Ari Aster Is Making a Three-Hour Cut of ‘Midsommar’ to Traumatize Us More
Credit to Author: River Donaghey| Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2019 16:24:32 +0000
Ari Aster may be the most exciting new horror director working right now, but the guy does not make movies that are exactly, uh, easy to sit through. Hereditary, Aster’s first movie, completely devastated audience goers when it premiered in 2018 and supposedly even gave one of the actors PTSD just from starring in it. His follow-up, Midsommar, may be full of sunlight and flowers, but it isn’t any less scary. It’s two and a half hours of tension slowly ratcheting up the dread until it hits its truly horrifying climax.
The thing is a devastating emotional rollercoaster that will wreck you by the end and you won’t be able to think about Maypoles or bears in cages the same way again. Apparently, Aster still doesn’t think we’re scared enough as it is, though—because the guy says he’s working on a director’s cut with a half-hour of new, terrifying footage, The Wrap reports.
On Thursday, Aster took part in a Reddit AMA, where he discussed his films, comedy writing, and, uh, Cheesecake Factory. But when one fan asked if Aster would ever consider making a director’s cut using the hour-plus of footage rumored to be left on the cutting room floor, Aster teased some big news: “Working on extended cut now,” he wrote. “Won’t be 1 hr 20 mins longer, but will be at least 30 mins longer.”
Aster said that his original Midsommar was nearly four hours long and rated NC-17 before A24 was able to bring it down to R, so it makes sense that there’s a whole lot of footage that didn’t make it in. In a new interview with GameSpot, Aster discussed one of his favorite cut scenes that will likely wind up in the new version:
“There [was] a very big argument between Dani and Christian in the middle. That was the only time that we see Dani fight back and argue with Christian, and that was a big debate in the edit room, about whether we keep that or lose that,” Aster told GameSpot. “If you told me that I would have cut that scene before we went into production, I would have told you that you were crazy.”
“I really love the scene that we cut,” he said. “It’s some of my favorite dialogue in the whole film, and in some ways it was as big of a decision to cut that as it would have been to cut the dinner table scene in Hereditary between Toni and Alex. It was that big of a cut. It was a very, very big day when we lost that from the film.”
There’s no word on when, exactly, Aster will release his new, potentially three-hour director’s cut, or what new footage we might see, but it’s terrifying just to imagine a version more traumatizing than the original. Get ready for a whole lot more skull smashing, everybody.
This article originally appeared on VICE US.