Age: 39
male
Ari Aster (born July 15, 1986) is an American filmmaker. After garnering initial recognition for the short film The Strange Thing About the Johnsons (2011), he became best known for writing and directing the feature films Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019), both released by A24, making a name as a filmmaker of elevated horror. After pivoting away from the genre with Beau Is Afraid (2023), his next film, Eddington, premiered in competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. His films are notable for their unsettling combination of horror, dark comedy, and graphic violence. He co-founded the production company Square Peg with Danish producer Lars Knudsen in 2019.
Another one of various ideas I've had several months ago of what could be done with DC's library of popular and beloved characters, following the critical and commercial success of Joker, to make for compelling films that could capture said characters' essence and nuance even without directly following any kind of source material. For this one, the basic idea is that this would be a purely psychological hard-R horror thriller, relying very heavily on tricks of the mind as well as the power of perception. This would be an origin story detailing Dr. Jonathan Crane's abuse at the hands of his great-grandmother Mary Keeny and bullies from school, his fascination with psychology (being mentored by Hugo Strange), and how he came to be called the Master of Fear.
