Quotes from Ari Aster

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The joy of making a genre film is that you have audiences in that place, and it's a perfect place to start because all it takes is finding ways to startle them out of that complacency and encourage a different kind of engagement.

'Hereditary' is unabashedly a horror film, whereas 'It Comes at Night' was a lot of things: it was a thriller; it was a postapocalyptic drama. It was a slow-building, very dark movie about relationships. 'Hereditary' is also about relationships, and I hope it functions as a vivid family drama, but it is also very much a horror film.

I got my MFA from AFI as a director in 2010. I've had time to make the shorts that I made previous to 'Hereditary' and to kind of build these movies in my head.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My first experience in a movie theater was Dick Tracy. There was a scene with a guy with a Tommy gun and a wall of fire behind him. I panicked, screamed, and jumped out of my seat. And I ran six New York city blocks, running into the street and almost got hit by a bunch of cars and had my mom chasing after a panic-stricken four-year-old.

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.'

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.