The Cult of Midsommar
The May Queen - Michael Calandra
An Interview with Martin Karlqvist & Patrik Andersson
You guys have a very unusual title at the end of the credits as “Concept of the Hårgas by” How does one initially create a culture or religion for film from the ground up? Where does that inspiration stem from?
MARTIN: It’s of course a lot of backwards engineering, because we knew what we had at an early stage, but it’s also highly influenced by my psychology studies,and the writings of (among others) Snorri Sturluson, Emmanuel Swedenborg, Mikhail Bakhtin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Vilna Gaon, James George Frazer and Pierre Bourdieu. We visualized what we wanted the film to be about, strange things we wanted to occur in the movie, and then we just try to find a way of tying all those creepy, disparate and strange ideas together more or less. I have three points. One is the Scandinavian com- ponents that we mentioned the midsummer celebration, the Ättestupan (the senicide cliff), the folk music and dance and explana- tions of modern traditions. Also of course, some Viking stuff like human sacrifice and runes, other astronomic and anthropos- ophic elements, like agriculture, rights and selective breeding. Then we have what we call the “scary three,” which was our own thoughts about what frightens us. And then we have the perverted utopia, or the reified dystopia that makes evil out of good things, and something beautiful out of evil things. Losing one’s mind, becoming the beast, and the power of social phenomena, like peer pressure and emotional contagion and non- verbal communication. Good people doing bad things more or less. The mythology then came out of necessity.
PATRIK: The idea was that we wanted to make a folk horror film, but from a very Swedish perspective. We were really digging, trying to connect the dots between the true pagan traditions and our Swedish midsummer celebration, basically the big national holiday here in Sweden, you know, the highlight of the summer for everyone.But really to connect them with a mythology that worked in a contemporary folk horror universe, with a culture, mythology and philosophy that actually digs deeper into the pagan connection between man and nature, and to do it so super Swedish, both aesthetically and within the mythology, was very important. A way to reflect on how we are connected to nature as always, but also that we might have even more of a connection to nature nowadays, given the fact that we are very frightened of what happens to the world in the age of climate change, and that we are encouraged to eat homegrown, ecological, be closer to the soil and nature and where you are. If you dig deeper into the Swedish soil, in terms of these thoughts and ideas and nature connected to man, you also end up reaching towards, or at least dealing with, national romanticism. Andin that way also reflecting on the wave of right-wing extremism that is happening in the world.
MARTIN: It’s of course a lot of backwards engineering, because we knew what we had at an early stage, but it’s also highly influenced by my psychology studies, in that way also reflecting on the wave of right-wing extremism that is happening in the world.
In terms of the backstory, the mythology, the culture, and the traditions of the Hårga, how long did it take to develop that kind of community and culture? A lot of what you’re pulling from you’ve said, are from pagan influences and folk stories from Swedish history.
MARTIN: We pulled from Sweden, northern Europe, some Viking stuff and some of our own fantasies. I’d say about four years or something like that.
PATRIK: It started when we were developing our original idea to make this a Swedish folk horror, and then we started constructing the universe quite instantly. That was something Martin and I had started with when we started collaborating with Ari [Aster].
What are some of the weird horrifying facts, secrets or rituals that you two came across while researching and developing the Hårga?
PATRIK: There’s so much stuff in the film in terms of the traditions and rituals that are coming from or being a bit thwarted from our real Swedish traditions. I think the ones that are sort of original and super Swedish, we just felt that if we’re going to make a film that is, in this sort of rich mythology, a Swedish folk horror, we have to have Ättestupan, we have to have the pubic pie, because it is its own mythology in terms of Ättestupan. People don’t really know if it happened or not here in Sweden, but it’s something you know even as a kid, it’s basically a way to play around with not having to take care of your grandparents because you will just send them off the Ättestupa. So it’s just it’s such a Swedish context to play with. And also that the pubic pie, it’s actually the hair pie. It’s actually coming from great input we got from a very famous Swedish folklore historian who’s called... What was his name again?
