“I see what you mean about the pageantry,” remarks Dani (Florence Pugh) in Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019) as she scrolls through photos of women lounging in a field, wearing embroidered dresses and flower crowns. Soon after, Dani joins her emotionally abusive boyfriend – the provocatively named Christian – and several of his friends, all anthropology graduate students, on a research trip to Sweden to study this pagan commune, the Hårga, during their Midsommar celebrations. Introduced to the group by Pelle, a fellow student who grew up on the commune, Dani is swiftly drawn in by the way the Hårga revere emotional experience and collectively share in its expression, finding the entangled visual and emotional customs of the Hårgan women “beautiful”. Her enchantment is, to an extent, a response to the fact that Christian does not find her beautiful. Instead, he treats her grief over the traumatic deaths of her family as burdensome and repulsive. The Hårga, on the other hand, reciprocate Dani’s admiration, and after a series of rituals she wins the cult’s highest honour: she is crowned May Queen after she outdances her competitors. During the film’s last act, the group’s “pageantry” quite literally cocoons Dani in a metamorphosis that is simultaneously ornamental and emotional. Dressed in a body-swallowing gown made of flowers, she chooses a human to be sacrificed in the ritual that traditionally closes the celebrations. In an act of revenge, she selects Christian and symbolically steps into her new community.
Midsommar’s ending is more than a symbolic self-assertion of power, or a trite allegory about ‘inner beauty’ given genre treatment. A deeper reading of the film’s aesthetics and elevation of beauty as a value is vital to understanding the cultural significance of Midsommar. Aster’s vision of the natural world emphasises flowered fields, fecund forests, and pale stone cliffs aglow with sunlight, a jarring contrast to the film’s selective moments of extreme gore. Dani’s interest in the Hårga begins with the way the Hårga women look, and her progressive entry into their group is demonstrated through her adoption of their costume. The relentlessness of the film’s pretty aesthetic is designed not only to unsettle the viewer, but also to shed light, literally, on the brutality embedded in the pastoral. Midsommar, while being a film that terrifies on the basis of story alone, also establishes a more foundational sense of terror through the oppressiveness of its filmic look, which relies on the stylised and commodified rusticity that contemporary visual culture has framed as appealing. The deep-feeling, earnest Hårga reflect the millennial predilection for emotional connection outside of the internet and the sales-driven distortion of Scandanavian minimalism that dominates Instagram feeds. Xine Yao describes how this aesthetic hews to white, materialistic “fantasies of idyllic primitivism: organic food, everything handcrafted, the economy sustained by selling artisanal goods – and the big happy white family, complete with gamboling children amid profusions of flowers, at its heart.”[i] Nothing in nature is as choreographed, pristine, and composed as Midsommar’s florid pastoralism and consequently the Hårgan lifestyle is glossed by fakeness. The film’s juxtaposition between this artifice and its moments of sublime rapture makes for discomforting tension. Folk horror, the historical genre to which Midsommar belongs, once channelled the mainstream fear of 1960s counterculture, but the subsumption of flower power iconography into marketable goods means that it now stands for something much more shallow. Taking their cue from Midsommar’s social media-ready mise-en-scène and cosplayers inspired by the film, fashion listicles followed suit, marking (and marketing) the emergence of cult couture. Thus, in real life, the film’s look mutated from horrific to aspirational. Midsommar’s cult may be fictional and located in sequestered rurality, but the signification of its images has travelled beyond the perimeters of its narrative.
