Indie Filmmaker Ari Aster Has An "Amazing Relationship" With His Parents

Apr. 20 2023, Published 12:17 p.m. ET

If you've observed Hereditary or Midsommar, chances are you had been left traumatized — that's Ari Aster for you! The indie horror filmmaker reputedly enjoys demanding his audiences, typically by way of highlighting circle of relatives drama rooted in trauma and grief. As his filmography grows, the home trauma best will get more alarming.

OK, we know what you might be considering: Is this habitual theme of family trauma due to private experience? No, and as it turns out, Ari Aster actually has a perfect relationship together with his circle of relatives! With that said, keep studying to learn more about his parents and more youthful brother.

Ari Aster has an "amazing relationship" along with his parents.

On July 15, 1986, Ari Aster was once born right into a Jewish circle of relatives in New York City; he's the son of a jazz musician father and a poet (and cancer survivor) mother named Bobbi Lurie. Not much is understood about his parents, but in 2018, Ari spread out about the connection between him and his family.

"I will say, I have an amazing relationship with my parents and with my younger brother. I have incredibly supportive parents who are both artists," Ari told Vox. "One reason I'm able to work on as dark a register as I often do is because I've never been made to question anything I was making by them. They were always incredibly supportive."

Ari did note that there's been "a lot of suffering in my family," but mentioned he could not actually talk about it. "It didn't befall me, but it's befallen people that I care very deeply about."

However, the filmmaker later revealed that he took inspiration from his circle of relatives's suffering to make Hereditary: "Things had gotten so relentlessly awful that the feeling prevailed that we basically must be cursed," Ari told IANS. "I'm always writing from a personal place, but I also love the genre."

"I'd never want to baldly dramatize any of the sufferings that I or my family had gone through, so by taking the idea of a family being cursed and then literalizing that, I was able to put a lot of those feelings through a horror movie filter, where the canvas demands a high level of catharsis," Ari added.

Ari Aster has one sibling: A more youthful brother.

Like his parents, now not much is publicly recognized about Ari's younger brother, including his name. However, the filmmaker spoke with Indie Wire in June 2018 and stated he "often felt responsible" for his brother. Ari did not elaborate further, but a travel to the Ari Aster subreddit revealed that his brother is on the autism spectrum.

Their mother, Bobbi, published a piece about her youngest son's autism — she wrote, "... my son cannot comprehend human cruelty. It makes no sense to him." She additionally discussed that he was once preventing severe anorexia and had Stevens-Johnson syndrome.

Per the Mayo Clinic, Stevens-Johnson syndrome is a "rare, serious disorder of the skin and mucous membranes. It's usually a reaction to medication that starts with flu-like symptoms, followed by a painful rash that spreads and blisters. Then the top layer of affected skin dies, sheds, and begins to heal after several days."

In another piece, Bobbi explained how the autoimmune dysfunction impacts her youngest son's eyes: "His left eye went blind; the right eye is constantly exposed to infection; his eyes can no longer make tears," she penned, "the disease process continues, forever; blood vessels growing into the cornea can easily blind his only eye."

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