Editorials
‘Midsommar’ (2019): Dani’s Divisive Development
Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019) is one of the most contentious horror movies of recent years, with people either loving or hating it. I’ve never met anyone who said it was just okay. Personally, I’m on the loving side. I see it as a disturbing character study of Dani, a young woman who experiences extreme trauma. This article, with spoilers galore, will discuss Dani’s development, particularly in the director’s cut.
The inciting incident of Midsommar comes in the first few minutes. Dani’s sister Terri has sent an ominous email ending with “goodbye” just before killing herself and their parents via carbon monoxide poisoning. Because of Terri’s bipolar diagnosis, Dani’s boyfriend Christian wants to write off this last email as another “obvious ploy for attention.” Although Dani is panicking, saying that this message “seems different” from the others, Christian tiredly gaslights her into disregarding the serious nature of it. He sees Dani as hysterical and needy. Dani, meanwhile, is just trying to care for her sister in a difficult time. Christian writes off Terri as irrational and Dani as enabling.
Of course, as we soon learn, the email was not seeking attention but was truly a farewell. Christian’s disregard for the sisters’ needs shows that his empathy is lacking. We learn that he’s wanted to break up with Dani for over a year, but he hesitated because he might want her back. It’s clear, however, that he doesn’t love or even care for her anymore. Dani expresses to a nameless friend her worries of leaning on him too much, of beingtoo much. Her friend says the point of a relationship is to lean on each other, and wouldn’t Dani be there for Christian if he needed support? Dani struggles, as so many women do, with the desire to not appear needy and as a chore. Women, like all living beings, do have needs. Women, like all humans, are social creatures who need support from time to time. Dani fills space in her boyfriend’s life. She is not a background figure or a toy, despite how much he wants her to be. Granted, by the time the movie starts, there’s really no good opportunity for Christian to end the relationship. Even so, he doesn’t deserve to die.
Yet his death at the end is a victory for Dani. She has developed from a passive to a functional character in her own story. She surveys the turmoil and fire, smiles, and thinks to herself, “I did this.” Some audience members may smile with her, like I did. Not only has she become an active player, but the one who restrained her will never have power again. She “purged the wickedness,” which is also what a villager says before setting the temple ablaze. She is no longer complicit and beaten down. How much more can we ask for than to be seen and to be an active participant in life?
Let’s look more into her development. When Dani finds out about Christian and his friends’ upcoming trip to Sweden and asks him about it, he gaslights her again. She remains calm as she confronts him, but his insistence that he should leave so she can cool down leads her to apologize profusely. But Dani has nothing to apologize for. She didn’t verbally or physically attack and she didn’t even cry, though her upset is clear and valid. At this point, she is a passive player in her own life.
Dani first genuinely smiles when she speaks to Pelle about his Swedish home. We glimpse who she could be when she doesn’t feel herself a burden. Sweden and Pelle provide the opportunity for her to feel belonging. In Sweden, when Dani has a panic attack, Christian is nowhere to be seen but Pelle is there to comfort her. He asserts that she deserves a family, to be “held,” to have a home. Christian gives her none of that. This is an early turning point for our protagonist, one of the first instances when she sees potential for healing.
One common criticism of Midsommar, especially the director’s cut, is the amiable framing of the Swedish cult. Dani is undoubtedly indoctrinated into the cult at a time when she most needs support. On the way to Pelle’s home of Harga, Christian’s friend Josh reads a book about Nazi symbols because the village uses such a runic alphabet. Dani makes light of this and says, “See that, Pelle? You’ve managed to brainwash all of your friends.” Little does she know how true this is. Pelle jokes that Christian was brainwashed already, which we can deduce from his enthusiastic participation with the cult from the beginning.
Furthering the Nazi agenda are the allusions to eugenics, such as when another friend, Mark, asks what makes Swedish women so hot and gets a vague answer about the gene pool. He doesn’t care much about how that gene pool is cultivated because he is shallow and already brainwashed. Incest is also discussed in Harga, when we learn that outsiders are occasionally brought in to avoid such coupling.
It is exceedingly important that Dani becomes the May Queen. She is an outsider, alone in the world, but once she starts dancing, she loses herself in giggles, smiles, and community. The fact that the May Queen is not a Harga native shows how easily a vulnerable person can be taken in. Studies have shown time and time again that people who feel isolated and weak are often picked up by cults. Look at Germany when Hitler came to power or, in a more recent case, incels and the far right in the U.S.
Dani’s grin at the end displays her reclaimed power. She is now healing from trauma through community. The audience members who smile with her may be in need of some healing themselves. As a person who experienced trauma and is still recovering myself, I felt Dani’s relief in the final shot. In the beginning, she bears the crushing weight of survivor’s guilt. By the end, she is able to smile not because she’s polite or high, as happens before, but because she wants to. The desire and ability to smile probably seem like trivial matters to those who haven’t experienced trauma or neurodivergence. When a person is in the depths of depression, trauma, or any significantly disruptive event, smiling can be a difficult task. Wanting to express a positive emotion is a huge feat, and I am so glad that Dani reaches that point with us.