Through its emphasis on appearance, Midsommar points to the way that idealised notions of women’s beauty get bound up in the hegemonic idyll of utopian imaginaries articulated by visual representations of cults. Beneath the surface of Midsommar’s stylization, beauty is at the heart of both the film’s on-screen crisis and its real-life ramificiations. As it moves through the ‘circuit of culture’, Midsommar’s prettiness raises questions about the psychology of an entire sub-genre of films about fictional cults; principally how beauty (especially women’s beauty), horror, and violence collide onscreen.[ii] Midsommar is only the most recent film to make cults look attractive, a trend that is not exclusive to one genre. Fascination with the beauty of the Manson Family women infuses their appearance in a cottage industry of media that references the group: several adaptations of Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry’s book Helter Skelter, including the 1976 mini-series spin-off, focus on the legal spectacle of prosecuting the group; more recent examples such as Charlie Says (2018) and Once Upon A Time … in Hollywood (2019) repurpose historical or biographical material.[iii] In Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke! (1999), the Orientalist impulses of New Age spirituality are gilded onto the figure of a young, indoctrinated Kate Winslet, who is objectified, sexualized, and manipulated by her chauvinistic cult deprogrammer (played by Harvey Keitel).[iv] In The Master (2012) Freddie Quell’s interest in The Cause (a movement that Paul Thomas Anderson based on Scientology) is entangled with his interest in the women who recruit him. Meanwhile, folk-horror films such as The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973) are full of white, dewy-faced femmes fatales in linen dresses. While the femme fatale of 1940s and ‘50s film noir represents, according to Mary Ann Doane, historicised “fears and anxieties prompted by shifts in the understanding of sexual difference”[v], in contemporary ‘cult’ films she represents the broader deviant magnetism embodied by cults or New Religious Movements (NRMs). Folk-horror femmes fatales often wield tremendous power, but because their authority is situated in the form of the cult it is understood as rooted in fraudulent practices, conning or brainwashing. As such, their power is artificially rather than inherently possessed. More concerningly, they are dangerous not only to a single male protagonist susceptible to their charms, as happens in the narrative structure of film noir, but belong to a group that, if not stopped, could infect society at large.
Centring on a futuristic version of pagan cults, Zal Batmanglij and Brit Marling’s Sound of My Voice (2011) follows a romantically linked couple, both investigative journalists, who aim to expose the fraudulent leader of a group that echoes real-world U.F.O. and alien cults like Heaven’s Gate. The fictional group is lead by the soft-spoken but chaotic Maggie (played by Marling). Maggie’s blonde, waifish beauty dissolves the skepticism of the film’s male protagonist, the hardened Peter (Christopher Denham), and evokes the jealousy of his girlfriend, Lorna (Nicole Vicius). Elsewhere, her ability to seduce her members into vulnerable confessions and instrumentalize this information undoes Peter’s position as a ‘rational’ journalist and sucks him into the group’s wild ambitions. While Sound of My Voice swaps the bucolic neo-medieval aesthetics of folk-horror for a contemporary Californian setting (see also Karyn Kusama’s feature The Invitation [2015]), an important similarity in art direction remains. As with the Hårga and the villainous Angel Blake in The Blood on Satan’s Claw, Maggie is draped in the ‘purity’ symbolised by white fabric; her dance between sweetness and violence is the source of her attractiveness.
Indicating cultural or subcultural difference on-screen too often falls into the realm of appearances, a strategy that can reduce or flatten complex individuals and nuanced cinematic stories. The belief structures of secretive subcultures are abbreviated in their aesthetic translation on-screen: folk-horror’s flowing dresses and rapturous landscapes, the liquid jewel-tones of giallo, and the hallucinogenic cinematography of films like Midsommar can pull us into a kind of detached visual admiration for even the most violent rituals. The fact that normativity is boring and deviance more interesting isn’t anything new or particularly troubling. However, when ‘cults’ describe patriarchal power structures or fixate on women (as they tend to do) and their abuse or objectification, this becomes more risky. Films about cults reproduce this subject matter as emblematic of depraved cruelty but also topically sexy, often presenting oversimplified treatments of humanity or religious experience. These films are about microcosms of power, and even when they attempt to deconstruct misogyny on an allegorical level, they often end up reifying it through aesthetics and normative beauty ideals. Where is the breaking point between the cult as meaningful allegory and visually alluring cinematic product? More bluntly, when does the attempted deconstruction of patriarchal structures slip into patriarchal fetishisation? While we wish to remain at a distance from cult violence, we find voyeuristic pleasure in the fantasy of cultural or religious deviance that comes to life onscreen. On the surface, Midsommar constructs a simple binary around the treatment of its protagonist: in contrast to the Hårga, who are attentive to Dani’s emotional vulnerability and crown her queen, her boyfriend and his misogynistic friends treat her very existence as inconvenient. Who wouldn’t choose to stay? As Xine Yao warns, this oversimplified reading of Midsommar’s feminisms assumes that the narcissistic impulses of a white audience will be centered through their identification with Dani, whose “ascension via sympathetic identification is explicitly posed against those left behind.”[vi] Herein lies the horror: in accepting her role as queen, Dani becomes complicit (note her ambiguous smile in the film’s final close-up) in the sacrifice of racialised characters in the film: Josh (William Jackson Harper), Connie (Ellora Torchia), and Simon (Archie Madekwe). In order to view the Hårga as a liberatory escape from death, gaslighting and misogyny, Dani must also ignore her own objectification in this fetishistic ritual and the unarticulated expectation that she is bound to procreate, her position as a former ‘outsider’ crucial to ensuring the long-term survival of the cult through offspring.
