Ari Aster

Aster's debut film was the short film Tale of Two Tims , which he wrote at College of Santa Fe and submitted to American Film Institute. This garnered him a fellowship into the graduate directing program at the AFI Conservatory. Aster followed up with several AFI cycle films, along with comedic shorts made with industry friends like TDF Really Works in 2011. Aster then followed up with a breakout short film The Strange Thing About the Johnsons, which stars Billy Mayo, Brandon Greenhouse and Angela Bullock as members of a suburban family in which the father is trapped in an abusive incestuous relationship with his son.

The Strange Thing About the Johnsons was Aster's thesis film while studying at the American Film Institute's graduate school in California,[11] and later screened at film festivals in 2011, premiering at the Slamdance Film Festival in Utah on January 22, before it leaked online in November and went viral. Ivan Kander of the website Short of the Week wrote that the comments on YouTube had "everything from effusive acclaim to disgusted vitriol. In terms of the internet, that means it's a hit."[12] He worked on the production with fellow students from the school. The story was first conceived while discussing taboos with his friends, including Greenhouse, before Aster's first year at AFI.[10]

Between 2011 and 2018, Aster wrote and directed five more short films, often teaming with his AFI Conservatory friends Alejandro de Leon and Pawel Pogorzelski among others.

Aster made his feature film directorial debut with the horror-drama film Hereditary, which premiered on January 21, 2018, in the Midnight section at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival,[13] and was theatrically released in the United States on June 8, 2018.[14] It stars Toni Collette, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro and Gabriel Byrne as a family haunted by a mysterious presence after the death of their secretive grandmother.

Hereditary was acclaimed by critics, with Collette's performance receiving particular praise, and was a commercial success, making over $80 million on a $10 million budget to become A24's highest-grossing film worldwide.[15] Writing for Rolling Stone, Peter Travers called it the scariest film of 2018.[16]

Aster's next production, also with A24, was the folk horror film Midsommar, starring Florence Pugh.[17] It follows a group of friends who travel to Sweden for a festival that occurs once every 90 years and find themselves in the clutches of a pagan cult. Midsommar was theatrically released in the United States on July 3, 2019, by A24 and in Sweden on July 10, 2019, by Nordisk Film. The film received positive reviews from critics, with many praising Aster's direction and Pugh's performance.[18][19] Aster's original 171-minute cut of the film, which A24 asked Aster to trim down for a wide theatrical release, had its world premiere at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City as part of its Scary Movies XII lineup on August 20, 2019.[20] For his work on the film, Aster received a nomination for Best Screenplay at the 29th Gotham Independent Film Awards.[21]

Ari Aster and producer Lars Knudsen announced in June 2019 the launch of their new production company, Square Peg.[22]

In June 2020, Aster said his next film would be a four-hour-long "nightmare comedy".[23] In February 2021, A24 announced Beau Is Afraid as its third partnership with Aster. The film stars Joaquin Phoenix.[24] It was originally titled Disappointment Blvd.[25] It was released in theaters on April 21, 2023.[25]

In 2021, Aster signed a first-look TV deal with the studio A24.[26] In August 2022, it was announced that Aster would reteam with A24 to produce Kristoffer Borgli's second feature film Dream Scenario, with Nicolas Cage attached to star, through Square Peg,[27] which in 2023 expanded its slate to include films by Kantemir Balagov, Guy Maddin, Don Hertzfeldt and Sebastián Silva, as well as television adaptions of J. G. Ballard's The Drowned World, Nick Drnaso's "Acting Class", and Junji Ito's Uzumaki,[28] the latter being an anime adaptation already in production for Adult Swim.