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Birth of a Griefsmith
Born in New York City to a poet mother (Bobbi Lurie) and jazz drummer father (name unknown), Ari Aster was surrounded by sound and language before even being delivered. Jewish, intense, and emotionally observant from a young age, Aster walked a tightrope anchored between creativity and quiet alienation. He would later describe his early life as filled with fear as well as fascination. -
Theater Trauma
A 4-year-old Aster’s first theater experience (Dick Tracy) ends in a panic attack. A scene involving a Tommy gun sends him running screaming from the theater, his mother chasing him through NYC streets. This moment seared into him the visceral power of cinema and ignited an obsession with fear. -
England to Enchantment
The Asters pack up and move to Chester, England briefly before settling in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where young Ari spends most of his childhood. He later recalls feeling “a sense of separation” from the world around him. Watching more than living. That detachment, he says, was a cocoon where his imagination flourished. -
VHS Violence
Video stores become Aster’s church. While other kids are rewinding Space Jam, Ari is devouring Don’t Look Now, Audition, and other subversive titles. Horror becomes less a genre and more of a code or roadmap. A refuge. It doesn’t scare him anymore. Instead, it inspires him. -
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Honing the Horror
As a teenager in Santa Fe, Aster develops what he calls an “addiction” to horror. He rents every horror film in the local video stores 'til there's nothing left. During this time, he also writes SIX feature-length screenplays before ever even picking up a camera. -
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Terrorism & Torture Porn
As a young adult, Aster watches the horror genre shift in realtime. In the wake of 9/11, a wave of ultra-violent films (Saw, Hostel, The Devil’s Rejects) dubbed "torture porn" take over theaters. This is horror without metaphor or nuance. Aster internalizes the shift, perhaps realizing that true horror is being trapped in a system without mercy. -
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Quiet Critic
While pursuing his BFA at Santa Fe University of Art and Design, Aster also moonlights as a film critic for a local alt-weekly. Known for his brutally honest reviews and disturbingly articulate essays, his professors both praise and fear his clarity. He graduates with honors but perhaps even more importantly, with a sense of purpose. -
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Crucible of the Craft
Aster is accepted into the American Film Institute Conservatory in LA. He stands out immediately. His thesis pitch, The Strange Thing About the Johnsons, makes faculty (and anyone else unlucky enough to view it) profoundly uneasy. He’s intense, obsessive, and one of the only students who is told, “You may not work again after this, but you have to make this film.” -
The Strange Thing About The Johnsons
Premiering at Slamdance, this taboo-shattering short about incest within a wealthy Black family causes walkouts during its premiere, and stunned silence afterward. It later leaks online and becomes a viral sensation. Aster becomes infamous overnight within the horror community. No one can decide if the guy is a genius or a sadist. He takes it as a compliment. -
Beau
A sadly overlooked entry in the Aster filmography, the original Beau short is Ari's anxiety distilled into 6 minutes. Little to no dialogue is uttered by frequent early collaborator/film school buddy Billy Mayo as a nervous man who unravels after losing his keys on the way to see his mother.
Beau is the spiritual ancestor to Beau Is Afraid. In fact, specific images (locked doors, tracking shots through desolate hallways, crazed backtracking) are directly echoed in the 2023 film. -
Vile Goes Viral
The year The Strange Thing About the Johnsons leaks online, YouTube and Reddit begin exploding with indie shorts. Aster’s film spreads like wildfire and many viewers refuse to believe it’s real. It becomes a case study in “forbidden cinema.” Studios notice. For that matter, so do trauma therapists. -
Munchausen
Aster releases Munchausen. It is a lush, wordless short film about a mother who poisons her son to prevent him from leaving for college. Styled like a living Norman Rockwell painting but dripping in psychological horror, it becomes a cult favorite online. Aster calls it the bridge between Johnsons and Hereditary. Thematically, it also plays as a sort of filmography foreshadowing for Beau Is Afraid. -
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"It's not just horror, bro, it's like, 'elevated horror.'"
