Did the Midsommar Leads Debut a Year Earlier in Hereditary?

Ari Aster’s heart-of-summer horror film Midsommar has been available on digital and On Demand for a few days and fans have already been spotting all sorts of interesting details and potential Easter Eggs in the film. But it’s not just the details of Midsommar that have fans of the director asking some serious questions. Aster’s previous film, Hereditary, is also prompting some questions, including whether the main characters of Midsommar really were first introduced in that film.

On Twitter, Brad Hanson posted a still from Hereditary showing Annie Graham (Toni Collette) exiting an art supply store while a young couple walk past her towards the store. It’s nothing special, but when you’ve seen Midsommar and go back and look at that moment in Hereditary, you can’t help but notice a similarity between that young couple and Midsommar‘s Dani and Christian. You can check out Hanson’s tweet below.

Hanson followed it up with a still from Midsommar showing a rear shot of Dani (Florence Pugh) and Christian (Jack Raynor) that really does look an awful lot like the couple from Hereditary.

Now, this could absolutely be a coincidence. Hereditary was released a year before Midsommar and the people walking into the store could just be a random set of extras filling in that part of the scene. That said, Aster packs a lot of detail into his work so it’s possible that the couple we see in passing in Hereditary is Dani and Christian — probably not the same actors, but prototypes of the characters. If that’s the case, then this could be a very subtle connection between the two films, establishing that Hereditary and Midsommar take place within the same universe.

Even if the moment ends up being some sort of simple coincidence, fans are already accepting the notion that Dani and Christian first appeared in Hereditary. They’re also accepting the recent discoveries of creepy faces in the background of scenes in Midsommar that are being interpreted by many fans as Dani’s grief literally always being part of the background. Earlier this week, a fan on Twitter noticed a face in the trees with what appeared to be a tube of foliage coming from its mouth in the background of one of the film’s scenes. That background detail is hauntingly similar to the trauma that Dani experiences after her sister dies by suicide in a very visually similar way — by connecting a tube from her car’s exhaust to her mouth.

Fans have also noted other creepy faces in the film, such as a face in the snow outside Dani’s window during a scene in the film’s first act, a face or figure in the rocks during the “fall” scene, and a face in the forest line during the wailing and singing scene at the beginning of the film.

Midsommar is now available on Digital and On Demand. It will be released on Blu-ray and DVD on October 8th.

What do you think? Are Hereditary and Midsommar connected? Let us know in the comments below.