Faith-based entertainment is hot these days. If you don’t believe me, a low-budget movie about the devil attacking the traditional nuclear family via fatherhood made $30 million globally in its first week. The film, Longlegs, is not exactly The Chosen or Jesus Thirsts. Those were religious entertainment properties produced by people of faith, which have beaten expectations and done quite well for themselves. Safe to say, Longlegs isn’t coming soon to a parish movie night near you. But the Nicolas Cage horror vehicle shares with them a serious treatment of the supernatural.
Every Halloween, Christians discourse among themselves over whether or not they can (or should) celebrate a holiday that is so focused on the macabre. Catholics face no such quandary, seeing in All Hallow’s Eve an opportunity to meditate on our mortality and Christ’s victory over death. When looking for something that will fire up the sacramental imagination while prompting Catholics to think about the role of faith, three horror films of the past decade—The VVitch, Midsommar, and Longlegs—treat evil with particular seriousness. If you have a strong constitution and enjoy the horror genre, each manages to entertain, thrill, and exercise the intellect of the believer, inviting them to a serious consideration of good and evil. But be warned—spoilers lurk below.
Let’s start with Midsommar.

A film that has a character named Christian stand idly by while two people are thrown off of a cliff is definitely saying something. Ari Aster’s sunlit, bucolic folk horror film features a group of American anthropology PhD candidates who find themselves at the mercy of a murderous pagan commune in Sweden. It came out in 2019: pre-pandemic, pre-2020 riots, pre-Ukraine, pre-Gaza. However, the film’s dark themes of modern alienation and a nameless search for authenticity have only taken on more urgent resonance. Coming out alongside the rise of the cottagecore aesthetic and homesteading TikTok, the film suggests that people are responding to an uncertain present by turning back, grasping for something simple and timeless.
The moral relativist becomes a literally passive observer of the nihilistic crimes around him . . .
Midsommar is perhaps most instructive to Christian audiences as an allegory for the dangers of pursuing tradition as an end in itself. The hapless, thoroughly modern Christian and his companions are heirs of the industrialized, post-World War II West. When he says at the film’s beginning, “I don’t know what my thesis is!” he could be speaking for many people of his time. A putative scholar at best, Christian (in name only) spends the movie wandering aimlessly: He steals his friend’s PhD thesis topic on a whim, refuses to force the moment to its crisis in his dead-end relationship with his girlfriend Dani, and can muster only a bland cultural relativism in response to witnessing the brutal ritual murder of two septuagenarians. “We stick our elders in nursing homes,” he tells the horrified Dani, “I’m sure they find that disturbing.”
This shocking murder occurs at the hands of the Hårga, the aggressively cheerful Aryan cultists who inhabit and cultivate the movie’s dappled Scandinavian idyll. When their American guests arrive for their annual midsummer festival, eager for a cultural experience, they greet them with smiles and psychedelics. The human sacrifice takes place early in the film, however, and shakes the visitors out of their mellow detachment. One-by-one the outside visitors disappear, and those who remain realize they are trapped.
By the film’s end, Christian has been stripped of his clothes by his captors, and in a desperate escape attempt, simply runs outside frantically, directionless. Too late, the naked man in the garden attains knowledge of good and evil when he is cornered, drugged, and rendered paralyzed by the Hårga. If Christian’s name is allegorical, the point is really brought home at the end: At last, the moral relativist becomes a literally passive observer of the nihilistic crimes around him, finally falling victim to them himself, consumed by flames as part of the type of ritualistic human sacrifice he refused earlier to condemn.
But if Christian and his friends are stand-ins for the exhausted, relativistic meaninglessness of modernity, the film hardly presents the Hårga’s nature-worshiping paganism as a remedy. The community members spend much of the film gaslighting the female protagonist, Dani, and ruthlessly murdering their guests and each other as part of a grisly seasonal sacrifice.

It’s never made clear why or how the Hårga community came about. They present their origins as ancient, but the untruths they blithely tell Dani make the rest of their story about their primitive folkways suspect. The young people of the community, we are told, have a set-up somewhere on the property that lets them watch Austin Powers. And if the grisly summer festivities portrayed in the film are, as the Hårga insist, only performed every ninety years, the participants all seem weirdly well acquainted with them. Nevertheless, their sunny agrarianism stands in stark contrast to the dark, cluttered interiors that stand in for America in the film. The way the Hårga enchant their simple rural life with rituals, songs, games, and stories is undeniably arresting—both to the viewer and to their unsuspecting victims.
Have these people always been in this valley, observing the changing seasons with pagan festivals since time immemorial? Or is there something more reactionary going on in this isolated place? (“Stop mass immigration to Hälsingland” reads a highway banner the Americans drive past on their way to the commune; all the visitors of color are killed early on). Aster seems to be cautioning us against falling too hard for the siren song of returning to the land, and the dark potential that lies within a movement that puts too rosy a tint on the past.
The female protagonist, Dani, watches her boyfriend go up in flames with an enigmatic smile. It is a finale reminiscent of Robert Eggers’ The VVitch, another film that ends with a young woman’s ambiguous smile. Both have been interpreted as symbols of female liberation and empowerment, but the circumstances that bring them to this point are preceded by undeniable evil.