September 03, 2019

The Inner Logic of Neo-Paganism in Sweden Why All Porno Films Get Remade as Horror Movies

September 03, 2019/ E. Michael Jones

Midsommar is an overly long, ultimately incoherent American horror film set in Sweden. It is the fruit of cross-cultural collaboration. Ari Aster, the film’s director, is a Jew from New York City who was born in 1986 and grew up fascinated with horror movies. Aster felt the film was personally cathartic because it allowed him to combine fascination with the horror genre with the experience of breaking up with his girlfriend, which felt “apocalyptic, like the world is ending.” So, from Aster’s perspective, Midsommar is “a perverse wish fulfillment fantasy,” in which sex leads to horror. Aster is, however, quick to add: “Nobody in the movie is a surrogate for my ex-girlfriend. It’s not like this is what I want to do to my ex, but there is a feeling of you want to set fire to that part of yourself and that part of your life and move on clean because it’s so painful.”

May 16, 2004

The Once and Future Heresy

May 16, 2004/ Thomas J. Herron

Gershon Gorenberg’s study of the eschaton immanentizers alive and well in Israel today starts by introducing us to Melody, the almost red heifer, who was born there a few years ago. The reason this cow became front page news in that country is that if she were completely red, at age three, she could have been slaughtered and used for ritual purification purposes for priests at Jerusalem’s Jewish Temple, according to the prescriptions of Numbers 19. As you probably know there hasn’t been a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem since 70 A.D., when the Romans, under Titus, burnt down the one built by Herod. The territory atop Mt. Moriah is currently occupied by a holy Muslim site, the al-Asqa mosque. However, there is a sizeable group of people who view the events of the 20th century as prologue to the construction of the third Jewish Temple on that site; not all of these people are in Israel and, as this book indicates, most of them aren’t Jewish.