Ari Aster Brings Horror Out into the Light in “Midsommar” Teaser

Ari Aster's debut feature Hereditary was breathlessly received at last year's Sundance Film Festival. It mostly lived up to the hype when it was released in June, and gave A24 its biggest debut ever, and ended up as the studio's second-biggest movie.

Aster is back to scare the bejeesus out of you this summer (or sommar, I should say) with Midsommar. The film, as far as I can tell, is about a group of young people (including Fighting with My Family's Florence Pugh, Black Mirror's Will Poulter, and The Good Place's William Jackson Harper) travel to rural Sweden for a pagan festival where there's bound to be some sort of human sacrifice.

There's obvious comparisons to be made to The Wicker Man (the original, not this glorious disaster), but Aster will find a way to be even more disturbing and visually dynamic, hopefully keeping Hereditary's visual style of perfect compositions where something is just wrong in the corner of the frame.

Midsommar will be released at some point this summer.

About Kip Mooney

Like many film critics born during and after the 1980s, my hero is Roger Ebert. The man was already the best critic in the nation when he won the Pulitzer in 1975, but his indomitable spirit during and after his recent battle with cancer keeps me coming back to read not only his reviews but his insightful commentary on the everyday. But enough about a guy you know a lot about. I knew I was going to be a film critic—some would say a snob—in middle school, when I had to voraciously defend my position that The Royal Tenenbaums was only a million times better than Adam Sandler’s remake of Mr. Deeds. From then on, I would seek out Wes Anderson’s films and avoid Sandler’s like the plague. Still, I like to think of myself as a populist, and I’ll be just as likely to see the next superhero movie as the next Sundance sensation. The thing I most deplore in a movie is laziness. I’d much rather see movies with big ambitions try and fail than movies with no ambitions succeed at simply existing. I’m also a big advocate of fun-bad movies like The Room and most of Nicolas Cage’s work. In the past, I’ve written for The Dallas Morning News and the North Texas Daily, which I edited for a semester. I also contributed to Dallas-based Pegasus News, which in the circle of life, is now part of The Dallas Morning News, where I got my big break in 2007. Eventually, I’d love to write and talk about film full-time, but until that’s a viable career option, I work as an auditor for Wells Fargo. I hope to one day meet my hero, go to the Toronto International Film Festival, and compete on Jeopardy. Until then, I’m excited to share my love of film with you.