Films like Robert Eggers' The Witch, David Robert Mitchell's It Follows, and Jordan Peele's Get Out redefine the horror space. A24 stabs its flag into Hollywood as the studio for “arthouse dread.” Critics coin the term “elevated horror” to describe this new wave, though Aster himself finds the term pretentious. He says, “If it’s good, it’s good. You don’t need to dress it up.” -
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Haute Horror
The Shape of Water wins Best Picture. Get Out wins Best Original Screenplay. The Academy is no longer afraid of things that go bump in the night! Ari Aster watches it all happen while prepping Midsommar, a movie he fears might be “too weird” to survive in the new climate. He is very wrong. -
Hereditary
Released June 8, Hereditary is Aster’s feature film debut. It’s a domestic nightmare about grief, guilt, inherited doom and the wrong side of Paganism. Toni Collette gives an unforgettable performance. Critics compare the film to The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby. The box office explodes and Ari Aster becomes a household name in horror. -
Birthed From A Breakup
While prepping Midsommar, Aster goes through a devastating breakup. Rather than mourn silently, he channels the grief into a script. He told VICE, “I wanted to make a perverse break-up movie." The film becomes a form of therapy and revenge. Critics called it harrowing. His ex has never commented. -
Midsommar
A scathinngly bleak break-up movie disguised as brightly sunlit horror, Midsommar releases to critical acclaim. Aster’s fear of relationships, codependency and groupthink bleeds into every frame. The score is gorgeous. Florence Pugh's career ascends. A24 lets Aster go full bore with this entry in his canon. While many fans refer to it as "The Wicker Man on shrooms,” Aster simply calls it “a fairy tale.” -
Pandemic Panic en Panorama
COVID-19 shuts down global cinema. Aster’s third feature (Beau Is Afraid) is paused. He uses the time to rewrite, reimagine, and ruminate. In a rare interview, he says, “Isolation breeds reflection and madness. Maybe that’s good for me.” -
The A In A24
After Midsommar, A24 inks a long-term deal with Ari Aster and producer Lars Knudsen to develop some original content under their new company, Square Peg. Aster now has full creative freedom. Thus, he returns to adapting his previous short film, Beau into a 4-hour nightmare with the working title Disappointment Blvd. which is later renamed Beau Is Afraid. -
The Grief Genre
By the time Beau Is Afraid hits theaters, film critics are calling Aster part of “The Grief Generation” of auteurs alongside Eggers, Garland, and Peele. He disagrees. “I’m not working through grief,” he says, “I’m painting with it.” -
Beau Is Afraid
A tragicomic epic starring Joaquin Phoenix as a nebbish man wandering a horrifying landscape of guilt and overbearing mommy issues, Beau Is Afraid drops in theaters everywhere. Critics and audiences are split, with some calling it brilliant and others finding it to be an overwhelming $35 million pet project full of negative Jewish Mother stereotypes. Aster comments, “It’s the film I’ve been dreaming about for 10 years," and "I wanted it to feel like an assault on the audience." -
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Future Fanfare
Aster confirms he’s been working on a new film described only as “a horror-comedy set in Hollywood that will piss a lot of people off.” He says it’s about “how performance culture and grief intersect.” Translation? We are not prepared. -
Eddington
A black comedy Western (yet unreleased to the general public as of this entry) Eddington premieres in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Set in an isolated border town during the COVID-19 pandemic, the film is his first true ensemble piece, reportedly blending "gothic Americana" with spiritual dread. Critics call it “the Coen Brothers on psilocybin.” Aster has commented, “I just wanted to write a ghost story with guns.” -
Filmmaker On The Edge
Aster is named “Filmmaker on the Edge” and honored by the Provincetown International Film Festival. He will accept the award and engage in conversation with John Waters onstage.