Midsommar reminds us that the cinematic allure of fictional cults is always contingent on bracketing the bad, or, to put it another way, by considering a cult’s power structures as separate from the hegemonies of a broader world. While the Hårga initially appear to be a refuge from Christian’s misogyny, the converse is true of most cults in films: they are presented as misogynistic aberrations from a norm. Both versions falsely assume that it is possible to isolate ideology and power. As religious studies scholar Joseph Laycock notes, on-screen cults are often amalgamated references to real ones (e.g., The People’s Temple, Heaven’s Gate, the Manson Family, Children of God, Aum Shinrikyo). While this never places viewers far from history and experience, these pastiched fictional cults are spectacles that hinge only on “deviance amplification” rather than any meaningful engagement with the history and practices of actual cults and NRMs.[vii] Also concerning are the popular stereotypes that both Laycock and, more foundationally, Lynn S. Neal observes in her study of the portrayal of cult members on television: hysterical, susceptible, predisposed, gullible, psychologically vulnerable, weak, untrustworthy, permanently damaged.[viii] Significantly, these concepts align with gendered pathologisations, making it unsurprising that if the vast majority of films about cults begin by foregrounding the women who participate in these groups, they end bound up in the aesthetic fascination of the groups themselves.
Whether leaders or followers, women come to function as abject symbols for the cult itself. A piece of web-journalism by Hannah Hightman on women cult leaders in fictional films and television contains a number of key insights, but concludes by stating that “horror films featuring women cult leaders portray the mixture of horror and fascination that the public, mainly men, have about women abandoning the patriarchy.”[ix] Although this is an exciting claim, it isn’t entirely true, operating on the flawed assumption that on-screen cults are an alternative to patriarchy because of their communal structures or geographic distance from larger human populations in cities and towns.[x] The fictional cults of popular cinema actually present patriarchal detachment as impossible. Whether by their supposed rejection of or attachment to it, female leaders of fictional cults are always read in relation to patriarchal power in both aesthetic and narrative terms. Even in the remake of The Wicker Man (2006), the matriarchal commune of Goddess worshipping beekeepers who have supposedly ditched patriarchy rely on the grooming and ritual sacrifice of a patriarch for their religious sustainability. As with horror scholar Chloé Germaine Buckley’s reading of the witch – “a dangerously precarious symbol that, at one turn of the tightrope, seems to subvert patriarchal ideology, and, at another, reinforces it” – women cult escapees and leaders alike get trapped within the boundaries of their tropes.[xi] They masquerade as antiheroes but they truly function as repositories for the cult narrative that positions and mythologises normativity as neutral and safe. As opposed to the grotesqueness of the witch, the allure of the woman cult member or leader is coordinated with the palatable, if not idealised, attractiveness of the femme fatale: although boxed in by her objectification, her instrumentalisation of beauty as a leader is meant to be understood as a betrayal of patriarchal normativity. As these films frequently end in her death, arrest, or other punishment, it’s clear we’re not meant to read this predicament sympathetically.
