Midsommar | 2019
- DIRECTOR |
- Ari Aster
"Have you never seen The Wicker Man?" we're all screaming silently to ourselves as a bunch of young Americans set off for a relaxing nine days celebrating Mid-Summer rituals in rural 'Sweden'. Yes, the film consciously owes a debt to the classic of the folk horror genre but it has its own slow-burning, dread-filled atmosphere, taking place in beautiful sun-drenched countryside.
The prologue is filmed in the USA. The parents of New Yorker Dani (Florence Pugh) live in the city of Draper, on I-15 about 20 miles south of Salt Lake City in Utah. The house is 1247 Bridle Trail Road.
Dani's apartment was filmed at an apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, but we don't see any more than the interior.
Soon, we're off to Europe and... Hungary.
For all sorts of reasons – mainly the eight-hour limit per day on filming in Sweden, which would have been impractical for a production dependent so much on long days of sunshine.
The film was based at the Korda Studios in Etyek, a little under 20 miles west of Budapest.
The whole of the idyllic looking commune-village of 'Hårga' was built from scratch in a field at the southern edge of the small Farkashegy airfield south of Budakeszi, a town in Pest County, between Etyek and Budapest.
Even the towering rocky outcrop where the happy hippie vibe is takes a shockingly darker turn was nearby. This is an old stone quarry, marked Régi kőbánya (Old Stone Mine) on maps, to the northwest of the field.
I'm not sure if the field is accessible to the public or private land.
If what you're looking for is more the genuine culture which inspired the look (if not the actual rituals) of Midsommar, then take yourself off to Hälsingland, a province in central Sweden which is home to the magnificent Decorated Farmhouses, now designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Two or even three storeys high, the farmhouses are famous for their wall paintings and iconography which director Ari Aster and his team visited to find the authenticity for the setting.
The area is about a two hour train ride from Stockholm Arlanda Airport.
BTW, one bit of trivia, if you didn't know you probably wouldn't recognise him but the old guy who plunges from the clifftop is Bjorn Andresen, who played Tadzio in Luchino Visconti's 1973 classic Death In Venice.
