Ari Aster, the director who set out to make horror films and keeps making something else

Ari Aster

Photo: Gabriel Hutchinson / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 15, 1986 Princeton, New Jersey, USA
Occupation	Film Director
Known for	Hereditary, Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid
Awards	Cannes Film Festival · Chicago Film Critics Association · Fangoria Chainsaw

The press has filed Ari Aster under horror since Hereditary opened in 2018 and made audiences leave theaters pale and unsettled. He has spent every film since quietly dismantling the classification. Each new project pushes further from genre mechanics — into surrealist comedy, into political satire, into territories that defy single-word description. The label sticks because the films unsettle. But what unsettles them is not supernatural, and has never really been.

He grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, raised partly in England and New Jersey before his family settled in the desert southwest. His parents were a poet and a jazz musician — the kind of household where storytelling and form were taken seriously. He was overweight, had a stutter, got expelled from his high school, and channeled the resulting isolation into six feature-length screenplays written before he turned eighteen. None of them were horror. He studied film at the College of Santa Fe, then earned an MFA in directing from the American Film Institute Conservatory in Los Angeles. The AFI thesis short, The Strange Thing About the Johnsons (2011), was a taboo-shattering work about domestic abuse that spread online with the speed of something that had no category to land in. People did not know whether to praise it or be disturbed by it. That ambiguity was the point.

Hereditary (2018) arrived as a genuine disruption. The film used the vocabulary of supernatural horror — demonic cults, occult rituals, the full arsenal — but what it was actually doing was staging the disintegration of a family under accumulated grief, specifically grief for a woman who was as destructive alive as she turned out to be dead. Toni Collette‘s performance as Annie Graham became one of those central pillars of contemporary cinema that rarely win the awards they deserve; her breakdown in the car, her attic confrontation with her husband, are scenes made of recognizable human anguish, not theatrical fear. The film earned $90 million on a modest budget, and A24 became inseparable from Aster’s career.

Midsommar (2019) was harder to file. A group of American graduate students travel to Sweden for a midsummer festival that reveals itself, progressively, as a ritual-sacrifice cult. Reading it as horror misses what Aster was actually following: the emotional arc of Dani, played by Florence Pugh, a woman whose grief over her family’s death has left her stranded in a relationship that cannot hold her. The cult provides what the relationship never did — complete absorption, collective feeling, total belonging. By the film’s final image, Dani’s expression is not horror. It is something harder to name. The film made $48 million worldwide.

Beau Is Afraid (2023) was the break that revealed everything. Three hours long, the film follows a paranoid, passive, middle-aged man named Beau — played by Joaquin Phoenix — through a journey toward his mother that is structured as a nightmare comedy, a surrealist odyssey of maternal dread and Oedipal paralysis. A24 lost more than $35 million on it. Critics divided sharply. Aster said he was disappointed by the response — not defensively, but with the specific frustration of someone who buried things in the work that no one got around to discussing. He later acknowledged the final hour could be tightened. None of this changed his reading of what the film was trying to do.

Eddington (2025) went to Cannes in Official Competition and arrived in theaters that July. Set in a small New Mexico town in May 2020 — during the pandemic, during George Floyd’s murder, during the fractured political moment that followed — the film starred Phoenix again as a sheriff in conflict with a mayor played by Pedro Pascal, with Emma Stone in a central role. It received seven minutes of standing ovation at the premiere. Critics disagreed about whether the political satire worked; domestic box office was modest.

What links these films — besides A24 and the press’s insistence on the horror label — is grief as the engine of structural violence. In Aster’s cinema, grief does not produce sadness. It produces systems: cults, mothers, political movements, the whole apparatus through which human beings seek to absorb the unbearable and redirect it outward. He cites Ingmar Bergman and Roman Polanski as influences and means it as description, not aspiration. The darkness in his films is not decorative. It is the load-bearing element.

The next project, Scapegoat, pairs him with Scarlett Johansson and A24, with production scheduled for November 2026. Before that, Aster has confirmed a return to explicitly horror-adjacent territory — the first time since Midsommar that the word might fit. Whether it will remain fitting by the time the film is finished is the question that defines where he is in his career: a filmmaker still arguing, in the language of genre, about the things genre does not usually touch.