MARTIN: Ebbe Schön
PATRIK: We have a thank you to him in the credits. He’s 90 years old now, but he is the grand old man in Swedish folklore. When we had the early research discussions with him, this was one of the one of the most peculiar things that he brought to the table, that this [the hair pie] actually happened. That it was a way for the young women to try and make the one they love to fall in love, but to cast a magical Love Spell to do so. I think these are two very obvious, but very amazing Swed- ish, super Swedish parts of the traditions in Midsommar.
MARTIN: Yeah. And the drinking of men- strual blood as well.
PATRIK: Exactly, exactly. It was part of the full package.
From what I recall, you two were collaborating with Ari years ago on developing Midsommar, and it wasn’t until Hereditary was released that Midsommar was financed.
PATRIK: That’s exactly true.
So what attracted you to working with Ari and working within the horror genre?
MARTIN: We’re horror buffs to begin with. We’ve been that way since we were really young. We have a lot of love for the genre, and in this case, a wish to make something artistic and scary on a meta level in a way. From the get-go, that was a really big drive for us. When it comes to Ari, we read his Hereditary script, fell in love with that, and when we met Ari, we kind of felt that we clicked so that we could cooperate and collaborate in a great way. There’s a lot of giving and taking.
What I found very interesting is that parallels between Midsommar, Hereditary, and throughout the majority of Ari’s short films, is this aspect of family connection and community. Somewhat cultish, sure, with his two films, but there’s something about the aspect of communication and community belonging.
MARTIN: Yeah, for sure.
PATRIK: For sure. I think he connected with our world and the story’s premise because of the operatic cinematic idea that we had in mind in terms of the Hårga, but also the way he could bring this community arc and really connect that to family and to Dani’s relationship. It was very evident he brought that to the table. Something felt enriching to everything we wanted to do, but it also felt super Ari. When he digs into stories and art, and I agree with you, you can see it both in Hereditary but also in The Strange Thing About the Johnsons (2011). He’s really pushing the envelope for what a family drama could be. He also has a really interesting perspective on a lot of Swedish cinema, like Ingmar Bergman, for instance, and also Roy Andersson, that he’s seeing it at another angle in a way that is extremely interesting. It’s like watching Bergman but a little darker nuance. I think that’s something is very much at the heart of Ari’s filmmaking, and I think we found such a beautiful match in terms of bringing him to Sweden, bringing that sort of way to tell stories and to challenge horror, because that’s also what we really wanted to do with Midsommar. As Martin told you, we had high ambitions from the get-go, and we really wanted someone that could not deal with this within the generic tropes, but rather do something new with the genre, which we also feel is part of an interesting movement that is currently happening in North America in terms of the way they’re doing horror films nowadays. It’s basically the more original, interesting, artistic angle you have, the more theatrical and marketable the film becomes. I think, in that sense, the film is the fruit of its times the way we want to explore stuff.
MARTIN: Just to add to that, I think both we and Ari wanted to take things that are normally seen as safe havens, like family, community and even relationships and make them as scary as possible. It’s like the teddy bear and turning it into a demon so to speak. I think that kind of tied our ideas together as well to use new and different fetishes, instead of the old monsters or the chainsaw wielding psychos.
Patrik, you’ve mentioned that you wanted to create a folk horror film from a Scandinavian perspective. I know a lot of horror films use religion or religious cultural communities as a common trope, but was there something inherently macabre or frightening within this Swedish, Scandinavian folklore or culture that you felt would translate very well in Midsommar? I know Ari is the one responsible for the script, but while you’re developing the story with him, was there something that you thought “this is a very weird angle to take this idea, this would be great to see on film.”
