MARTIN: It’s of course a lot of backwards engineering, because we knew what we had at an early stage, but it’s also highly influenced by my psychology studies,and the writings of (among others) Snorri Sturluson, Emmanuel Swedenborg, Mikhail Bakhtin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Vilna Gaon, James George Frazer and Pierre Bourdieu.
We visualized what we wanted the film to be about, strange things we wanted to occur in the movie, and then we just try to find a way of tying all those creepy, disparate and strange ideas together more or less. I have three points. One is the Scandinavian components that we mentioned the midsummer celebration, the Ättestupan (the senicide cliff), the folk music and dance and explanations of modern traditions. Also of course, some Viking stuff like human sacrifice and runes, other astronomic and anthroposophic elements, like agriculture, rights and selective breeding.
Then we have what we call the “scary three,” which was our own thoughts about what frightens us. And then we have the perverted utopia, or the reified dystopia that makes evil out of good things, and something beautiful out of evil things. Losing one’s mind, becoming the beast, and the power of social phenomena, like peer pressure and emotional contagion and non-verbal communication. Good people doing bad things, more or less. The mythology then came out of necessity.