In 2019, horror went back to school in a major way, with a couple of popularly-released films taking on the trappings of academia. Ari Aster’s atmospheric Midsommar takes us to a remote village in Sweden where the residents have sinister plans for the unwitting grad students functioning as tourists. Sophia Takal’s Black Christmas is a remake of the 1974 proto-slasher of the same name about murders in a sorority house, but acts as more of a spiritual successor than faithful adaption.
While these films take dramatically different approaches to horror and the delivery of feelings of unease, they share a certain thematic sensibility. Namely, both movies deal with themes of cults and cult-like behavior, and in doing so draw an interesting comparison between the occult behavior of the villains of the stories and the trappings of higher education itself. In short, the cults in the film hold up a mirror to the conceit of academia in both productions and ask hard questions about the behavior of the characters involved.
“You don’t even know how to use JSTOR!” Unethical Research in Midsommar
Midsommar is a distressingly bright tale about the trauma of a deeply unhealthy relationship, brutally resolved with the help of a death cult. To a current graduate student, however, there is another troubling layer to the tale, concerning the positionality of the characters, who are all graduate students themselves. The main character, Dani (Florence Pugh), is a psychology student on a leave of absence after the death of her family. Her boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor), and all of his friends are anthropology students, and the deadly trip to the remote Swedish village starts out as a research trip for one of the students, Josh (William Jackson Harper), who is working on his dissertation. It at first appears as though the film was written by people with little to no experience in social sciences graduate education, but it soon becomes apparent that the lack of ethical research practices among the graduate students is not done out of ignorance but is a conscious choice to demonstrate how predatory research about marginalized groups of people can be, as a necessary byproduct of the cult(ure) of prestige that the academy insists upon to maintain its relevance.
The Hårga, the people of the Swedish village that serves as the central location in Midsommar, are a very vulnerable population. They live without access to most twenty-first century amenities in a remote location. They at first appear to the American graduate students as remnants of a simpler time, innocent and untainted by modern society. But rather than respect the rites of the Hårga, Josh and Christian immediately intrude upon their spaces and attempt to collect the knowledge of the village so that they may be the first to publish about the rituals and gain prestige. From an ethical research standpoint, the entire trip is already on problematic grounds, because there is no evidence to suggest that anyone filled out an Internal Review Board (IRB) form to receive approval to engage in research with human populations before heading to Sweden. While there, Josh and Christian both entice and coerce the Hårga into answering their questions and agreeing to be research participants (and there are no formal consent forms in sight).
Josh being told ‘No’
As the film progresses, Josh and Christian become more explicitly competitive with each other for the right to be the first one to write about the community they’ve invaded. In doing so, the cult of the academy reveals itself as very individualistic and ruthless in its pursuit of prestige, which starkly contrasts with the community-oriented behavior of the Hårga. This in turn influences the sympathies of the audience, who see the potential victims of the villagers acting as aggressors; the seeming villains are thus also positioned as victims.
As the film begins to move toward its climax, Josh engages in the most predatory behavior of all, and discretely takes photos of the Hårga’s sacred runic text, which he has been expressly forbidden to do by a Hårga elder.
The predatory disrespect Josh demonstrates for the Hårga makes his death feel earned in a very specific way; the Hårga were exacting vengeance upon these students who attempted to take advantage of them. Overall, then, this film demonstrates that while the Hårga were engaged in behavior considered immoral by 21st century Western standards, they were in fact enacting a karmic balancing of sorts, and taking back the power of their rituals for themselves, instead of allowing their lives to be put on display for the glorification of the people who “discovered” them.
The Bust of the Founder and Problematic Academic Idolatry in Black Christmas
While Midsommar focuses on graduate students, Black Christmas focuses on a more common experience many people have with academia: the trope of the rigid, tradition- and canon-worshiping professor. Cary Elwes’ Professor Gelson is the quintessential classics professor- a white man obsessed with upholding the legacies of the white men who came before him, at the expense of the voices of women and POC, and who even verbally attacks and degrades these groups of people in a classroom setting, thus enacting an institutionally-sanctioned form of violence in the name of education.
The film is centered around a sorority of women who vocally protest their college’s literal pedestaling of problematic white men, as well as the phenomenon of sexual assault prevalent in Greek life. Throughout the film these women are targeted and punished by a cult-like fraternity who uses the bust of the college’s founder in occult rituals.
Cary Elwes as Professor Gelson
Black Christmas is a rapid departure from the 1974 original, sharing almost nothing narratively but the conceit of being focused on a series of murders inside a sorority house. Both do contain themes of the rights of women, however, making the 2019 version a fitting spiritual successor. Instead of the protagonist struggling with the fallout from her decision to have an abortion (a fitting direction to take in 1974 with the recent passing of Roe v. Wade), 2019 sees the main character, Riley (Imogen Poots), dealing with the aftermath of sexual assault and being punished for speaking out about her experience. The fraternity/cult targets the sorority after they show support for the victims of sexual assault and attempt to have Professor Gelson removed from his teaching position; Gelson acts throughout the film as an authority figure for the fraternity and reveals himself at the climax as a mastermind of the cultish plot to restore the balance of the genders, with women in a passive, subservient role.
These plotlines unfortunately have their roots in the real world: many universities such as the University of Kansas have demonstrated lackluster responses to the phenomenon of sexual assault across their campuses (After multiple reports of a visiting speaker assaulting multiple women during his trip to KU, campus authorities only saw fit to ban the accused for a paltry three years), and many scholars who challenge the dominant cultural narrative that people like the fictional Gelson uphold find it difficult or impossible to secure tenure, such as the recent case of Harvard’s Lorgia Garcia Pena. Thus, while fraternities, in reality, do not have access to a nefarious and darkly magical bust capable of giving young men supernatural strength and aggression, the things that the AKO fraternity strive for in Black Christmas are sentiments present across college campuses with alarming regularity.
Conclusion: Higher Ed and Horror
Both films have a lot to say about the nature of academia and how it treats Othered folks both within and without its walls. The shared theme of the cult across the two films draws interesting parallels to how many perceive the Ivory Tower of the academy as a sort of cult in itself. While in Midsommar the Hårga are an object of research for the grad students, the single-mindedness of their agendas and their utter disrespect for the autonomy of the villagers sets up postgraduate work as a sort of cult of selfishness and prestige. And in Black Christmas, the cult is baked into the very structure of university life and is supported and upheld by faculty and the history of the academy. Both films articulate a contemporary cultural unease about higher education, and in doing so demonstrate in searing and ghoulish ways the moral pitfalls of uncritically buying into the dominant ideology of the academy.
Related: Check out our podcasts on Black Christmas (1974) and (2019).
You can rent Midsommar on Amazon:
Emma Kostopolus is a Ph.D candidate in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Kansas, where she is currently writing her dissertation. She has previously written for Critical Distance and The Philological Review, and her work is forthcoming in Kairos and OneShot. When not working on her writing, she enjoys watching slashers while knitting. On weekends you’ll find her running a horror-flavored table-top role-playing game.