When women in cults aren’t trying to entrap men on-screen, they’re perceived as damaged goods, with many films focusing on the escape and deprogramming of a female cult member. This woman is not led to the cult by autonomous or honest belief, but because of low self-esteem or the desire for male attention, either romantic or paternal. In Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011), former cult member Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) is left with a ruptured understanding of her own identity that leads her to sexual and behavioural transgressions, such as ‘inappropriate’ nudity or interrupting her sister and her husband during sex. After her escape, her indoctrination makes her seem spontaneous and dangerous to men ‘on the outside’, while her trauma infuses her character with a subservient, confused naiveté that increases her allure. As in Campion’s Holy Smoke!, the main character’s sexuality, which has been given shape by her cult experience and never understood outside it, fluctuates between the roles of aggressor and victim. In more frank terms, this type of character functions as symbolic warning: while life within the cult is unbearable, life without it will be shaped by her break from and longing for its people, structures and iconography. On-screen she is almost always placed in dialogue with heterosexual, nuclear families (usually her birth family). The contrast frequently ends up reifying sweeping ideas that cult films often endorse: normativity as healthy, its loss as perverse.[xii]
More recent films, such as Małgorzata Szumowska’s The Other Lamb (2019), balance the visual spectacle of cults with the ordinariness and banality of patriarchal violence itself, offering a more nuanced perspective and one that therefore might be more challenging to stomach. These are fictionalised films, and thus do not offer a true ‘insider’s view’, but they do challenge stereotypes reiterated by films about cults.[xiii] A perversion of the bildungsroman, The Other Lamb offers a character study of teenage protagonist Selah (Raffey Cassidy), whose mother – an early member of the film’s fictional cult – died when she was a baby. Selah’s community is secluded in the woods and composed almost entirely of women, whose hierarchy of subjugation is rendered, once again, through dress: Wives wear magenta wool dresses, Daughters wear blue. The Wives joined the group during vulnerable life transitions, such as recovery from addiction, which their male leader, Shepherd (Michiel Huisman), exploits with pseudo-Biblical theology. But while Selah witnesses a great deal of violence, she also spends a lot of her time waiting around or bored, so much so that at one point she falls asleep while watching a flock of mountain sheep (a banal action with disastrous consequences). In popular culture cults and NRMs seem larger than life, their actions virtually unbelievable,[xiv] Part of the horror in films about cults lies not in the violent actions of leaders or followers, but rather in the fact that the on-screen depiction of cults engenders a spectatorial smugness in viewers; these films tug at the belief that we could never be brought to join one ourselves. By showing Selah’s boredom, The Other Lamb pushes against both the trope of violence and the viewers’ desire for the confirmation it gives them, while elsewhere it uses the cinematic form to haptically integrate viewers into the space and activities of its cult, closing the imagined distance and dispelling the smugness. In a recurring rite, the group’s temple – a tight cube constructed from white threads tied between trees – becomes the site of a ceremony where obedient Wives and Daughters devolve into wild, religious fervour, their cheeks painted with the blood of a sacrificed animal. “My Shepherd!” they chant in increasing volume and orgasmic desperation, their faces frantically crowding the frame. As spectators, we apprehend the claustrophobia of this sequence as a physicalised representation of Shepherd wearing down the bodies of his followers by confining and exhausting them. Here, Szumowska exploits the ways that visual harmony can act as a marker of patriarchal violence, indicative of the constrictive tendency to arrange, control, and own.
