Movies Like Midsommar: 12 Folk Horror Films That Get Under Your Skin

Last updated: March 2026

Midsommar is an unusual horror film for a specific reason: it’s terrifying while being beautiful, and almost all of its horror happens in broad daylight.

Ari Aster’s 2019 film follows a grieving American woman who accompanies her emotionally absent boyfriend and his anthropology friends to a Swedish midsummer festival. The Swedish commune they visit is welcoming, lush, and operates by rules so alien that the wrongness accumulates slowly — until something breaks open.

What makes Midsommar linger is the combination of folk horror (isolated communities with pre-Christian traditions, the land as a living thing) with genuine emotional intelligence. Dani’s grief is real. Her relationship is real. The horror eventually becomes a warped kind of liberation, which is the most unsettling thing about it.

If that specific flavor of dread is what you’re after, here are twelve films that will find you there.

1. Hereditary (2018)

Ari Aster’s debut is the necessary companion piece. Where Midsommar is sun-drenched and outward, Hereditary is claustrophobic and domestic — a family miniaturist’s horror about grief, inherited damage, and the way trauma moves through generations. Toni Collette’s performance is one of the great horror turns of the decade. The film is more conventionally terrifying than Midsommar but equally intelligent. The two together represent Aster’s thesis on what it means to belong somewhere.

Streaming: Netflix

2. The Wicker Man (1973)

The granddad of folk horror and the film that defines the subgenre. A devout Christian police sergeant travels to a remote Scottish island to investigate a missing child and encounters a pagan community celebrating their May festival. Robin Hardy’s film is shot in a kind of pastoral idyll — the horror comes from watching two completely incompatible worldviews collide, with the intruder so certain of his own rectitude that he can’t read the signs around him. The ending is iconic. The journey matters more.

Streaming: Available to rent/buy. Note: Avoid the 2006 Nicolas Cage remake.

3. The VVitch (2015)

Robert Eggers’ debut is set in 1630s New England — a Puritan family expelled from their plantation community builds a farm on the edge of a dark forest. The title’s archaic spelling signals the film’s commitment to period authenticity: the dialogue is sourced from journals of the time. The dread comes from isolation, from religious terror, from a father whose certainty in his own righteousness makes him incapable of protecting his family. The ending has the same ambivalent liberation as Midsommar.

Streaming: Available to rent/buy

4. Apostle (2018)

Gareth Evans brings The Raid’s precision to Welsh folk horror. A man travels to a remote religious island commune in 1905 to rescue his kidnapped sister. The island has an agricultural deity. The crops are failing. The community’s rules are beginning to collapse under the pressure of their own contradictions. Dan Stevens carries the film with a kind of exhausted intelligence that makes him immediately sympathetic — and the practical horror effects in the final act are genuinely extraordinary. Available on Netflix.

Streaming: Netflix

5. The Ritual (2017)

Four British friends hike through the Swedish wilderness after the death of a friend and encounter something ancient in the forest. Director David Bruckner understands that the best folk horror is about what the landscape means, not just what it contains — and this specific Scandinavian forest carries the weight of Viking mythology and something older. The creature design, when it’s revealed, is unlike anything else in contemporary horror. Available on Netflix.

Streaming: Netflix

6. Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Ira Levin’s novel is set in a Manhattan apartment building rather than a field or forest, but the horror mechanics are identical to folk horror: an outsider (Rosemary, newly married, newly pregnant) is slowly absorbed into a community with its own rules, her autonomy eroding so gradually she almost doesn’t notice. The film is one of the great studies in paranoid horror — is something wrong, or is she simply afraid of pregnancy? The answer, when it comes, is worse than either.

Streaming: Paramount+

7. The Wicker Man (2006) — No. Skip This One.

We mention it only to save you time. The 2006 Nicolas Cage remake famously strips the original of its intelligence, its atmosphere, and its meaning. The only reason to watch it is for the Cage meme compilation content, which is better absorbed via YouTube.

8. Kill List (2011)

Ben Wheatley’s British horror-thriller starts as a kitchen-sink drama about two hitmen navigating bad contracts and troubled marriages, and ends as full folk horror. The transition is one of the most jarring in genre cinema — deliberately so. Wheatley wants you to feel the ground shift underneath you. If you liked Midsommar’s sudden pivots into extreme violence, Kill List operates in the same register of “this film is willing to go places you didn’t expect.”

Streaming: Available to rent/buy

9. The Lighthouse (2019)

Robert Eggers again — his second film, this time set on a remote New England lighthouse island in the 1890s. Two lighthouse keepers (Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson) are stranded together by a storm and begin to lose their minds. Shot in black and white, in a nearly square aspect ratio, with monologues drawn from Melville and mythology. The folk horror here isn’t a community with ancient rules; it’s the sea itself, and the thing the light might be protecting. One of the decade’s most atmospheric films.

Streaming: Available to rent/buy

10. Men (2022)

Alex Garland’s British folk horror divides audiences sharply — some find its symbolism too on-the-nose, others find its dream logic genuinely disturbing. A woman retreats to a remote English village after a traumatic experience and finds all the men in the village look identical. The film pulls from the Green Man tradition, from folklore about the land’s claim on people, from gendered horror about the way women navigate spaces made hostile by accumulated small hostilities. The practical effects in the final sequence are remarkable.

Streaming: Paramount+

11. Midsommar: Director’s Cut (2019)

If you watched the theatrical cut, the director’s cut adds 24 minutes of context for Dani and Christian’s relationship before they leave for Sweden — making the horror that follows feel both more inevitable and more earned. Aster considers this the definitive version. Available on physical media and some streaming platforms.

12. A Field in England (2013)

Ben Wheatley again, this time in English Civil War territory — a group of deserters find themselves in a field under the influence of a strange man who may be a sorcerer. Shot in black and white with sequences of pure psychedelic imagery, it’s the most experimental film on this list. If you want folk horror pushed to the edge of experimental cinema, this is where it lives.

Streaming: Available to rent/buy

FAQ

What makes Midsommar different from other horror movies?
Midsommar does something few horror films attempt: the horror occurs in full daylight, in pastoral beauty. The film denies the viewer the visual shorthand of darkness and shadows — the wrongness has to be communicated through ceremony, community behavior, and the slow erosion of the protagonist’s connection to the people she came with.

Is Midsommar based on real Swedish traditions?
The film draws loosely from Scandinavian midsummer traditions and folk practices but is not based on any real event or specific tradition. Aster researched Scandinavian mythology for visual and thematic elements. The Hårga community is entirely fictional.

What is the director’s cut of Midsommar and is it better?
The director’s cut adds approximately 24 minutes of material, primarily expanding the relationship between Dani and Christian before the trip. Most viewers who’ve seen both prefer the director’s cut for the emotional context it provides. The theatrical version is tighter structurally.

What is folk horror exactly?
Folk horror is a subgenre defined by: rural or isolated settings, communities with pre-Christian or pagan religious practices, outsider protagonists who fail to understand or adapt to local customs, and horror that emerges from the land, community, and tradition rather than supernatural entities. The Wicker Man, The VVitch, and Midsommar are the canonical examples.

For more horror recommendations: our best Korean horror movies guide covers a completely different horror tradition with its own mythology, and our movies like Knives Out list is for when you want mystery rather than dread.