Midsommar (2019)
- The studio almost pulled funding for Midsommar midway through the shoot, convinced that the general audience wouldn't connect with the highly unconventional tone.
- During the filming of Midsommar, the director famously rewrote the ending on the fly after seeing the incredible chemistry between the lead actors on set.
Midsommar is a 2019 folk horror film written and directed by Ari Aster, his follow-up to Hereditary. Florence Pugh stars as Dani, a young woman reeling from a devastating family tragedy who accompanies her emotionally distant boyfriend Christian, played by Jack Reynor, and his friends on a trip to a remote Swedish commune for a midsummer festival that occurs once every 90 years. What begins as an idyllic pastoral experience in a community of perpetual daylight gradually reveals itself as a pagan cult whose rituals involve human sacrifice, psychedelic manipulation, and practices designed to absorb outsiders into their collective.
Ari Aster inverted the horror convention of darkness and confinement by setting his film entirely in blazing Scandinavian sunlight and wide-open meadows โ the horror was not lurking in shadows but displayed openly, with the commune's brutality presented as joyful communal celebration. Florence Pugh's performance was the film's emotional engine โ her journey from grief-stricken, emotionally neglected girlfriend to the flower-crowned May Queen embracing a new family was simultaneously horrifying and cathartic, a breakup movie disguised as a horror film. The film earned $48 million worldwide on a $9 million budget.
