When members of the Hårga – Ari Aster’s Swedish cult in Midsommar – reach the age of 72, they are instructed to jump off a very high cliff. “They have reached the end of their life cycle,” the Hårga explain, Swedishly, to their dumbfounded American guests.
As horror films go, it’s an unexpected twist – all the more so because it bucks what might be described as the genre’s most unrelenting theme, which is that the elderly are almost always villains, not victims. Throughout the long history of horror, the old have waited, jealously, to feast on the young, either in over-friendly cabals (Get Out, Rosemary’s Baby, Hereditary), or alone (X, Saw). All versions, perhaps, of horror’s longest-lived baddie: the vampire.
