The Horror/Beauty of the Harga: Midsommar as Western Imaginary of a Screen-Free Life

Abstract

The “highbrow horror” film Midsommar was released in 2019 to an engaged critical and popular reception Featuring several anthropologists as main characters, this film explores the culture of the fictive Harga and their midsummer festival in Sweden. While critics have focused on the genre-bending aspects, the exploration of a cult, and the racial politics of the film, in this article I argue that they ignored a central tension in it: the relation between technologically-mediated communication and face-to-face, intense social interactions. I suggest that these oppositions are part of an ongoing debate about the relationship between technology and sociability in contemporary life, and that the exploration of this tension might explain some of the strong reactions provoked by the film.