The impact of Shepherd’s abusive, autocratic control of individual autonomy is shown most emphatically though the character of Sarah (Denise Gough), a former Wife. Sarah is exiled from the group for perceived impurity. She is stripped naked and quarantined in a filthy shed; Selah brings her scraps of food to keep her alive. The punishment of women who are perceived to be a threat to the (male) cult leader is a common plot point in films about cults, something that darkens the idyll of bucolic cult life.[xv] When I first saw the shed in The Other Lamb, I was reminded of Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.’ A critique of utopian projects, this story shows the happiness of the community as contingent on the suffering of a child imprisoned in a cellar beneath the city. Initial festivities are peeled away to expose the inhumanity on which a performance of communal joy is built. In Omelas, Le Guin (echoing Hannah Arendt) suggests that artists commit a betrayal in their “refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain”.[xvi] This banality is what most ‘cult movies’ miss. The Other Lamb stands out because it balances the flamboyant exaggerations of horror with bored gazes and depictions of strenuous labour. When police discover and evict the cult from their residence in the forest, Shepherd decides that they will find a new Eden. The underfed group hikes across mountainous terrain for weeks in frequently challenging weather, past the point of exhaustion. Szumowska draws out this hiking trip and its violence, manipulating screen time to communicate its painful tedium and using it as the marker at which Selah begins to resent Shepherd. As a single car drives past the hiking group, Selah hallucinates seeing a different version of her teenage self in the backseat. “Where are you going?” the phantom-double mouths. In the film’s use of doubling, repetition, and looped scenes the answer is clear: nowhere. This is perhaps the film’s largest success. Instead of unrealistically concentrating on Selah’s deprogramming and liberation, The Other Lamb unfolds a structure where power dynamics do not break but only shift. We do not see the young woman joining an “outside” social world capable of liberating her. Instead, we’re simply presented with the image of a new group, made up of the remaining survivors in a new setting: feral, monstrous, and autonomous. Film critic Jourdain Searles views the “pessimism” of this ending as one that prompts the spectator towards recognising “that changing the broken world can’t happen without a radical rejection of the methods used to build it.”[xvii] Indeed, this ending is doubly helpful in that it self-reflexively bends back on the film’s genre to further muddle divisions between the world of the cult and the world beyond it.
While The Other Lamb swings between the banality of cult life and its chaotic violence, Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s The Lodge (2019) uses chaos and violence to imagine horrific consequences to the fetishisation of one deprogrammed woman. Richard (Richard Armitage), a writer, falls in love with and becomes engaged to Grace (Riley Keogh), the only survivor of a fundamentalist Christian suicide cult and one of the subjects of his book. Like the anthropology grad students of Midsommar, Richard is the worst kind of participant-observer. Grace appeals to him because her cult experience is the subject of his professional fascination, and her past imbues her with erotic exoticism. He believes that he understands Grace completely – even better than she does herself. Richard’s delusion of his paternal control drives him to leave Grace and his two children alone in a remote cabin over the winter holiday while he works in the city. The children, traumatised by their mother’s recent suicide, channel their resentment of Grace as a stepmother figure into highly triggering, elaborate pranks. They hide her medication and belongings, turn off the power so that Grace is disconnected from her support network, and, most awfully, reenact in their bedroom the visually distinct mass suicide of her former cult. (The purple shrouds suggest a reference to Heaven’s Gate; the duct tape reading “SIN” that they have placed over their mouths harkens back to the Evangelical anti-abortion protestors in Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s 2006 documentary Jesus Camp). Nothing ends well, of course. These mean-spirited pranks retraumatise Grace and confuse her grip on reality. In the end, Grace kills Richard. While genuinely frightening, The Lodge is best understood allegorically, as a cinematic annotation that skewers its subgenre’s easy fetishism of women, as well as the way audiences receive these stories and images of women in cults. If Richard stands for this fetishism, and Grace as the archetypal folk-horror femme fatale made sexy, dangerous and sad by her experience in a cult, the film presents this kind of relationship as doomed to implode. The Lodge makes Grace scary, and contains pathologising tropes, but it also foregrounds the objectifying conditions through which she is forced to embody the spectacle of the cult. Then, by showing Richard’s impulses to reduce, mollify, and underestimate Grace, the film shows, forebodingly, how Grace exceeds the constraints of her objectification. Like R.O. Kwon’s recent novel The Incendiaries (2018) – a story about a woman who stays in a controlling group – The Lodge is a revitalizing approach to cult narratives because it refuses to construct their common binary: that these groups are ruled by a patriarchal logic separate from an outside world portrayed, disingenuously, as free of these structures.
