Alice in Midsommar: how the summer horror blockbuster draws from Victorian fantasy

“A Wizard of Oz for perverts” is how Hereditary director Ari Aster has described his second film—a tantalising description for this particular friend of Dorothy, and an apt one when you consider both the format of the film and the derangement Midsommar sounds out.

But the film, centring as it does on Dani, a young American woman accompanying her anthropologist boyfriend to a Nordic festival that turns steadily more sinister, also brings to mind Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In…