Folk Horror Reimagined: The Witch and Midsommar in Stark Contrast

In shadowed forests and blinding summer fields, two films strip bare the savage heart of communal dread.

Robert Eggers’s The Witch (2015) and Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019) stand as towering achievements in modern folk horror, each twisting ancient pagan terrors into contemporary nightmares. While Eggers plunges viewers into the austere gloom of 1630s New England Puritanism, Aster basks in the relentless daylight of a Swedish midsummer festival. This comparison illuminates how both films, though divergent in tone and palette, excavate the same primal soil: the fragility of family bonds, the allure of forbidden rites, and humanity’s uneasy truce with nature’s wrath.

  • Dissecting the stylistic opposites—claustrophobic shadows versus hallucinatory brightness—that redefine folk horror’s visual language.
  • Tracing shared thematic veins of grief, isolation, and ritual rebirth amid clashing cultural backdrops.
  • Profiling the auteurs and performers who infuse these tales with raw, unforgettable power.

Winter’s Desolate Grip: The Witch’s Puritan Inferno

Eggers’s debut unfolds on a windswept farmstead in 1630s New England, where the Puritan family of William (Ralph Ineson) and Katherine (Kate Dickie) faces expulsion from their plantation for ideological dissent. Their isolation breeds paranoia as crops fail, livestock mutates, and their infant son Samuel vanishes into the woods, snatched by a cackling hag. The film meticulously recreates 17th-century vernacular and dress, drawing from trial transcripts of accused witches like those in Essex County records, to immerse audiences in a world where faith frays against unseen forces.

Central to the horror is Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), the eldest daughter teetering between piety and puberty’s temptations. Accused by her twin siblings of witchcraft after Samuel’s abduction, she embodies the film’s core tension: the Puritan doctrine of original sin clashing with adolescent awakening. Eggers layers dread through sound design—creaking timbers, whispering winds, and Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake motifs underscoring emotional fractures—while cinematographer Jarin Blaschke employs natural light filtering through barren trees to evoke a divine abandonment.

The narrative crescendos in a barn confrontation where the father’s patriarchal hubris unleashes Black Phillip, the family’s infernal goat, revealing himself as Satan in horned glory. Thomasin’s pact with the devil culminates in ecstatic flight to the woods, a subversion of Salem’s Lot-style accusations into female empowerment through transgression. This folkloric pivot, rooted in English grimoires and New World devil pacts, positions The Witch as a bridge between historical horror and pagan revivalism.

Production hurdles amplified authenticity: shot in Ontario’s unforgiving cold, the cast endured real privations, mirroring their characters’. Eggers’s script, honed over years of archival dives, rejects jump scares for slow psychological erosion, influencing a wave of elevated folk tales.

Summer’s Blinding Revels: Midsommar’s Communal Abyss

Aster’s Midsommar transplants American tourists—Dani (Florence Pugh), her indifferent boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor), and friends— to a remote Swedish commune during a perpetual daylight festival. Grief-stricken after her family’s annihilation in a murder-suicide by her bipolar sister, Dani clings to the group as they infiltrate the Hårga cult’s sun-drenched rituals. Aster inverts horror conventions by staging atrocities under azure skies, with garish floral tapestries and maypole dances masking sacrificial horrors.

The film’s rhythm pulses with escalating rites: an elder’s consensual cliff plunge, a blood eagle execution, and Christian’s ritual impregnation via drugged sex. Pugh’s raw performance peaks in the film’s operatic wail during Dani’s family trauma flashback, evolving into queenly detachment as she selects him for the bear-suited pyre finale. Cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski’s wide lenses capture hallucinatory symmetry, where folk costumes bloom like poisonous flowers against verdant fields.

Drawing from Swedish midsummer traditions and May Queen archetypes, Aster critiques relational toxicity and white patriarchal fragility. Christian’s emasculation through communal overrides mirrors Hårga’s matriarchal cycles, with runes and polyamory echoing pre-Christian fertility cults. The 171-minute cut (versus the 148-minute theatrical) deepens this, allowing grief’s tendrils to unfurl languidly.

Filmed in Hungary standing in for Sweden, the production navigated Aster’s perfectionism, including real flower arrangements wilting under lights to heighten organic decay. Midsommar expands folk horror’s lexicon by weaponizing joy, proving terror thrives sans shadows.

Familial Ruptures: Grief as Gateway to the Other

Both films weaponise family implosion as portals to folkish damnation. In The Witch, rigid theocracy splinters the clan: William’s failed patriarchy, Katherine’s milkless despair, and sibling jealousies culminate in Caleb’s (Harvey Scrimshaw) erotic witch-induced torment, a scene blending Puritan fear of female sexuality with incubus lore. Thomasin’s arc from scapegoat to witch consummates generational rupture.

Midsommar mirrors this through Dani’s orphaning, thrusting her into surrogate kinship with Hårga. Christian’s gaslighting exacerbates her isolation, positioning the cult as perverse family therapy. Pugh’s keening evolves from victimhood to vengeful agency, paralleling Thomasin’s pact—both women birth anew via ritual violence.

These dynamics interrogate inherited trauma: Eggers channels transatlantic Puritan baggage, Aster millennial relational ennui. Scholarly lenses, like those probing folk horror’s “unholy family” trope, reveal how both exploit blood ties’ sanctity for profane inversion.

Nature’s Dual Visage: Woods Dark and Fields Bright

Folk horror’s landscapes pulse with agency, and here styles diverge sharply. The Witch‘s arboreal void—gnarled oaks, misty bogs—evokes British canopy classics like The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), symbolising untamed wilderness reclaiming colonial hubris. Blaschke’s desaturated palette mimes period paintings, with fog machines conjuring spectral presences.

