Florence Pugh and director Ari Aster’s Midsommar is probably one of the most beautifully haunting pieces of cinema that has ever been released. From the slow and methodical approach to horror through beauty to the anti-climatic ending, Midsommar truly followed in the footsteps of its forefather Hereditary.
With incredible shots of the nightmarish horrors that lay in the village of Hårga, the CGI was clearly on point in this film. The VFX team behind the incredible feat revealed that they only had a total of three weeks before the film was to be released in theaters!
The VFX Behind Florence Pugh’s Midsommar Only Took Three Weeks!
It is indeed something that the VFX team is proud of but not something that they would have done willingly. It was just three weeks before the theatrical release of Midsommar that the creative studio The-Artery was hired for some CGI and VFX scenes.
At the beginning of Midsommar, Hårga village seems just a beautiful and scenic place where flowers bloom around the year. The sudden shock that jolts the audience arrives when after the feast the elders perform the ceremony of Ättestupa in which they jump from the cliff to end their lives so that they may not have to rely on their children during old age (some claim this was a true ritual by the Norse people!).
When one of the elder folk jumps from the cliff, his legs break but he doesn’t die. When people mock him for his pain, the villagers take a sledgehammer and smash his head multiple times. This scene was enough to make the audience sit upright in their seats and give that familiar Ari Aster feeling. What’s more harrowing is that the VFX team revealed that in the scene where the elder’s head gets smashed in, they only had three weeks to create the CGI gore stuff!
Talking about the gore elements of the film alongside the Ättestupa scene, the founder of The-Artery, Vico Sharabani had quite some interesting tales to tell about the making of Florence Pugh and Ari Aster’s Midsommar.
How That Scene In Midsommar Was Created Digitally
As stated above, the caving-in head scene was the jolt that audiences felt while watching the 2019 film. To bring that sense of tension and gore, director Ari Aster wanted people to see that gore and wake them up from their sleep.
In a 2019 interview with Vulture, Vico Sharabani, the founder of The-Artery talked about how his VFX team managed to come up with that stuff on time. The founder also revealed that although these scenes took a little bit more time, The-Artery was hired just three weeks before Midsommar‘s theatrical release.
Having a tight noose around the film’s CGI, the team at The-Artery gave it their all and the result that came was simply beautiful (yet gory).
“For ‘Midsommar’, it was a huge challenge to design and craft a CG treatment that would depict the physical devastation suffered by a pair of sacrificial offerings. We were brought on with a little less than three weeks before the theatrical release deadline.”
He further continued,
“We created 30 complicated CG shots — skulls being smashed by sledgehammers, faces and limbs, torsos shattering against rocks after being thrown from cliffs above, and blood treatments. All amazingly complex treatments within an incredibly short window of time.”
In the end, all the efforts and hard work paid off as Florence Pugh and the film received quite fame and love from all over the world. Midsommar earned a rating of 7.1/10 on IMDB and a whopping 83% on Rotten Tomatoes and continues to be one of the most well-liked horror films of all time.
Ari Aster’s 2019 film is currently available to stream on Max in the U.S.
