Top 33 Ari Aster Quotes

These are films that I really love, but I would say I’m not somebody who runs out to every horror film. I avoid most of them. I feel like a lot of them are made very cynically.

The nice thing about a horror movie is that people go in looking to be unsettled.

I know that I put a lot into ‘Hereditary’, and I’m proud of what it is. Beyond the fact that the film takes its time and asks for a certain amount of patience from the audience – and I hope it rewards that patience by the end – I know that I’m something of an aesthete. I care about aesthetics, and I love filmmaking.

The idea of witches has always scared me because of the idea that there are Machiavellian forces out there that conspire to hurt others. There are people who do not have your best interest at heart and are actively willing to do harm to you and actively sending energy in that direction.

Sometimes you want pain to be acknowledged and not whitewashed – or erased by some exceptionalist point of view.

A great horror film works as a communal experience more than almost anything else, except for maybe a comedy. That’s something that I’ve experienced, just taking this movie around and watching it with audiences.

I have more fun talking about other movies than talking about my own.

I know a lot of people who hate the ending of ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ and wish that it was left ambiguous.

I love Cronenberg so much, especially the films he was doing in the mid to late ’80s and early ’90s, like ‘Naked Lunch’ and ‘Dead Ringers’.

You get so lost in the making of a film, and you get so fixed on just, like, every tiny detail. If something doesn’t hit the bullseye in the way you wanted, you become obsessed with that, and you get so just lost in that maze of neurotic thinking.

In some ways, the audience becomes complacent when they go to a horror film. And so it’s fun to take that attitude and then to upend it.

I love Lars von Trier. ‘Dogville’ is my favourite movie of the last 20 years. ‘Nymphomaniac’ and ‘Melancholia’ aren’t quite as exciting as ‘The Kingdom’, ‘Breaking the Waves’, or ‘The Idiots’, but I’ll always love him for being him.

When I was 13 years old, I was obsessed with horror films. I even had, like, a binder that I filled with badly copied images from the Internet of, like, ‘Pinhead and Basket Case.’

Jewishness is a very big part of my identity. I am a proud Jew, I would say, who doesn’t practice very actively.

I really feel like the horror genre is capable of so much. Especially as an in-theater experience, something you watch with other people. It can do so much.

I can say that I put a lot of personal feelings into ‘Hereditary’, though I can also say that none of the characters in the film are surrogates for anybody in my family or for myself.

The way I work is, I always compose a shot list before I talk to anybody, including my DP. So I’ll spend a couple months basically creating the movie in my head, so I have a very solid film in my head, where I know every shot, and I know what the transitions between scenes are.

With ‘Hereditary’, I wanted to make a film about what bothers me about life.

I love the horror genre. I consider myself a genre filmmaker. I love genre, but I think there’s a certain amount of complacency that comes with watching a genre film; people know what the devices are. They know what the tropes are. They know the conventions.

Every single moment in ‘Hereditary’ is linked to a moment in the end for the payoff. I think it has the ability of captivating people the same way that ‘Manchester By the Sea’ did. It has that audience because it’s so wrapped in human drama.

I enjoy turning things on the audience. I really like working in genre because people come into the films with certain expectations. They know the tropes so well that, when you turn on those, it can be shocking because there’s a complacency that comes with watching those films.

The next film I’m making is a horror film, and I’m making it with A24. It’s a dark break-up movie that becomes a horror film, set in Sweden. That’s all I can really say now. It’s called ‘Midsommar.’ Everybody’s been spelling it wrong. It’s ‘midsummer’ in Swedish.

I found that the things I am afraid of most are things for which there are no obvious remedies. Like, what do you do with a fear of death? You either come to terms with it or you don’t, but there’s no solving it.

There’s been a lot of aesthetically rich horror films that have come out in the last several years. ‘The Babadook’ is this perfectly paced, beautiful film. ‘The Witch’ is a beautifully made film. ‘Get Out’ is so intelligently written. I feel like there’s so many great things happening right now.

I’m very fortunate in that my parents are artists. My mom is a brilliant poet… She still is a great visual artist. My dad is a jazz drummer… I’ve been very fortunate in that I’ve had parents who supported and encouraged me and haven’t really questioned what I’m doing or asked me to question it.

The beauty of the horror genre is that you can smuggle in these harder stories, and the genre comes with certain demands, but mostly you need to find the catharsis in whatever story you’re telling. What may be seen as a deterrent for audiences in one genre suddenly becomes a virtue in another genre.

A betrayal in a family is much more devastating than a betrayal among friends, or even lovers.

Most horror films are made very cynically, and they’re usually made by studios for an audience that they know is there, no matter what they put out. And there are always exceptions – every year, it seems we have a great one coming out.

For me, writing is a part of directing. It’s the first stage of directing.

I’m very impressed by films like’ Whiplash’ or what Fincher does, where you get all these different… Where you get all this coverage that’s perfectly linked up. I actually find coverage very confusing. But I love sequencing shots because I know exactly where I am.

‘Hereditary’ is unabashedly a horror film. In a lot of ways, it’s in dialogue with other horror films. But I do know that it was important for me that the film functioned first as a family drama. I know that I’m never affected by anything if I’m not invested in the people to whom the genre things are happening.

It’s easy for me to write a horror movie about real stuff because my mind is always going there anyway.

Filmmaking is so much about catharsis anyway. It’s therapeutic.