Although Dani finds her power in a deeply problematic collective, the simple fact is that she develops from passive and alone to an active figure in a loving community. That community just so happens to be a eugenicist murder cult.
Editorials
What’s in a Look? The Jason Voorhees Redesign Controversy
The Jason Voorhees redesign sparked heated debate, but is the backlash overblown? Dive into Friday the 13th’s formula and fan expectations.
If you’re a longtime reader of Horror Press, you may have noticed that I really really like the Friday the 13th franchise. Can’t get enough. And yet, I simply couldn’t muster a shred of enthusiasm for piling hate on the new Jason Voorhees redesign that Horror, Inc. recently shared with an unwitting public.
Why the Jason Voorhees Redesign Controversy Feels Overblown
Hockey mask? Check. Machete? Check. Clothing? Yeah, he’s wearing it. I really didn’t see the problem, but very many people online pointed out all the places where I should. The intensity and specificity of the critiques shot me right back to 2008, reminding me distinctly of watching Project Runway with my friend’s mom while I waited for him to get home from baseball practice. What, just me?
But the horror community’s sudden transformation into fashion mavens got me thinking about other things, too: the character of the franchise as a whole, how Jason Voorhees fits into it, and why I feel like this reaction has been blown out of proportion. (A disproportionate reaction to a pop culture thing? On my Internet? Well I never.)
What Does A Jason Look Like, Anyway?
What confused me the most about this reaction was something I couldn’t quite get a bead on. What does Jason Voorhees look like? His look, both masked and unmasked (especially unmasked), changes wildly from film to film, even when he’s played by the same person (in three consecutive movies, Kane Hodder played a hulking zombie Jason, a shiny slime monster Jason, and a Jason who was mainly seen in mirrors and looked like his face was stung by a thousand bees). And then there’s the matter of him being both a zombie child and a bagheaded killer before receiving his iconic hockey mask.
However, if you synthesize the various forms of the character into the archetypical Jason Voorhees, the one that most people might visualize in their head when told to imagine him, the result doesn’t not look like this new redesign. Frankly, I even think “redesign” is too strong a word for what this is. This image shows a dude in outdoorsy clothes wearing a hockey mask. It looks enough like “Jason Voorhees” to me that my eyes just slide right off of it.
What Do We Expect From Friday the 13th, And What Do We Need?
Ultimately, many people clearly disagree with my assessment of this redesign, which led me to ponder the franchise as a whole. If there’s something to complain about with this new look, that implies that there is a “right” way and a “wrong” way to be a Friday the 13th movie.
This I can agree with. While the franchise is wide-ranging and expansive to the point that it has included Jason going to space, fighting a dream demon, and taking a cruise ship from a New Jersey lake to the New York harbor, the movies do still follow a reasonably consistent formula.
Step 1: Generate a group of people in a place either on the shores of Crystal Lake or in Crystal Lake township (they can travel elsewhere, but this is where they must start).
Step 2: Plunk Jason down near them, give him a variety of edged weapons, and watch what happens. One girl survives the onslaught, and sometimes she brings along a friend or two as adjunct survivors. Bada bing, bada boom, you have yourself a Friday the 13th movie.
If you fuck with that formula, you’ve got a problem. But beyond that, there’s really not a hell of a lot that the movies have in common. Sometimes you have a telekinetic final girl, other times you have a child psychologist. Sometimes the dead meat characters are camp counselors, but other times they’re partiers or townies or students attending space college.
Hell, even the people killing them aren’t always the same. Look at Pamela Voorhees in the original movie or Roy in A New Beginning.
So why this protectiveness around the minutiae of Jason’s look?
It’s Us, Hi, We’re The Problem, It’s Us
I don’t mean to discount everyone’s negative opinions about this Jason redesign. There are a multitude of aesthetic and personal reasons to dislike what’s going on here, and you don’t have to turn that yuck into a yum just because I said so. But I think we’ve had online fandoms around long enough to see how poisonous they can be to the creative process.
For instance, was The Rise of Skywalker a better movie because it went down the laundry list of fan complaints about The Last Jedi and basically had characters stare into the camera and announce the ways they were being fixed?
Look, I’m not immune to having preconceived disdain for certain projects. If I’m waiting for a new installment in a franchise and all that I’m hearing coming out of producers’ mouths is “prequel” and “television show,” those are fighting words.
However, the constant online pushback to projects that are in early development might be one reason it has taken us so long to actually get more Friday the 13th (I’m talking in addition to the long delays amid the lawsuit, of course). It’s been more than a decade and a half without a new Jason vehicle, and that time keeps on stretching longer and longer.
What Fans Really Want From a New Jason Voorhees Movie
Instead of just letting the creative tap flow and having a filmmaker put out the thing they want to make, then having somebody else take the wheel and do that same thing for the next installment, it seems like producers are terrified of making the wrong move and angering the fans, which has prevented them from actually pulling the trigger on much of anything.
