is now playing in theaters!
