10 Horror Movies Actors Wanted You To Hate

Ari Aster's folk horror brought city folk's biggest fear -- the countryside, apparently -- out into the daylight in 2019, managing to balance premium scares and dread with a broadly joyous and open setup.

Florence Pugh's grief-stricken Dani Ardor is the focal point for the film, as she joins a group of students escaping to the Swedish countryside for a summer festival, but her male companions -- including Jack Reynor, Will Poulter and William Jackson Harper -- are more often the centre of the Swedes' attention, as they pick them off one by one.

Dani's boyfriend Christian (Reynor) is arguably as much the villain of Midsommar as the citizens of the Hårga commune. Christian is a coward, more interested in distancing himself from Dani and partaking in the various physical and psychological experiences he encounters at the commune than helping her process the trauma of the death of her entire immediate family.

But he gets his comeuppance, being sexually, psychically and socially humiliated before he is sewn into a bear and burned. Ahh, yes, justice...

Reynor set out to unsettle audiences by providing a counterpoint to cinema's obsession with the sexual humiliation of women -- something that he thinks is "really gross", but which he was willing to bring to life, inhabiting something repugnant and seeing what it was like from the inside.