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[shadowkat]

So as previously mentioned, movie buddy really wants to see Midsommar which is director Ari Aster's followup to "Hereditary", considered the best horror flick of 2018. Now, this is being considered the best horror flick of 2019.

People have compared it to Wicker Man, but the description reminds me a bit of Harvest Home by Tom Tyrone, later made into The Dark Secrets of Harvest Home starring Betty Davis, Rene Auborgonoulis (ODO from DS9), Rosanna Arquette, Dan Ackyrode, John Calvin, Joanna Mills, and the voice of Donald Pleasance.

I found Harvest Home on youtube. The book was creepy psychological horror, reminiscent of the Stepford Wives and Get Out. The movie isn't quite as good. It's about a couple with a daughter, who are struggling and decide to retreat to the country, Harvest Home, and slowly find themselves embroiled in secretive pagan cult. The husband decides to write a book about it -- and discovers far more than he bargained for.

HERE's PART II.

Midsommer from the reviews has been compared to Get Out, and various other films.
I've been reading the reviews...and am curious (because hello, had a cultural anthropology minor), but ...I can't tell if I can watch the thing without it keeping me up at night and/or grossing me out on a certain level. It appears to end with the heroine in pretty much the same place as the hero of Harvest Home...which no, it's not what you think. Harvest Home isn't Wicker Man, it's much creepier and a lot better.

Harvest Home according to my mother was one of my grandfather's favorite novels. My father's father loved horror films, particularly science-fiction horror films. He used to take my grandmother to the Saturday Maintainee to watch, and he had quite the collection of horror novels, including a book about sci-fi horror movies -- that I remember flipping through at the age of ten.

I'm going to grill Chidi on Monday, he said his friends who'd invited him to see it, were psyched to see the film. And he and I get scared by the same things.

Comments

[shadowkat]

I haven't read the Other, nor did I know a movie was made from it. I have the book somewhere -- hunted it done at a discount book shop in Brooklyn that went out of business five years ago. Harvest Home is about a cult of women who to prevent in-breeding, rent a house to a new couple every few years, and have one of their own mate with the wife, and somehow get rid of the husband. The man who mates with the wife, a young hunk, is then killed by the wife. The husband (John Calvin's novelist), goes back to try to stop the ritual and they capture him and put him inside a tree (in the book), in the movie they just attack him and bound him and force him to watch. In both he's blinded and can't see anything afterwards. Pampered and blind. Senseless.

The ritual depicted in Harvest Home -- is actually very similar to MidSommar and Wicker Man. I like the plot and story of Harvest Home better, I could never get through Wicker Man, which I found to be too silly for words (both versions). Similar stories were told in The Perilious Guard (which I loved), Pamela Dean's Tam Lin (which didn't work for me at all), Waking the Moon by Elizabeth Hand (which got a bit confusing and silly), and Secret History...which erred on the side of not showing all that much (by far the most effective).

It's the son is sacrificed to the mother, and his blood brings forth spring and renewal. We actually do the same thing in the Christian faith -- it's no accident that we celebrate the death of Christ around the same time as the Spring Solstice. Or the birth around the same time as the Winter Solstice...the pagan beliefs sort of blend quite nicely into the Christian ones. Except in Christianity -- the son is sacrificed to the Father god (sun), while in Pagan religion - the son is sacrificed to the Goddess (the earth).

I like the mythological aspects of it and the metaphors. But the ritual, sigh, I'm not a fan of ritual.