Midsommar: Horror That Refuses the Dark

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Horror lives in the dark. It has always been the genre’s first tool — the thing off-screen, the corner the candle does not reach, the cut to black that lets your own imagination do the director’s work. Ari Aster’s Midsommar, from 2019, throws that tool out. It stages nearly its entire runtime under a sun that never sets, in a Swedish meadow so bright you have to squint, and it is one of the most upsetting films of its decade. Taking the dark away turns out to be scarier than any shadow, because in the light there is nowhere to hide from what people do to each other on purpose.

Hereditary: Grief Wearing a Haunted House

Sun, 10 Sep 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Ari Aster has said that he thinks of Hereditary as a tragedy that happens to have a horror film wrapped around it, and the description is exact enough that you could use it as a warning label. People walked into cinemas in June 2018 expecting a possession picture and got, for roughly ninety minutes, one of the bleakest domestic dramas of the decade — a mother and a family disassembling under a grief so total it has nowhere to go but the supernatural. The demon arrives eventually. By then you have long since stopped needing it.

Ari Aster - vo.rs

Midsommar: Horror That Refuses the Dark

Hereditary: Grief Wearing a Haunted House