“[…] Not all horror stories work that way. In some, the protagonist does not escape from or kill the beast, but nor is she simply killed in turn. In these stories, the protagonist enters into a state of communion with the very horror that has spent the rest of the movie threatening her life and her sanity. The process may be voluntary or not. The embrace of the evil may be gleeful or reluctant, and the outcome may be triumphant or tragic. But in the end, the dangerous, deranging, demonic forces at work are greeted not as destroyers, but as liberators, freeing the human protagonist from his human concerns once and for all, the life he once led forgotten in favor of a supernatural, superhuman new state of existence.

This is transcendental horror: stories that climax with the protagonist entering a state of ecstatic or enlightened union with the source of the horror they’ve experienced. […]  Sometimes a touch of transcendental horror is all that’s required to elevate a film’s climax from a mere “down ending” into something more mysterious and harder to shake. Because what the narrative offers us is not all that different from what stories of martyrdom, or tales of witchcraft and devil worship — martyrdom’s dark mirror image — offer believers, from antiquity to the present day. For martyrs and saints, their horrifying ordeals brought them closer to God; for witches and Templars, who in the fevered imaginations of their detractors were said to have literally kissed the Devil’s ass, their self-abasement before Satan was the prerequisite for power. We want to believe that there is virtue in suffering, that pain and has some kind of up side, that whether alive or dead we can reap some kind of benefit from pain, humiliation, torment, torture. More than anything else, that is what films like The Lighthouse and Midsommar offer, in their own dark way. Ephraim and Dani are made to endure the tortures of the damned — their spirits battered and abused, their connections to life outside the sphere of suffering severed, their brains tampered with to a hallucinogenic degree. Yet on the other side of all this, they see things other humans can’t, and they achieve a power the normal world cannot offer them or abide at all. If you were within reach of something that made every awful thing you’ve been through worthwhile, wouldn’t you reach out and touch it? To paraphrase The Witch, wouldst thou like to live, or die, deliciously?”

— Sean T. Collins, The ecstasy of the agony: A quick guide to transcendental horror

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