Ari Aster is a bit of a menace. I say that with love, but let’s be real—the man has spent the last several years making us watch things we’d rather unsee. Think back to that one scene in Hereditary. You know the one. The telephone pole. The sound of a mother’s grief that felt a little too visceral for a Tuesday night at the local AMC. Aster didn't just stumble into the spotlight; he kicked the door down and started rearranging the furniture of our collective nightmares.
He’s polarizing. People either think he’s a once-in-a-generation visionary or a pretentious provocateur who likes the sound of his own screams. There isn't much middle ground when it comes to Ari Aster. His films are long, they are deeply traumatizing, and they often treat the audience with a level of clinical coldness that makes you wonder if he’s actually a psychologist in a director’s chair.
The Anatomy of an Ari Aster Nightmare
Most horror movies rely on jump scares. You get a quiet build-up, a loud bang, and a guy in a mask. Aster doesn't care about that. He focuses on the "rot" of the human family. He takes something we find sacred—like the bond between a mother and child or a long-term relationship—and he lets it fester on screen for three hours.
In Midsommar, he did something that technically shouldn't work in horror: he filmed the whole thing in broad daylight. Usually, shadows are where the monsters hide. But Aster realized that there is nothing more terrifying than a horror you can see clearly. You can’t hide from the Swedish sun. You can’t hide from the fact that Florence Pugh’s Dani is being slowly assimilated into a cult because her boyfriend is a mediocre human being who can't handle her grief.
Grief as a Monster
If you look at his short films, like The Strange Thing About the Johnsons, you see the seeds of what he would eventually do with his features. He’s obsessed with taboo. Not just for the sake of being edgy, but because taboo represents the things we are most afraid to talk about. Grief isn't a ghost in an Aster movie. It’s the house itself.
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In Hereditary, the Paimon mythology is almost secondary. The real horror is the way Toni Collette’s Annie looks at her son. It’s the inherited trauma of a family that was doomed before the movie even started. Aster leans into the idea of determinism—the terrifying thought that you have no control over your life because your DNA or your family history has already written the script.
Why Beau Is Afraid Divided Everyone
Then came Beau Is Afraid. Talk about a swing. After two massive hits with A24, Aster got a blank check and used it to make a three-hour "nightmare comedy" about a man with extreme anxiety trying to visit his mom. Honestly? It’s a lot.
Some critics called it a masterpiece of surrealism. Others called it an endurance test. It’s basically a maximalist exploration of Freud’s worst nightmares. You’ve got Joaquin Phoenix running through a city that looks like a war zone, giant phallic monsters in attics, and a sequence involving a forest play that feels like a movie within a movie.
It’s where Ari Aster truly stopped caring about being "accessible." He leaned into the weirdness. If you didn't like it, that was kind of the point. He wanted you to feel Beau’s suffocating anxiety. To do that, the movie had to be overbearing. It had to be exhausting.
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The A24 Partnership and the New Wave of Horror
We can't talk about Aster without talking about A24. They’ve become the "cool kids" of the film world, and Aster is their star pupil. Alongside directors like Robert Eggers (The Witch) and Jordan Peele, Aster helped define the "elevated horror" era.
Now, "elevated horror" is a bit of a snobby term. Fans of the genre often hate it because it implies that regular slashers aren't "art." But whatever you call it, Aster changed the business model. He proved that you could take a mid-budget horror film, release it in the middle of summer, and make it a cultural event. People weren't just going to see Midsommar to be scared; they were going because they wanted to see the flower dress. They wanted to participate in the "trauma-core" aesthetic.
Realism vs. Surrealism
The trick to an Aster film is the production design. He works with Pawel Pogorzelski, his cinematographer from his AFI conservatory days. They build these massive, intricate sets—like the house in Hereditary or the village in Midsommar—just so they can control every single inch of the frame.
Every shot is intentional. If there’s a reflection in a window, it’s there for a reason. If a character is positioned in the corner of the screen, it’s to make you feel uneasy. It’s this meticulous attention to detail that separates him from the "point and shoot" horror directors.
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The Misconceptions About His Work
People often say Aster hates his characters. They say he puts them through "misery porn" just for the sake of it. I don't think that’s true. If you listen to his interviews, he talks about his characters with a lot of empathy. He just happens to believe that life is often tragic and that there aren't always happy endings.
Another misconception is that his movies are "slow burns." I’d argue they aren't slow; they’re just dense. There is a lot of information being thrown at you in the first twenty minutes of Hereditary. If you blink, you miss the cult symbols on the telephone poles or the weird Grandma-related foreshadowing in the background.
What’s Next for the Director?
Rumors are always swirling about his next project, Eddington. It’s supposedly a contemporary western noir. If it follows the pattern, it’ll probably feature Joaquin Phoenix again and involve some sort of psychological collapse in a small town.
Aster seems to be moving away from "pure" horror and into something harder to define. He’s becoming more like a dark version of the Coen brothers or a more modern Luis Buñuel. He’s interested in the absurdity of human existence.
Actionable Insights for Horror Fans and Creators
If you’re a fan trying to digest his work or a creator looking to learn from his style, here’s how to approach the world of Ari Aster:
- Watch the background. Aster loves "deep staging." In Hereditary, the cult members are often visible in the dark corners of the house long before they are officially revealed. Training your eye to look past the main actors changes the experience.
- Study the sound design. The "cluck" sound in Hereditary or the breathing in Midsommar is used to trigger physical reactions in the audience. If you're a filmmaker, notice how he uses silence as a weapon.
- Read the scripts. Aster’s screenplays are notoriously detailed. They read like novels. You can find many of them online, and they reveal how much of the "vibe" is written directly onto the page before a camera even rolls.
- Don't look for "the point." Sometimes the point is just the feeling. Aster often leaves things ambiguous because life doesn't always provide a neat Third Act explanation for why bad things happen.
Aster isn't for everyone. He’s probably not even for most people. But in an era of sequels and reboots, he’s one of the few directors with a blank check and a very dark imagination. Whether you love him or hate him, you can’t look away. And honestly, that’s exactly what he wants.