PATRIK: Yeah, I think we mentioned some of the real true Swedish, but I think it’s an amazing eeriness to the way we in Sweden, or in Scandinavia, relate to nature. If you dig a little bit deeper into the subcultures here, you can find a lot of pagan connections. It’s in the black metal scene, it’s in the folk art scene, but we’re basically so left out of the elements of nature up here. We still have a lot of ways we need to deal with nature and that connects to arts, that connects to culture in such an evident way. We have such a rich legacy of folk art and art that is really, truly inspired by nature, and then that will in itself give you a quite an evident connection to folk horror. I mean, for instance, the way we really pinpointed Hälsingland (a region in the northern part of Sweden, where the real Hårga is located), as the location for Hårga is connected, of course, that Hårga is in Hälsingland, and that [the myth of] Hårga itself is a big Swedish myth that we wanted to bring into what was part of one of the super important key elements of the placement, the location of where we want to bring the story. And basically, the myth of the Hårga, it’s the Swedish equivalent of the myth of the Pied Piper, where basically a village and its young ones are not able to protect themselves from a stranger coming to the village that is playing the flute so beautifully, that everyone falls in trance. And then they walk up to the mountain and they dance and dance and dance until they die, which is also included in this in the script and included before the big ritual dance around the maypole. But also, what I wanted to connect to the folk art, is that these mural paintings that you can see, specifically in the main house of the film, are just so inspired by real mural paintings from the farmsteads up in Hälsingland and the way they are made. It’s basically the true aesthetic of the film, even though we’re telling another story than the sort of very rich Swedish Bible Belt where these farmsteads are built. So they are telling the stories of something else that we are doing, but it was very much like you could not go that down that road if you wanted to dig deep in trying to make a folk horror film in Sweden. It’s just so beautiful, eerie, weird, and just a great setting.
MARTIN: The homesteads are actually one of UNESCO’s world heritage sites, very unique in the world. It was something that kind of struck me the other day. I remember we were kind of joking around about it a lot at first with Ari, because he noticed, and we are also kind of aware, of that the generic Swede or the stereotypical picture of the Swedish person that is very non-scary and soft-spoken and, like secularized and very inhibited, and therefore for it was a kind of an interesting challenge to make that into something scary.
Kind of like making a Canadian person not your stereotypical “Oh! Hi there, neighbour” by taking off the mask and thinking “Oh my God! They’re so evil!” There’s another layer of scariness.
PATRIK: Exactly. On that note, I think that has been in the eye of the beholder when you watch the film as a Swede, because we have such a sense of community in all of Sweden. And it’s really playing with that in such a great way I think, to film on a macro level. So it’s a feast for Swedes.
There are a lot of beautiful and inspiring costumes and murals and set pieces but also there’s a lot of disturbing, fucked up stuff. What was the process behind collaborating with the film’s production designer, Henrik Svensson, costume designer Andrea Flesch, and the entire art department? I forgot, who did the murals again?
PATRIK: Ragnar Persson.
MARTIN: Henrik was involved from a very early point. I think it was about the same time that we got Ari on the project, right?
PATRIK: I think it was actually even before we met Ari, because I remember that Henrik and I planned Ari’s first visit. So we were basically having the first discussions with the U.S. when we were already just discussing with our production designer, because Henrik has been just so amazing in grasping the ideas of the world and putting them on paper, making sure that we always keep track on the development of this visual world from the get go. He’s been just a super key figure in the full development of the idea and of the film. Then Andrea, she came on board very late, about when we went into pre-production in Hungary, about four months before the start of principal photography. A lot of thoughts on the costumes were already in the original production mood book that we had for the project. But of course, Andrea brought so much amazingness to the film and the way the dresses get more and more flourish for instance, specifically the work she did on the huge floral dress that Dani has in the end was sort of a film in itself trying to get that made. [laughs]
I was gonna say, you saw how much that dress sold for when A24 put that up for auction?
PATRIK: The Oscars bought it for the Academy museum, so it’s I mean, it’s amazing that it’s really part of film cinema history now. But it was a shit-load to work to make it move. [laughs]
MARTIN: Rubber tubes and I don’t know what else. [laughs]
I can’t fathom how difficult that must have been to construct.
