10 Horror Movie Moments More Important Than You Realised
7. The Opening Mural - Midsommar
Ari Aster's unforgettable horror film Midsommar opens with a fleeting glimpse of a gorgeous yet disturbing painted mural which contains a number of eerie, unsettling sights.
While viewers might initially assume that this is simply some garden variety Creepy S**t intended to throw them off-balance from the movie's opening seconds, it's actually a veiled breakdown of basically the film's entire plot.
The most distinctive visuals in the mural include Dani (Florence Pugh) and Christian (Jack Reynor) arguing, the Swedish cult's elders jumping off a cliff, Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren) as the Pied Piper who leads the movie's American tourists to their doom, Mark (Will Poulter) wearing a jester's outfit (as his corpse will wear later in the film), and the presence of five skeletons representing the five outsiders killed by the cultists.
The mural also offers far more metaphorical imagery for audiences to read into, but it's nevertheless fascinating that Aster included almost all of the movie's major plot beats upfront, even if their context wouldn't be made fully clear until film's end.