The film-maker Ari Aster was born in New York City in 1986 and grew up in New Mexico after a short stint in Chester in the UK, where his father ran a jazz club. A horror buff, Aster studied film in Santa Fe and completed a master of fine arts degree at the American Film Institute Conservatory. His feature debut was Hereditary, the 2018 horror-drama starring Toni Collette. He followed this up a year later with the folk-horror Midsommar, which the Guardian called an “outrageous black-comic carnival of agony”. Now he’s back with Beau Is Afraid (out 19 May), in which Joaquin Phoenix plays a lost soul trying to get home to his mother.
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