From The Body Snatcher (1945) to Black Christmas (1974, 2019), from Suspiria (1977, 2018) to The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015), the academy serves as a common setting in the horror genre. But less frequent is the use of the academy not as a site of horror, but as a source of horror, particularly for those whose knowledges and customs the Ivory Tower simultaneously excludes and exploits. In Decolonizing Methodologies, Linda Tuhuwai Smith (2012) points to the failure of Western academic traditions to attend to the material realities of colonized peoples, all in the name of those Enlightenment requirements that research be objective, apolitical, and distanced from its objects. She claims, “Taking apart the story, revealing underlying texts, and giving voice to things that are often known intuitively does not help people to improve their current conditions. It provides words, perhaps, an insight that explains certain experiences—but it does not prevent someone from dying” (Smith, 2012: 3).
If we could design the ideal bad Western research team, we might recruit American anthropology doctoral students Christian, Josh, and Mark from Ari Aster’s sunlit Midsommar (2019). Their colleague Pelle provides a fascinating counterpoint as an “insider” researcher who grew up in the isolated Swedish community of Hårga, where the team has traveled to participate in the community’s annual Midsommar festivities. Anthropology has traditionally been concerned with the study, analysis, and re-presentation of “primitivism” and the Other. Christian, Josh, and Mark certainly enter Hårga with this attitude, clearly embodying Smith’s evaluation of the imaginary concept of “the West” as a standard model of comparison and measure of evaluation against which other societies can be ranked. They stand out starkly, both in their contemporary Western dress and in their propensity for separating themselves physically from the community.
Figure 1. The Hårga welcome the American students to their Midsommar festivities.
The men demonstrate a deep unwillingness to collaborate and clearly have no intention of co-authoring, either with each other or with the members of the community. The information they gather by asking the most pointedly judgmental questions (“Do you have a problem with incest?”) will follow a direct line into their dissertations, which will help them find jobs and establish themselves as cutting-edge anthropological researchers long after the names of any of the Hårga are forgotten. When Josh disappears and the elders implicate him in the theft of one of the community’s holy texts, Christian immediately disavows any connection that he might have had to Josh, relying on the enclosure and the pigeonholing of disciplinary neutrality to protect his own continuing research interests. Richa Nagar (2013) describes academic professions as “cults of expertise” that have the power to create knowledge and to selectively empower or devalue knowledges (2013: 10) and, given the students’ self-sequestering and air of intellectual superiority, perhaps this term “cult” indeed applies more pointedly to their discipline than to Hårga. A subtle JSTOR in-joke slipped into the Director’s Cut indicates a nod to a particular type of audience—academics and intellectuals who may, upon first viewing, be more concerned with ensuring that Christian, Josh, and Mark maintain the proper objectivity and honor the Hårga elders’ desire to remain anonymous than with questioning their presence in and orientation toward Hårga in the first place. Because this really forms the crucial question, and the people of Hårga know the answer—and they have had enough.
One of the most noteworthy characteristics of Hårga that instantaneously calls into question the applicability of postcolonial theory to its space is its blinding whiteness. Everyone in Hårga is super white—too white, in fact. While dense forests surround the village, the communal space itself lacks large trees or structures that would throw the villagers into shade or shadow. The midnight sun provides no relief whatsoever from the whiteness, but at no point does this whitewashed community become normalized, partly because of its overwhelming strangeness and partly because three non-white characters—Simon, Connie, and Josh—remind audiences that they have not entered some white supremacist fever dream. The entirely white population of Hårga enacts many of the “savage” practices that early adventurers and Western researchers attributed to the indigenous populations of Africa, Asia, and Polynesia—love spells, dance-based competitions based on ancient stories of demonic possession, ritual senicide, voluntary and involuntary human sacrifice, sex rites. But what makes Midsommar so unsettling for the Western viewer is that they engage in all of these practices while white. Aster has re-marked his indigenous community with disturbingly cheerful, familiar whiteness and then plunged them into the role of the colonized in a move that requires the kind of epistemological shift never required during a viewing of Cannibal Holocaust.