MARTIN: Yeah, they weren’t really on their knees at that point.
PATRIK: But she got a lot of help from her architect boyfriend, who actually put his mind to it as well dealing with different materials that would make Florence [Pugh] be able to carry it and drag it without it breaking. I think they put the final stitches together the day before we had to shoot it. And so yeah, it was crazy.
MARTIN: And I mean, that was the story for so much of the film that we kind of had to come up with the concrete answers when the cameras was rolling, because we kind of described it vaguely in the script and in discussions before, but at that time, we really had to decide. Sometimes Ari would want us to give him a couple of options to choose from, or sometimes he just wanted that we make up an answer for him. And sometimes he just made up one of his own.
What about all the paintings and murals in the houses and the cabins? Where were those ideas pulled from? Pagan and folklore paintings? Tapestries?
MARTIN: Of course, a part of the inspiration is, of course, the way that the big farmsteads up there in Hälsingland. But then we chose the motifs that should fit our world better. The rune things were developed already at this point, and as I remember it, we kind of created poetry for the artists to work from, also gave them a lot of vague historical motifs from the old Swedish stories about kings and stuff. Also very much Kama Sutra and moral motifs like the “Thou shalt not…” stuff
I mean, to draw that out, and then put it into a film that --
MARTIN: It was cool. But it was kind of the same procedure with the music and the choral parts. Give them poems to work from just to grasp the mood, and then hope for the best. And the best happened, I think.
PATRIK: But there’s also in the motifs a hoard of history you can track as well. As we mentioned early on, it’s a big pattern in the ground work, and you can see bits and parts of it, but it’s really, truly there and something that the artists have been working with to make it fully connected.
For those who haven’t seen the director’s cut, were there any other rituals or aspects of the Hårga that was left on the cutting room floor that were too disturbing or just didn’t work?
MARTIN: There are a couple that appear in the director’s cut, and then there’s also parts not even in that version. We have a river sequence that’s in the director’s cut. It’s kind of a ritual on its own, but the scene is definitely a reason to get the director’s cut. Then there’s one extra dinner scene, I think. Am I forgetting anything Patrik?
PATRIK: No, no, no, that’s it in terms of the… It’s the lunch by the maypole. That one, right?
MARTIN: The one where they’re sitting on rugs.
PATRIK: Exactly, exactly. That’s the lunch by the maypole. Then there’s the dinner scene after Josh has disappeared. Is that a bit longer as well? Maybe?
MARTIN: Yeah, it is. It is.
PATRIK: But the big thing is the river, or the lake scene as we call it, which is basically a play of its own in the film.
Swedish horror itself has left a large influential mark on cinema goers and directors worldwide from The Phantom Carriage (1921) and Haxan (1922), to Hour of the Wolf (1968) and Let the Right One In (2008). Is there still an active horror film scene in Sweden? Or any other films that helped inspire the tone or mood of Midsommar?
MARTIN: My answer is no. But maybe you have another answer Patrik.
PATRIK: It is no, but one of the main reasons that we had to make this into an American film was that we don’t really have a [film] culture in Sweden at the moment, unfortunately. Hopefully the global massive response to Midsommar could also be something that triggers more Swedish stuff to happen in the horror genre. There are a couple of films that get made from time to time for instance, Ali Abbasi’s Border (2018), which is a psychological drama and it’s super great. It won the Un Certain Regard award at Cannes a couple years ago. I can also recommend Aniara (2018) which is a Swedish sci-fi that came out a couple of years ago, but those are anomalies unfortunately. The bigger inspiration in terms of Swedish film on Midsommar is more the work of Bergman, Roy Andersson, and the work of older Swedish films, besides the huge homage to folk horror and psychedelic films. We don’t really have any Swedish psychedelic films whatsoever.
MARTIN: I guess that would be, you know, old porn films in that case. [laughs]
PATRIK: [laughs] True. I will give you that.
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