Ari Aster, Hollywood’s Master of Dread, Is Afraid of Everything.
The man behind some of the 21st century’s most unsettling films takes his own anxiety and puts it onscreen.
By Anna Peele
Aster, the 39-year-old auteur who made the relentlessly unsettling films “Hereditary,” “Midsommar” and “Beau Is Afraid,” has a long list of realities that his brain registers as mortifying or terrifying. “In a way, ‘Beau Is Afraid’ — that’s him,” says Lars Knudsen, laughing. He would know, as the person who has produced all of Aster’s films. “He’s afraid of everything,” Knudsen says. There’s having a body, obviously: Aster doesn’t like to wear shorts, lest people discover he has legs. He endured a span of childhood during which a paralyzing stutter made it nearly impossible for him to speak to anyone outside his family. He has hypochondria, worrying about a parade of ailments that one friend says he forgets as quickly as he became convinced he had them. Existence requires making decisions he finds incapacitating, like where to live or what to order at restaurants...
His career started with a very intimate source of unease: family. Aster’s first feature, “Hereditary,” was about the supernatural ability of parents to pass down trauma through generations; it also featured multiple decapitations. Despite earning what he has described as one of the lowest-ever scores in a Hollywood test screening (24 out of 100), the 2018 release made more than $80 million on a sub-$10 million budget. “It’s just been a declension since then,” Aster has said. The oeuvre that followed has been increasingly brilliant and, so far, decreasingly profitable.
“Midsommar” still did well. This 2019 breakup movie was commissioned by a Swedish production company, which financed it alongside A24, the company that has released all of Aster’s features. The remit from the Swedes was that the film had to be folk-horror — and that the American tourists had to die.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/16/magazine/ari-aster-eddington-film.html