Director Ari Aster's debut horror film, Hereditary, was so scary that basically everyone involved wound up with some kind of lasting trauma. The entire audience at Sundance lost their shit when the film premiered last year and the film's actors say they have PTSD from shooting the thing. The movie even managed to make Etsy somehow terrifying.On Tuesday, A24 dropped the first trailer for Midsommar, Aster's new Hereditary follow-up, and the thing looks exactly as goddamn creepy as you'd expect.The trailer follows a group of young couples who visit an isolated Swedish town where the freakishly happy villagers invite them to take part in a mid-summer festival. Unfortunately, this isn't all flowers and maypoles or whatever—things quickly take a fucked-up, Wicker Man-style turn as the rituals "render their pastoral paradise increasingly unnerving," according to the official synopsis.Don't expect Midsommar to be a Hereditary retread, though. Aster is doing something distinctly different here. The lush, oversaturated nature visuals are about as different from Hereditary's dark and gloomy suburban environment as you can get. And there's nothing as immediately haunting in as the claustrophobic shots of people screaming and crying and burning alive from the Hereditary trailer. No creepy-ass children cut the head off any dead birds, either. Midsommar trades in that abject horror for a subtle slow-burning dread and it really, really works.
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Midsommar will hit theaters on August 9, just in time for you to find a nice Pagan cult to ring in the end of summer or whatever. Until then, give the trailer a watch above.