Look, we survived A New Beginning. And Jason Takes Manhattan. Even Jason Goes to Hell. A controversial misstep can’t kill the immortal beast that is Friday the 13th. I say let’s just let them make one. Having something tangible to complain about is better than having nothing at all.
Editorials
Monstrous Mothers: Unveiling the Horror in ‘Mommie Dearest’ and ‘Umma’
The horror umbrella is massive and encompasses many subgenres including thrillers, sci-fi, and even true crime. I like to quip that movies like Mommie Dearest and Priscilla belong to the latter category. I even point out they have final girls surviving their monsters, but like most jokes, there is a lot of hard truth behind that. To be clear, Mommie Dearest is highly contested even by Christina Crawford, who wrote the book about the abuse suffered at the hands of her alcoholic guardian. However, the fact remains that there is an abusive mother terrorizing children at the heart of the horror. This is a tale as old as time in the genre, and we see these themes of motherhood, mental illness, and generational trauma often. So, why do we typically forget this movie when discussing titles like Psycho (1960), Run, Hereditary, etc.?
I challenged myself to fill a gap in my cinema history this month and watched Mommie Dearest. I was very familiar with the movie due to how many drag queens reference it and because of Joan Crawford’s villainous reputation. However, I had never seen it in its entirety before, which is weird because I write about my own maternal baggage often. Without ever seeing the film, I knew this movie, categorized as a drama, belonged under my favorite genre label. Some sources even try to meet in the middle and classify it as a psychological drama, which is a phrase that does a lot of heavy lifting to remove itself from what it actually is. After all, what else should we call a film about being abused by the person who should love us most other than horror?
Does Mommie Dearest Belong in the Horror Genre?
The horror umbrella is massive and encompasses many subgenres including thrillers, sci-fi, and even true crime. I like to quip that movies like Mommie Dearest and Priscilla belong to the latter category. I even point out they have final girls surviving their monsters, but like most jokes, there is a lot of hard truth behind that. To be clear, Mommie Dearest is highly contested even by Christina Crawford, who wrote the book about the abuse suffered at the hands of her alcoholic guardian. However, the fact remains that there is an abusive mother terrorizing children at the heart of the horror. This is a tale as old as time in the genre, and we see these themes of motherhood, mental illness, and generational trauma often. So, why do we typically forget this movie when discussing titles like Psycho (1960), Run, Hereditary, etc.?
Mommie Dearest recounts a version of Christina Crawford’s upbringing by Hollywood royalty Joan Crawford. It depicts her as an unstable, jealous, manipulative woman who only holds space for her beliefs. As with most abusive parents, she takes out her frustrations and feelings of inadequacy on those around her. Specifically, those who cannot fight back due to the power dynamics at play. This version of Joan is a vicious bully, which feels familiar for many people who grew up with an abusive parent. How many of us never knew what would set our parental monster off, so just learned to walk on eggshells? How many of us grew up believing we were the problem for way longer than we should have? How many of us normalized the abuse for so long that it carried over into adulthood, letting us believe being mistreated is just part of living?
Watch the trailer for Mommie Dearest
The Lasting Impact of Abusive Parents in Horror Movies
While my mother wasn’t the active bully in our home, part of my struggle with her is her complicitness in the hell she helped create for all of us. Which is why, while I don’t think Mommie Dearest is a great film, I believe it’s a decent horror flick. It made me want to revisit a better movie, Umma, that also dealt with motherhood, mental illness, and trauma. Iris K. Shim’s 2022 PG-13 horror sees Sandra Oh playing a single mother who has not healed. After growing up with her own mother, who was especially cruel to her, she has built her world around that trauma and forced her daughter to live within its walls with her. As someone who was severely homeschooled by a woman who still really needs to find a therapist, Umma hits me in my feelings every time.
Watch the trailer for Umma below
Maternal Monsters: A Common Thread in Psycho, Hereditary, and More
Before the film starts, Oh’s character, Amanda, has turned her back on her family and cultural heritage. She has built a life that she’s not really living as she hides in her home, afraid of electricity due to the abuse she suffered at the hands of her mom. So, when her uncle shows up with her mother’s ashes, she is triggered and haunted. All of the issues she hasn’t dealt with rush to the surface, manifesting in ways that begin turning her into her deceased mom. Amanda does eventually force herself to confront her past to avoid becoming her mother and hurting her daughter. So, while Umma is different from Mommie Dearest, it’s not hard to see they share some of the same DNA. Scary moms make the genre go round which is why movies like M.O.M. Mothers of Monsters, Serial Mom, Mother, May I?, and so many others will always pull an audience by naming the monster in the title.
I doubt I am the first person on Norma Bates’ internet to clock that some of horror’s most notorious villains are parents, specifically moms. I’m also sure I cannot be the first person to argue Mommie Dearest is a horror movie on many levels. After all, a large part of the rabid fanbase seems to be comprised of genre kids who grew up wondering why the film felt familiar. However, I hope I am the first to encourage you to watch these two movies if your momma trauma will allow you to hold space for a couple more monstrous mothers this month. Both have much to say about how we cope with the fallout of being harmed by the people who should keep us safe.
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