In a lot of ways, Midsommar and Hereditary are both existential horror movies.
I wanted to present a dynamic in which neither party is awful to the other one, but they’re absolutely wrong for each other.
They’re dealing with fears that have no real remedy; questions about death and whether you can really know the people closest to you.
We open the film by having this woman be thrown into a very serious existential dilemma where she is rendered — in one fell swoop — an orphan, and inherent to the film’s trajectory, the story is very much a fairytale.