Revisiting the Addictive, Feminine Pull of Midsommar (2019)
“It is women who love horror. Gloat over it. Feed on it. Are nourished by it. Shudder and cling and cry out - and come back for more.”
- Bela Lugosi
Bela Lugosi was right. If film is historically and industrially 'for the boys', then the deviant, B-standard horror genre is for the girls. Women are its backbone. This is because women's centrality to these films, often through violence and sexualisation, is the horror. Women are frequently the victims, the sufferers, the bodies reduced down to exploitation in horror films. Female characters titillate straight male audiences, and, as fated by male filmmakers, they pay the price for their femininity.
So why is horror such a personal genre for women? Horror, complexly and often unintentionally, challenges its own legacy of misogyny. There are plenty of victims, but there are even more heroines. It is through the inclusion of the latter when horror is at its most compelling: when women are positioned at the centre and are able to navigate this centrality to their advantage. As they occupy this space, at odds with the macabre world they inhabit, women are forced to fight back against its malevolent forces. Consequently, far from pitying or victimising these women in an internalised, sexist way, instead we come to admire their strength and assimilation.
Chiefly to this, plenty of classic horror films portray men as illegible, unidentifiable villains and women are positioned as their antithesis. Thus, although at first glance horror appears to be a genre which chastises the existence of women, exploiting and killing them, this isn’t exactly true. Whilst there are examples where this is the case - often cheaper exploitation movies - if we examine some of the most revered horror films: Psycho, Halloween, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Rosemary’s Baby, they all present women with whom we identify. We, as viewers, grapple with the psychological textures of these films through the eyes of women, or in the case of the slasher genre, where we are further removed from their subjectivity, we at least root for their vindication and survival. Above all, it is women at the forefront of these genre-greats - not men.
This takes us to the visual splendour that is Midsommar (2019), and how it succeeds at placing women at the centre of its fabric. Some months after its release, Ariana Grande tweeted that Midsommar was her ‘bedtime movie’. This, somewhat unexpectedly, seemed to resonate with her following, and myself. There is a sensuous, intoxicating quality to Midsommar’s visuals; flower crowns and linen dresses bathed in sunlight, and the catharsis of watching the painful demise of a relationship. Even though the horror genre often provides great comfort for women, this re-watchable interlude is clearly unique. So why is it that we find ourselves drawn back into the distorted world of Midsommar?
Dani (Florence Pugh), through whom we perceive the story, endures a great deal of emotional suffering. Much like Aster’s debut feature Hereditary released the previous year, the horror of Midsommar emerges from the emotional context of grief, felt most intensely by the women at the nucleus of their narratives. Where in Hereditary, Annie (Toni Collette) becomes the horror, Dani, initially a disturbed outsider, eventually comes to control the horror. As she transcends both emotionally and within the hierarchy of the commune, (as May Queen), Dani alone catalyses the violent, ritualistic death of her long-term boyfriend, earning the film a sense of surrealism that is both mesmerising and gratifying. It is within her unification of catharsis, release and quiet determination that Dani punctuates the horror of the film, and it’s with the lasting image of her half-smile, as she gazes on at the burning architecture, that we walk away from this film awe-struck, and, as Legosi writes, nourished.
The specifically addictive aspects of horror are drawn out to excess in Midsommar. I've seen the film several times, and until recently I wasn't sure why I kept being pulled back into its absurdity. I have since realised that it has everything to do with its obscuring of conventional - therefore masculine - horror techniques. The feminisation of the film’s aesthetic, the sunlit transparency of its violence, and the symbiotic, otherworldly organism of the women which constitute the commune, come to represent the most soothing aspects of Midsommar. Inasmuch as the women of the commune form one sexed body, in mating rituals and sharing their utility, Dani stands for a collective of women. We empathise with her trauma no matter how fantastical and twisted her experience becomes.
Revisiting Midsommar a year after its release has confirmed its feminisation, indicated most explicitly by its female audience’s continuous infatuation. Dani, as our heroine, becomes an emotional anchor to the genre’s perversity. She is a clear example of women establishing their unfettered and beautiful ownership of horror in all its mystique.
