For Fans of Midsommar

Midsommar works because the commune is not the real antagonist. Dani and Christian's relationship is already over before the first ritual; the film is a breakup that takes two hours and a cult to complete. Aster constructs the horror so that Dani's final smile feels, against all logic, like relief. The best films in this tradition do the same thing: they use supernatural or social menace to externalize an interior wound that the characters cannot speak out loud.

Horror taught us to fear the dark. Midsommar made the permanent midsummer daylight feel worse. Nothing can hide; the horror is right there in full color, dressed in white linen and embroidered flowers. A handful of other films have understood this: The Wicker Man does it, as does Suspiria's neon-drenched academy. When there is nowhere to retreat into shadow, the dread has nowhere to dissipate.

The folk horror revival that The Witch kicked off in 2015 and Midsommar accelerated is not nostalgia for old genre tropes. It is horror that takes seriously the idea that community, tradition, and belonging can themselves be terrifying. The novels that belong to this wave (The Ritual, The Secret History, The Girls) understand the same thing: the scariest force in fiction is not a monster. It is a group of people who agree.

Bobby Krlic (The Haxan Cloak) composed one of the decade's most precise horror scores. It does not announce itself as scary: it breathes, shifts in pitch almost imperceptibly, folds field recordings of Scandinavian folk singing into the dissonance. The score's purpose is to stay in Dani's emotional register throughout, so that when the horror escalates, the music does not signal danger so much as confirm that something has been wrong for a very long time.