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15 Movies Like Midsommar — Folk Horror and Daylight Dread That Gets Under Your Skin
If Midsommar's sun-drenched horror ruined summer for you, these films deliver the same slow-burn dread, pagan rituals, and the horror of being a stranger in a closed community.
15 FILMS·April 2026·By MoviesPack
Section 1
What Makes Midsommar Special
Ari Aster made a horror film in broad daylight, and that's the least interesting thing about it. Midsommar is a breakup movie wearing a folk horror costume — Dani's grief and Pelle's community are two expressions of the same longing for belonging, and the horror is about which one actually delivers it. The Swedish countryside has never looked more gorgeous or more dangerous. Every horrible thing happens in full sunlight with flowers in everyone's hair. The formula that defines this genre: **isolated outsiders**, **a community with its own logic**, **horror that arrives slowly and then all at once**, and **dread that comes from beauty as much as darkness**. [Use our tool to explore more: Movies Like Midsommar](/similar/midsommar)
Section 2
The Ari Aster Double Bill
01
Hereditary
2018
★7.3IMDb
When a family's secretive grandmother dies, her daughter and grandchildren begin finding evidence that their grief was expected — planned for, even. Something older and more deliberate has been moving beneath the family for years. In both films, a grieving woman is guided through her pain by a community that has a specific use for her suffering — Pelle recruits Dani the same way Joanie recruits Annie, with real compassion, toward a pre-determined end. Where Midsommar is bright and expansive, Hereditary is claustrophobic and attic-dark. Toni Collette in the performance of her career.
Section 3
The Folk Horror Classics
02
The Wicker Man
1973
★7.5IMDb
A devout Christian police sergeant flies to a remote Scottish island to investigate a missing girl. The pagan community there is cheerful and warm — they sing, they dance, they have sex in the fields — and entirely unhelpful about the investigation. Robin Hardy's film is sunny for most of its runtime, which makes the ending one of cinema's most iconic and genuinely shocking. The key difference from Midsommar: Sergeant Howie is destroyed because he refuses to understand the community's logic. Dani is accepted because she finally does. Aster has cited it explicitly. Christopher Lee as Lord Summerisle is magnificent.
03
The Witch
2015
★6.9IMDb
A Puritan family exiled from their New England settlement builds a farm at the edge of a dark forest. Their crops fail. Their infant disappears. Their twins begin whispering to the goat. The father blames the oldest daughter. The horror is both the forest and the family's rigid faith — each creating the conditions for what the other does. The period-accurate dialogue, the final scene, and Anya Taylor-Joy mark this as a masterpiece of slow-burn dread. "Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?"
04
Apostle
2018
★6.4IMDb
A man travels to a remote Welsh island in 1905 to rescue his kidnapped sister from a religious cult — going undercover in their community while trying to find her before the upcoming harvest festival. The cult's logic is coherent and disturbing, the island's secrets unfold methodically, and when the violence comes — Gareth Evans (The Raid) directing — it's staggering. The body horror in the final act is some of the most effective in recent memory. Netflix's most underrated film.
05
Kill List
2011
★6.7IMDb
A hitman and his business partner take a job from a new client — three targets, good money. The first two jobs feel off in ways they can't quite name. The third is when they realize what kind of list they're working from. Folk horror disguised as a British crime thriller — the genre shift happens slowly and then all at once. The ending is one of the most disturbing in British horror, and it works because you had no idea it was coming.
Section 4
Slow-Burn Dread
06
Rosemary's Baby
1968
★8.0IMDb
A young woman moves into a gothic New York apartment building with her husband and gets pregnant. The neighbors are unusually attentive and helpful. Her husband agrees with everything they say. Her doctor dismisses her concerns. The horror is in the gaslighting — everyone telling her she's imagining things while her body is used for a purpose she hasn't consented to. Polanski's masterpiece is the ancestor of all paranoid folk horror — genuinely frightening and culturally prescient in ways that land differently now than they did in 1968.
07
The Lodge
2019
★6.6IMDb
A woman is left snowbound in an isolated cabin with her boyfriend's two children while he goes back to work. She was the sole survivor of a cult massacre. The children know this and have been doing research. When strange things start happening, she doesn't know if she can trust her own perception. Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz create unbearable psychological tension from a small cast and a single location. Riley Keough is exceptional.
08
Picnic at Hanging Rock
1975
★7.5IMDb
On Valentine's Day 1900, three schoolgirls and their teacher walk up an ancient volcanic formation during a picnic and vanish. No explanation is ever given. Peter Weir's film is horror built entirely from atmosphere — the heat shimmer, the rock, the white dresses, the silence after they're gone. The dread is the dread of the inexplicable: nature that doesn't care and refuses to explain itself.
