Ari Aster

Ari Aster (born July 15, 1986) is an American filmmaker. Stylistically, his films are notable for combining horror and dark humor, and for their unsettling and unsparing depictions of graphic violence. He is best known for his feature-length films produced by A24, namely Hereditary (2018), Midsommar (2019), and Beau Is Afraid (2023). Early life Aster was born into a Jewish family in New York City on July 15, 1986, the son of a poet mother and musician father. He has a younger brother. He recalled seeing his first film, Dick Tracy (1990), when he was four years old. The film featured a scene where Warren Beatty's protagonist fired a tommy gun in front of a wall of fire, allegedly causing Aster to jump from his seat and run "six New York City blocks" while his mother tried to catch him. In his early childhood, Aster's family briefly moved to England, where his father opened a jazz nightclub in Chester. The family returned to the U.S. and settled in Albuquerque, New Mexico when he was 10 years old, where he would spend the remainder of his childhood. Aster originally had childhood aspirations of becoming an author and became interested in filmmaking through screenwriting; though he would not begin making physical films until college, Ari had written six feature screenplays before graduating from high school. As a child, Aster became obsessed with horror films, frequently renting them from local video stores. He later said, "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. I found myself just writing screenplays." In 2004, he enrolled at the College of Santa Fe to study film, where he also was a writer for the Weekly Alibi, a New Mexico-based arts magazine. After graduating in 2008, he was accepted into the 2010 class of fellows at the AFI Conservatory graduate program, where he earned an MFA with a focus in directing. Career Aster's debut work was the short film Tale of Two Tims, which he wrote at College of Santa Fe and submitted to the American Film Institute. This earned him a fellowship into the graduate directing program at the AFI Conservatory. He followed this up with several AFI cycle films, along with comedic shorts made with industry friends such as TDF Really Works (2011).