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Ari Aster: 5 things to know about the new master of horror
Actors Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal take the lead roles in American director Ari Aster’s new film Eddington. The horror western has just been released in theatres. Numéro looks back at five obsessions of the new king of horror. Terrifying screams, horrific scenes, and sacrificial rites are part of the agenda of his latest features Beau is Afraid (2023) and Midsommar (2020).
By Alexis Thibault.
Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal at the heart of the horror western Eddington
At 39, Ari Aster gave one of the lead roles in his new feature to Joaquin Phoenix, who is twelve years his senior. The western film Eddington is out now and fans of macabre atmospheres, nerve-wracking static shots, and tormented characters are already thrilled. The plot is simple: “In May of 2020, a standoff between a small-town sheriff and mayor sparks a powder keg as neighbor is pitted against neighbor in Eddington, New Mexico…”
As the son of a musician and a poet, Ari Aster has been thrilled cinephiles since Hereditary, his 2018 film which, retrospectively, is now appreciated at its fair value, even if its quality remains a topic of debate among the most demanding viewers. A provocative and unsettling spectacle for some, a parodic genre film for others… Everyone acknowledges the boldness of the New York filmmaker nonetheless. The former graduate of the American Film Institute offers a different vision of horror, transforming the tropes of B-movies into works of brutal and realistic atrocity, staging disgusting, yet plausible scenes.
Ari Aster’s new film Eddington is currently in cinemas. The cast includes Emma Stone, Austin Butler and Pedro Pascal. Discover five things you need to know about the new master of horror.
Ari Aster enjoys confronting generations
Teenagers are recurring characters because of their naivety and reckless bravado. In particular in slasher movies, a horror genre in which a psychopath hunts down a group of clueless teens. Yet, Ari Aster prefers to pit generations against one another in his films. A grieving mother faces her bewildered teenage son, or naive young tourists come up against a frail old man in the midst of a sacrificial ritual.
More than just a fascination with generational divides, the filmmaker methodically turns bodies and their scars into horrific elements. This graphic violence is made all the more effective through Ari Aster’s command of movement. The latter masterfully inserts static shots in which his characters remain eerily still amid numerous long takes.
The horror effect of motionless monsters on screen is intensified, petrifying the viewer, who cannot look away from this lingering object of terror. As for the victims, their inertia is carefully orchestrated by the director and heightens both their helplessness and the viewer’s anxiety.
A filmmaker fascinated by screams and mutilations
Ari Aster has a knack for making his viewers uncomfortable. He is visibly fascinated by bodies marked by deformities, congenital anomalies of tissues or organs, which he exaggerates to the extreme. He brings in disfigured or disabled characters, cranking up screams of terror to their highest pitch, while gaping mouths, stretched to the verge of tear, turn faces into demonic figures.
Ari Aster actually portrays a strange, pessimistic world. His universe is haunted by the Freudian concept of the unheimliche – the “uncanny”. Yet, beneath the surface of incestuous relationships, his disabled and disfigured characters often evoke mythological, even metaphorical figures… Creatures that are about to transform.
Ari Aster’s personal life inspire his films
Like many of his peers, Ari Aster underlines the role of own life as inspiration for his screenwriting. Hereditary (2018) is a clear extension of his short film The Strange Thing About the Johnsons (2011). The film plunges us in the heart of a cursed family after the passing of the matriarch. Here, the director recounts a series of ordeals experienced by his own family over a span of three years… Traumas that fed into the genesis of this cathartic, almost testamentary feature. A few years later, Ari Aster directed Midsommar (2020), a therapeutic work that mirrors his own breakup, which had taken place just months earlier.
Ari Aster infuses his films with ancient runes and symbols
For years, Ragnar Persson has used black markers to fuse heavy metal imagery in his bucolic landscapes. But in 2019, the Swedish artist created prophetic murals for Ari Aster. These naive, blood-soaked works recall medieval tarot illustrations and the mystical art of cartomancy. The drawings of pagan rituals were then turned into wallpaper. Incorporated directly into Midsommar (2019), they secretly foreshadow the film’s plot for the most attentive viewers. In Hereditary, the director had already scattered details throughout the film, culminating in an explicit satanic ritual.
Ari Aster cites Ingmar Bergman as one of his guiding influences. And he has clearly inherited the late director’s taste for iconography and symbols of mourning and death – found in The Seventh Seal or Cries and Whispers. In Midsommar, Ari Aster even went so far as to invent an entire runic alphabet as part of a fictional language of his film.
Ari Aster long resisted tackling the horror genre
A screenwriter for his own features, Ari Aster rejects the conventions of commercial horror movies and doesn’t consider himself as a “horror filmmaker.” “I’d been resisting writing a horror film for a long time because the genre wasn’t really appealing to me,” he shared in an interview with The Verge. “But eventually, I raided the horror section of every store I could find…”
This ambivalence is linked to his love of genre cinema. Witchcraft aficionado Robert Eggers (The Witch), the scandalous Nagisa Oshima (Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence) are his inspirations. Not to mention screenwriters Lars von Trier, Gaspar Noé, or Ingmar Bergman. Ari Aster shuns jump scares and oscillates between claustrophobic darkness and nightmares filmed in broad daylight, like in Midsommar, his macabre 2019 film featuring fantastic actress Florence Pugh.
Eddington (2025) by Ari Aster, starring Emma Stone, Austin Butler, and Pedro Pascal, is out in theaters.