Section 5
International Folk Horror
09
Tumbbad
2018
★8.3IMDb
A man discovers that his family's ancestral estate conceals something ancient and hungry, and develops a ritual for extracting gold from it without getting consumed himself. He perfects it over decades. His son learns it. The film builds dread through repetition — each generation returns to the same womb-shaped room, staying a little longer, until the creature in the dark isn't just frightening but familiar. Both Midsommar and Tumbbad are about communities that have maintained a ritual relationship with something monstrous for so long that the horror has become tradition. The visual design is unlike anything in Western horror. Required viewing.
10
Pyewacket
2017
★5.9IMDb
A teenager deep in grief over her father's death fights with her mother during a move to a remote house, and in the worst moment of the fight invokes a forest spirit against her. She immediately regrets it and tries to undo it. She cannot. A small film — limited locations, small cast — but the dread it builds from one terrible decision made in a moment of genuine pain is impressive. The folk horror here comes from indigenous curse mythology, and the film respects the rules of the world it builds.
Section 6
Art Horror That Shares Midsommar's Texture
11
Raw
2016
★7.0IMDb
A lifelong vegetarian arrives at vet school and is forced to eat raw rabbit kidney as part of a hazing ritual. Something wakes up. She develops a craving she can't explain and keeps satisfying it further than she should. Body horror more than folk horror, but the slow escalation from discomfort to horror, the community with its own initiation rituals, and Garance Marillier's extraordinary performance put it in the same conversation as Midsommar.
12
Suspiria
1977
★7.4IMDb
An American ballet student arrives at a prestigious German dance academy and starts noticing things that don't add up — students disappearing, the staff's strange behavior, sounds from the floors above at night. Dario Argento's giallo horror film. The Goblin score is one of cinema's great horror soundscapes — it plays during murders and quiet scenes alike, so you're never unaware of the threat. Like Midsommar, the horror is inseparable from beauty — every murder scene is art-directed like a painting, which is the exact wrong response to have and the one the film demands.
13
Annihilation
2018
★6.8IMDb
A team of scientists enters a quarantined coastal zone where nature has changed in beautiful and terrible ways — plants shaped like humans, creatures that have absorbed other creatures' voices, a perimeter that seems to be expanding. Nobody who goes in comes out the same. Science fiction by label, folk horror by mood: the lighthouse sequence is an encounter with something inhuman that has nonetheless learned to imitate you. Natalie Portman gives a contained, precise performance.
Section 7
Cult Logic Done Right
14
The Hunt
1977
★7.5IMDb
Three veterans of the Spanish Civil War reunite for a rabbit hunt in the same valley where they fought decades ago. The landscape is beautiful and parched. The old grievances are still there. As the heat rises through the day, what started as a social occasion reveals itself as something else. Not folk horror in the traditional sense but it shares the same structural DNA: beautiful pastoral landscape masking buried violence, and the sense that the ritual you thought was harmless is actually fatal.
15
The Ritual
2017
★6.3IMDb
Four British friends hike through the Scandinavian forests in memory of a friend who died, take a shortcut through the woods, and find a gutted animal hanging high in a tree. Something in the forest is following them. They find a cabin. Inside the cabin is something they cannot explain. Slicker and more conventional than Midsommar but earns its place in the conversation — the Scandinavian mythology, the forest as a living and hostile presence, and the creature design in the final act are excellent.
Section 8
Quick Comparison
| Movie | Setting | Pacing | Key Dread | |-------|---------|--------|-----------| | The Wicker Man | Scottish island | Medium | Pagan community logic | | The Witch | Colonial forest | Very slow | Religious paranoia, nature | | Hereditary | Suburban home | Slow to explosive | Grief weaponized | | Apostle | Welsh island | Medium | Cult mythology | | Tumbbad | Rural India | Slow burn | Ancestral greed | | Kill List | Rural Britain | Slow reveal | Criminal into ritual | | Picnic at Hanging Rock | Australian outback | Very slow | The inexplicable |
Section 9
Want More?
- [Full list: Movies Like Midsommar](/similar/midsommar) — 20+ folk horror and cult horror matches - [Best horror movies](/best/horror) — the all-time horror list - [Scary movies to watch](/mood/scary) — curated horror for your mood - [Ari Aster films](/pack/director/ari-aster) — every Aster film ranked
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