At first glance, Midsommar looks like a photo negative of Hereditary, the breakout horror film it follows up. Instead of the grief-stricken Utah home at the heart of Hereditary, director Ari Aster’s new movie takes place in idyllic Sweden, where the midnight sun shines brightly on a twisted summer-solstice celebration happening once every 90 years. Dani, an American college student reeling from family tragedy, is invited by her anthropology student boyfriend to tag along to Midsommar, full of white caftans and psychedelic drugs, as a half-hearted pick-me-up. But as the rituals grow increasingly violent and her friends start to vanish, Dani finds herself at odds with a partner who’s stopped paying any attention to her and a cult perhaps paying too much attention to her. The result is one of the most unpredictable horror movies of the year, and perhaps the most bizarrely cathartic breakup movie ever.
Like Hereditary, Midsommar has some startling twists and a fast-rising body count, but here Aster festoons the corpses with flowers, drenches the gore in light, and adds a welcome dose of gallows humor. While recalling folk-horror classics like The Wicker Man in spirit, Midsommar is very much its own ambitious, 140-minute beast, with a skin-crawling sense of dread anchored by a queasy score from Bobby Krlic, aka the Haxan Cloak. Aster wrote the movie’s script while listening exclusively to the experimental electronic producer, particularly the 13-minute closer off his morbid, throbbing 2013 breakthrough, Excavation. When it came time to add temporary music cues to the film, Aster slotted in even more Haxan Cloak—in his mind, there was no other musician who could score the film. And with Krlic having spent the last few years working on movie music with Atticus and Leopold Ross, he was primed for his own big solo scoring moment.
Sound and music are crucial during Midsommar’s descent into madness, and this required Krlic to incorporate custom-made instruments, sacred chants, and more into his work. He and Aster connected over email in January 2017, before Hereditary was filmed, and then at Krlic’s house in L.A. prior to Midsommar’s filming. “We spent hours rambling on about all the movies we love,” Krlic says. “We would break for lunch and sit at the table and just spend the whole time emphatically talking about film scores and playing records.” We recently hopped on a call with both Aster and Krlic to discuss the ambitious sound of Midsommar.
Bobby Krlic: Ari and I talked to death about what [Midsommar] would be, but describing music with words turns out to be absolutely the most redundant way of doing anything. So Ari came to my house and for about a week we would work from 10 in the morning ’til 7. We tackled the big end scene first, with the idea that it surmises all the emotive qualities that the film’s been building to, expressed in this amazing, nine-minute sequence. So we made that first, with me at the piano and Ari next to me, and he would be so wonderfully descriptive and gestural. I think we were both nervous to start with, and then within a few minutes the whole thing unlocked itself. It was a really great connection that was waiting to happen, that I’d never had doing anything else.
Ari Aster: I had the same experience. This really was one of my favorite collaborations with anybody. I can be very verbose, and what we both found was that it was good for me to talk with my hands. We got to a point pretty early on where you were able to understand exactly what something needed by allowing me to just fuck around with my hands.
BK: Yeah, absolutely. If you’ve ever seen anybody dance to Sufi music, that’s kind of what Ari’s gestures are like. [laughs]
BK: I went to an incredible woman named Jessika Kenney. She’s a vocal artist who did her master’s degree in interpreting sacred texts through singing, which rendered her completely perfect to help with Midsommar. She brought all these incredible sounds and a lot of it is based in old Icelandic and Nordic and then there’s some Middle Eastern languages in there. It’s kind of a mishmash of quite a lot of stuff. There are a lot of references to sacred devotional music and devotional chants and things like that.
AA: [Jessika] came out for one day before we entered production and she worked with the entire Hårga cast [the Swedish villagers], so about 70 people, and she taught them how to perform her songs. She was there for a very short amount of time but by the time she left, everybody was absolutely capable of doing what was needed. We were also very fortunate to have [Kati Dombi], who was a member of the cast who was also a singing teacher, and she was able to conduct these songs in Jessika’s absence.
AA: This was an even bigger undertaking [than Hereditary] in that there is just as much diegetic music as there is nondiegetic. I knew it was important to Bobby and me that they kind of feel like they are of a piece, that the music you find in the diegesis could also kind of seamlessly move into the score. On the production design side, we actually had several original instruments being made by a craftsman in Sweden, so there were these instruments that in many cases just didn’t really exist. They were meant to function as some sort of analogous instrument, like you had one instrument that looks like some weird mutated cello, and that would serve the function of a bass.
BK: I did a hell of a lot of research into ancient Scandinavian music and the kind of instruments they would use, then wrote all these pieces [of music] at home and sent them over [to the production]. A lot of the instruments on set had already been made because of time constraints, but we were just incredibly lucky that our thinking aligned. The instruments that [the production designers] ended up creating, even if it wasn’t the exact instrument, my music could be mapped onto the instruments that got made. [Once I got on set] we ended up transcribing the demos I’d made to all the players and it turned out really well, and sounded incredibly authentic to me.
BK: The first piece you hear after the tragedy that engulfs Dani is very much rooted in that specific place and feeling at that time, and it’s not really indicative of what the rest of the score does. And then once we’re going towards Sweden, you get this wind tone growing louder and louder, that exists in the background for most of the film. The idea is that it’s the hive mind of the Hårgas beginning to penetrate the group. When we first see the main house, when Dani goes in, the music conveys this feeling of the trauma melting away for a minute. For her it’s like an Alice in Wonderland feeling, where she is engulfed in this magical new universe and deserts everything else that’s happening to her.
Ari and I spoke a lot about Midsommar not being a horror film at all, really; it’s a pretty twisted fairy tale. So I was doing a lot of research into old Disney movies and even listening to things like Nelson Riddle and Frank Sinatra, that old Capitol Records, dreamy orchestra kind of sound. That was definitely something we wanted to bring into the film to help with this transformation that Dani goes through in meeting this fantastical group of characters that brainwash her troubles away. [The sound] can be ominous and soothing at the same time—like a lot of my music, actually.
Midsommar is in theaters July 3.
