Ari Aster

Early life

Ari Aster was born to Jewish parents in Princeton, New Jersey on July 15, 1986. The family moved to New York City when Ari was about a week old. His mother was a poet and his father was a jazz musician. He has a younger brother. He saw Dick Tracy (1990) when he was four years old, later recalling that he jumped from his seat and ran "six New York City blocks" while his mother chased him after seeing the scene in which Warren Beatty's titular protagonist fired a machine gun in front of a wall of fire. He spent some of his childhood in England, where his father opened a jazz nightclub in Chester. The family returned to the U.S. when he was 10 years old and settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he spent the rest of his childhood. He described himself as a "fat kid with a stutter" who felt alienated and was kicked out of Santa Fe Preparatory School. He was obsessed with films, Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide, and Hastings Video Store.

Originally aspiring to become an author, Aster became interested in filmmaking through screenwriting, and wrote six feature-length screenplays during high school even though he would not begin actually making films until college. As a child, he became obsessed with horror films and frequently rented them from local video stores: "I just exhausted the horror section of every video store I could find. I didn't know how to assemble people who would cooperate on something like that [so] I found myself just writing screenplays." In 2004, he began studying film at the College of Santa Fe, where he made several short films and wrote for the local Weekly Alibi arts magazine. He graduated in 2008 and debuted as the writer and director of the short film Tale of Two Tims, which he submitted to the American Film Institute (AFI). This led to him being accepted into the 2010 class of the AFI Conservatory's graduate program, where he earned an MFA with a focus in directing.

Career

After graduating from the AFI Conservatory, Aster wrote and directed several more short films between 2011 and 2018, often teaming with his AFI Conservatory friends Alejandro de Leon and Pawel Pogorzelski. The most notable project was the short psychological horror film The Strange Thing About the Johnsons (2011), which follows the members of a suburban family in which the father finds himself trapped in an incestuous relationship with his abusive son. The film was Aster's thesis film while studying at the AFI Conservatory, and was later screened at film festivals; it premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival in Utah on January 22 before leaking online in November, where it went viral. Film website Short of the Week wrote that the comments on the film's YouTube page had "everything from effusive acclaim to disgusted vitriol [...] in terms of the internet, that means it's a hit". Aster worked on the film with fellow AFI students. He first conceived the story while discussing taboos with his friends, including the film's star Brandon Greenhouse, before starting his first year at AFI.

Aster made his feature-length directorial debut when he wrote and directed the supernatural horror film Hereditary (2018), which follows a family haunted by a mysterious presence after the death of their secretive grandmother. The film premiered in the Midnight section at that year's Sundance Film Festival, and was theatrically released in the United States on June 8. It was acclaimed by critics, with Toni Collette's performance receiving particular praise, and was a commercial success; it grossed over $90 million on a $10 million budget, becoming A24's highest-grossing film worldwide at the time of its release. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone named it the scariest film of 2018.

Aster next wrote and directed the folk horror film Midsommar (2019), which was also produced by A24. It follows a group of American university students who travel to Sweden for a festival that occurs once every 90 years and find themselves in the clutches of a cult claiming to practise paganism. Midsommar was theatrically released in the United States on July 3. The film received positive reviews from critics, with many praising Aster's direction and Florence Pugh's performance. Aster's original 171-minute cut of the film, which A24 asked him to trim down for a wide theatrical release, had its world premiere at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City as part of its Scary Movies XII lineup on August 20. For his work on the film, Aster received a nomination for Best Screenplay at the 29th Gotham Independent Film Awards.

Upcoming and unfinished projects

Aster and Hertzfeldt are collaborating on an animated feature film called Antarctica, described by Hertzfeldt as "big" and "very expensive".

Filmmaking style

While as violently bloody as many of his peers, Aster tends to focus on the horror of the unraveling of self. His films often explore unresolved grief, familial trauma, the loss of personal identity, and deep psychological deterioration. In Aster's films, vividly bright imagery and symbols of childhood are frequently juxtaposed with visceral, bloody violence. Beau Is Afraid, for example, featured numerous child-like animation sequences, Midsommar was set in the idyllic Swedish mountains, and Hereditary was filmed as if it was inside a dollhouse.

Filmography