I just saw Midsommar, and being from Sweden, I found the setting of Hårga to be the perfect choice, and one that many Swedes would recognize as a reference to a classic scary folk tale.Hårga is a real village in Hälsingland, a tiny place, most famous for the song Hårgalåten ("the Hårga song").You can find the song with English subtitles here. It's a classic style of Swedish folk song, with an almost melancholy melody.In the song, a stranger comes to town. He takes out his fiddle, and his playing makes the young townsfolk dance with such joy that they "forgot God and the world". They dance in the fields for hours on end. One of them asks the stranger where he learned to play such wild music, and notices to their horror that the stranger has cloven feet. They cannot stop for anything, not even the call of the church bells, and in the end they "dance asunder their soul and body". The song ends by saying the stranger will not stop until they all die.This is a variation on a classic symbol, found throughout Europe, of the devil playing the violin to entice people to dance, lust and sin, to their ultimate demise in a dance of death. The story also brings to mind the stories of Dancing Mania, a real phenomenon throughout medieval Europe, where people would break out in sudden fits of dancing that would only stop by collapsing of exhaustion.To a Swede, Hårga has only ever been a place associated with this terrible story. It's like setting your movie in Sleepy Hollow. It's a tiny detail that serves as an easter egg for the Swedes in the audience, and a sign that the people behind the movie put a lot of thought into its Swedish setting. via /r/movies https://ift.tt/3yaPkmG
No comments:
Post a Comment