Quotes from Ari Aster

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 like to play with transgression and upending conventions, and I like the idea of rooting genre films in character.

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.

'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.

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

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.

My films typically veer towards the darker side, and I enjoy turning things on the audience. I really enjoy working in genre because people come into the film with certain expectations, and they know the tropes so well that when you turn on those, it can be really shocking. There's a complaisance that comes with watching those films.

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

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'.

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

If people felt that they were misled with 'It Comes at Night,' they should know that the marketing here is deliberately misleading you in an honest way, in that we're not hiding what isn't there: we're hiding what is there.

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

I graduated from the American Film Institute in 2010, where I studied as a director, and came out with a few features I really wanted to make.

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.

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

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.