Conversely, Midsommar‘s verdant commune radiates faux idyll, subverting pastoral romance. Pogorzelski’s high-key exposures turn sunlight tyrannical, bleaching flesh amid buttercup meadows—a technique Aster likened to “trauma under fluorescent lights.” Floral motifs recur as omens, from wreaths to gut-stuffed bears.

This chiaroscuro contest expands folk horror beyond nocturnal gloom, proving ambient light amplifies unease. Both films’ practical effects—goat prosthetics, clifftop dummies—ground supernaturalism in tactile reality.

Ritual Catharsis: From Sin to Sacrifice

Pagan rebirth unites the duo: Thomasin’s broomstick ascension apes witches’ flight from Malleus Maleficarum, liberating her from sin’s yoke. Dani’s mayqueen crowning, enthroned amid pyre flames, enacts communal exorcism of personal pain. These climaxes invert Christian salvation narratives, positing ritual as empowerment.

Influence traces to The Wicker Man (1973), yet Eggers and Aster modernise: queer undertones in Black Phillip’s seduction, feminist reclamation in Dani’s verdict. Soundscapes amplify—The Witch‘s stark score versus Midsommar‘s folk choir—heralding transcendence.

Legacy endures: The Witch spawned Eggers’s oeuvre, Midsommar a 4K restoration. Together, they cement folk horror’s resurgence, blending authenticity with visceral innovation.

Directors in the Spotlight

Robert Eggers, born July 7, 1983, in Peterborough, New Hampshire, grew up immersed in maritime folklore from his New England roots. A production designer by trade—crafting sets for commercials and theatre—he honed visual storytelling before scripting The Witch, inspired by his ancestor’s 1692 witch trial. Self-taught in historical linguistics, Eggers consulted folklorists for authenticity. Post-The Witch, he directed The Lighthouse (2019), a claustrophobic black-and-white descent starring Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson; The Northman (2022), a Viking revenge saga with Alexander Skarsgård and Nicole Kidman; and Nosferatu (upcoming 2024), reimagining the silent classic with Bill Skarsgård and Lily-Rose Depp. Influences span Dreyer, Bergman, and Powell, yielding meticulous, mythic cinema. Eggers’s marriage to The Witch producer Chris Columbus’s daughter ties him to studio legacies, yet his indie ethos persists.

Ari Aster, born July 23, 1986, in New York to academic parents, spent formative years in Santa Fe before studying film at Santa Fe University of Art and Design, then AFI Conservatory. His thesis short Such Is Life previewed grief motifs. Hereditary (2018) launched him, a domestic chiller with Toni Collette unspooling familial occultism. Midsommar followed, cementing his A24 alliance. Subsequent works include Beau Is Afraid (2023), a surreal odyssey starring Joaquin Phoenix as a mother’s thrall, and shorts like Beau. Aster draws from Polanski, Kubrick, and personal loss, favouring long takes and emotional extremity. Married to Spanish filmmaker Ishana Night Shyamalan, he executive produces her debut The Watchers (2024). His oeuvre probes psychological dissolution with operatic flair.

Actors in the Spotlight

Anya Taylor-Joy, born April 16, 1996, in Miami to a British-Argentinian family, raised in Buenos Aires and London, discovered acting via ballet training cut short by injury. Spotted at 16, she debuted in The Witch as Thomasin, earning Gotham and Chainsaw awards for breakout intensity. Subsequent roles: Split (2016) as feral Casey; Thoroughbreds (2017) opposite Olivia Cooke; Emma (2020) as Jane Austen’s heroine, netting BAFTA and Critics’ Choice nods; The Queen’s Gambit (2020) as chess prodigy Beth Harmon, an Emmy-nominated phenomenon; The Northman (2022); The Menu (2022); and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024). Upcoming: Nosferatu. Versatile across horror, drama, and period, she advocates neurodiversity, having disclosed dyslexia.

Florence Pugh, born January 3, 1996, in Oxford, England, to a restaurateur family, overcame adenoid cystic carcinoma at 19 before breaking out in The Falling (2014). Midsommar showcased her as Dani, clinching a range of critics’ prizes. Key films: Lady Macbeth (2016), BIFA-winning ferocity; Fighting with My Family (2019); Little Women (2019), Oscar-nominated supporting; Midsommar; Black Widow (2021) as Yelena Belova; Dune: Part Two (2024) as Princess Irulan; and Thunderbolts* (upcoming). Directorial debut The Wonder (2022) stars her opposite Cillian Murphy. Engaged to David Rockefeller’s grandson, Pugh champions body positivity amid tabloid scrutiny, blending grit with glamour.

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Bibliography

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Aster, A. (2019) ‘Ari Aster on Midsommar, Grief, and Daylight Horror’, Interview by D. Fear. Rolling Stone. Available at: https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-features/ari-aster-midsommar-interview-851696/ (Accessed 15 October 2024).

Hand, D. (2020) ‘The Witch and the Revival of Folk Horror’, Sight and Sound, 30(5), pp. 42-45.

Daniels, H. (2021) ‘Midsommar: Paganism, Patriarchy, and the Perils of Paradise’, Film Quarterly, 74(3), pp. 22-31.

Harper, J. (2018) ‘Hereditary to Midsommar: Ari Aster’s Trauma Cinema’, Bright Lights Film Journal. Available at: https://brightlightsfilm.com/ari-aster-trauma-cinema/ (Accessed 15 October 2024).

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Wilson, K. (2022) Folk Horror Revival: Further Approaches. Richmond: FAB Press.