Midsommar’s corporeal, affective filmic language reaches an apex in its final shots. We’re shown Dani dragging herself through a smoke-filled field, the floral gown – a symbol of transformation rooted in the body – trailing heavily. The film ends with a close-up, blossoms bordering Dani’s tear-stained face: then, her quivering, downturned mouth slowly turns into a maleficent smile. The countless, surface-level readings of Midsommar’s finale that posit it as a warped ‘happy ending’ for Dani or emblematic of empowerment miss something crucial: that the choice given to our protagonist (sacrifice a Hårgan or her boyfriend) is no choice at all. In her new circumstances, Dani might be a queen, but she is also an instrument. This uncertain autonomy, reflective of women in on-screen cults more broadly, is there in her emotionally ambiguous look into the camera. Likewise Grace’s culminating frontal gaze in The Lodge – her face marred by bruises, cuts and frostbite – suggests that the tropes into which she’s compressed are not only inscribed cinematically, but also on her body. These direct stares confront the spectator and complicate their separation from the world of the cult by upending the divisions between inside and outside. In what may be the best iteration of this front-facing look, The Other Lamb’s Selah addresses the camera with an open-mouthed scream. Here the film’s formal appeal sours and ferments into something radically unstable. It is a moment of aesthetic distortion, one that exceeds the flattening of the cult woman into trope by gesturing toward the continuation of her narrative outside filmic frameworks and toward a yet unsketched humanity, her humanity, that exists beyond prettily packaged images of empowerment. These disruptive endings provoke our speculative impulses and make us wonder who or what the ‘cult woman’ might become beyond the edges of her story on-screen. They give way to a sticky liminality, something that catches the audience too, leaving an affective residue that destabilises both genre platitudes and the idea that misogynistic terrors are far away in the forest. These close-ups instigate a reciprocal searching: these women look at us, so that we can look back.
Katherine Connell is a writer based in Toronto and one of Another Gaze‘s staff writers.
[i] Xine Yao, “Midsommar: The Horrors of White Sympathy.” Avidly. Aug 13 2019. [ii] The ‘circuit of culture’ is how Stuart Hall describes the various contexts an object or text moves through to communicate and accrue different forms of meaning. [iii] See Constance Grady. “The evolving mythology of the ‘Manson girls.'” Vox. Aug. 8, 2019. [iv] See Kathleen McHugh. Jane Campion, University of Illinois Press, 2007, pp. 112-123. [v] Mary Anne Doane. Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1991, p.2. [vi] Xine Yao, “Midsommar: The Horrors of White Sympathy.” Avidly. Aug 13 2019. [vii] Joseph Laycock. “Where Do They Get These Ideas? Changing Ideas of Cults in the Mirror of Popular Culture,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol. 81, no.1, 2013, pp. 80-106. [viii] Lynn S. Neal. “‘They’re Freaks!: The Cult Stereotype in Fictional Shows, 1958-2008.” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, vol. 14, no. 3, 2011, pp. 81-107. See also Laycock’s commentary on ‘medicalization’ and cult participants in popular culture, ibid. [ix] Hannah Hightman, “What female cult leaders in popular movies and TV can teach us about patriarchy.” Hello Giggles. Sept. 19 2019. [x] For more on this see Neal, ibid. [xi] Chloé Gerrmaine Buckley. “Witches, ‘Bitches,’ or Feminist Trailblazers? The Witch in Folk Horror Cinema.” Revanant Journal: Special Issue on Gothic Feminisms, no. 5, 2020, pp. 22-42. This paper also features an extended feminist reading of The Wicker Man (2006) vis-à-vis representations of Wicca and paganism. [xii] For a different, more refreshing take on this story see Rebecca Wait’s novel The Followers (Europa, 2015). [xiii] In documentary films, the representation of cult insiders, members, and participants raises a whole separate set of issues particular to the form’s capacity to selectively frame its storytelling (from independent films such as Holy Hell [2016] and Going Clear [2015] to sensational news network exposés about cults). [xiv] See Douglas E. Cowan, Sacred Terror: Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen. Baylor University Press, 2008. [xv] For an interpretation of family Aster’s Midsommar and Hereditary via Le Guin’s literary criticism of Tolstoy see Sophie Lewis, “The Satanic Death Cult is Real.” Commune. Aug. 28, 2019. [xvi] Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” New Dimensons 3, 1973. [xvii] Jourdain Searles, “Girl Watchers: The Uneasy Female Gaze of ‘Black Conflux’ and ‘The Other Lamb.'” Bitch Media, Oct. 11 2019.
