Midsommar (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), dir. Ari Aster, USA/Sweden, 2019

“Out of these woods do not desire to go” – alongside its Green Man-esque themes of vernal festivities, fantastical dreams, and fairyland magic, whether pagan or Ovidian, William Shakespeare’s early comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream also distills fairytales’ darkness: instances of abduction, transfiguration, drugged “seduction,” and dubious conjugal consent. These tropes are equally reflected in Ari Aster’s American folk horror film Midsommar (2019). Midsommar takes cheery familiar pagan and animistic festive elements, such as the fertility dance, bridal election, and ceremonial feast, and blends these with increasingly unsettling cultic routines involving synchronized hallucinogenic consumption, ritualistic sex, and violent death or self-sacrifice. Accordingly, this entry outlines how Midsommar can be read loosely as a horror-movie version of Shakespeare’s solstitial comedy, and how so doing can illuminate and exaggerate the latter’s problematic aspects, even while exploring how these instances could be considered to categorize Dream more fruitfully as a Shakespearean “problem play.”