The extent to which the Hårga are performing the role of the native for their Western visitors remains in question. Are they essentially giving the people what they want to help them feel comfortably complacent and superior in a space that is just strange enough to satisfy the curious anthropologist but not so immediately otherworldly as to raise any alarms? They greet their outsider visitors with charming “welcome to our village out of time” pageantry reminiscent of indigenous Hawaiian women distributing leis to resort-bound tourists at the Honolulu airport—children play hand-carved flutes, smiling young women hand out skewers of wild strawberries, and the town elders welcome their guests with smiles and hugs. Even a subtle tribute to The Wizard of Oz (1939) in the form of a path of yellow flowers through the forest signals that the students are stepping into a fantasy world. Yet the disdain rolling off the Hårga’s bodies is already palpable; they know why the students have come, and they are willing, at least at the outset, to put on a show. The Hårga perform nativity beautifully for their anthropologist guests, but viewers can identify enough casually dropped clues that this performance little resembles their everyday realities. The children watch a DVD of Austin Powers and everyone between the ages of 18 and 36 takes a mandatory pilgrimage to the “outside world” in a practice that recalls the Amish Rumspringa. A town elder, Stev, mentions that they make their carefully embroidered white gowns specially for the Midsommar festival, so even after almost three hours of viewing, audiences have no idea what the Hårga look like for most of the year. This community clearly maintains porous borders and modern, i.e. Western, modes of living, yet their performance of nativity convinces us that the film depicts the literal enactment of the myth of first contact.
The Hårga clearly demonstrate no intention whatsoever to serve as the anthropologists’ objects of study. Yes, they cheerily describe their agricultural practices to Christian and explain to Josh the process of inbreeding that has produced their oracle, Ruben, but beyond these bare-minimum enactments of research object-ivity, they refuse to be object-ified. For example, Josh comments on the similarities between Hårga’s May Day traditions and those of other indigenous communities in Europe. Josh views these similarities as a form of validation because his knowledge system and methodology train him to identify patterns and consider these multiple instances as indicators of universality. When Josh shares his observation with Stev, however, Stev responds with a look of such pointed unconcern that he reduces Josh to the position of a child who thinks himself brilliant for noticing his own toes. As the film moves into its third act and violent eruption, the anthropology students start disappearing, starting with the thoroughly despicable Mark, who made himself a mortal enemy for the last remaining day of his life by urinating on the holy tree that houses the ashes of Hårga past.
While the outsiders’ hideous fates may initially resemble nothing more than Cannibal Holocaust-style gore with better CGI, moviegoers well versed in the brutal imperial history of Western research practices will notice that the Hårga’s death mechanisms look suspiciously like the colonizing investigative techniques detailed in the journals of Henry Morton Stanley and James Cook. Simon’s blood eagle dissection renders him a vivisected insect specimen pinned to a canvas; Ulf literally appropriates Mark’s face and Western gaze in a gruesome twist on imperial medical research; and Christian becomes anesthetized and enrobed in the body of a bear, one of the Hårga’s sacred creatures, for display in a grisly death museum that the elders set on fire. As Stev addresses the two Hårga who have volunteered their bodies for the Midsommar sacrifice, he offers as solace, ‘You will today be joined in harmony with Everything.” This easily missable dialogue, combined with the fact that the final anthropology student to be sacrificed is named “Christian,” signifies the ultimate turning of the tables on Western colonizing methodologies.
Figure 2. The Hårga sacrifice the Westerners to ensure their future prosperity.
The cult to be dismantled, then, is not Hårga or even the more stereotypically brutal communities from Cannibal Holocaust and Eli Roth’s Green Inferno, but rather the cult of academia that repeatedly reinscribes imperial epistemological and methodological hierarchies that devalue and exclude indigenous forms of knowledge. Christian, Josh, and Mark found a golden opportunity to use their positions within the academy to rewrite the collection and validation processes that justify anthropological research. Alas, while those working and writing in the same positions as these doctoral students might not meet the same ghastly fate, Midsommar tells a cautionary tale not about the dangers of wandering into remote Swedish villages with no cell phone service and random bears in cages, but about the arrogance and colonizing violence of Western knowledge practices.
Works Cited
Midsommar. Directed by Ari Aster, performances by Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, and William Jackson Harper. Square Peg and B-Reel Films, 2019.
Nagar, Richa (2013) Storytelling and co-authorship in feminist alliance work: reflections from a journey. Gender, Place, & Culture 20(1): 1-18.
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai (2012) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Emily Naser-Hall is a fifth-year Ph.D candidate in the Department of English at the University of Kentucky. She earned a BA from Tulane University, a Juris Doctor from DePaul College of Law, an LL.M. in National Security Law from Georgetown, and an MA in Literature from Northwestern University. Her research interests include post-1945 American literature, gothic narratives, and the intersection of law and literature. Her work has been published in the Tulane Journal of International Law, the DePaul Journal for Social Justice, and the Proceedings of the Third Purdue Linguistics, Literature, and Second Language Studies Conference. Her upcoming publications will be included in Studies in the American Short Story, Popular Culture Studies Journal and the anthology Screening #MeToo: Rape Culture in Hollywood.
