Ari Aster
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Bring Her Back (2025)
Directed by Michael Philippou
influenced by Hereditary (2018), Midsommar (2019)
Visuals Themes
…reminds a shadow or so of another A24 horror movie, Ari Aster’s “Midsommar,” in its chilling sequences of familial bodily maiming that become a motif that terrorizes the protagonists in the present.
…it also shares some spiritual companionship to the family horrors of Ari Aster’s “Hereditary” and the opening of “Midsommar,” where a death of loved ones derail our protagonists’ normalcy and plunge them into a world of terror and despair.
…it also shares some spiritual companionship to the family horrors of Ari Aster’s “Hereditary” and the opening of “Midsommar,” where a death of loved ones derail our protagonists’ normalcy and plunge them into a world of terror and despair.
Cut from the same cloth as occult family horrors like Hereditary and Sinister, Bring Her Back balances its foster family plot with blurry found footage mythology that gives way to a larger conspiracy.
Not since Ari Aster’s Hereditary have I seen a horror film tackle uncomfortable family dynamics so well…
The film especially feels like it pulls both in tone and tenor from A24 predecessor Hereditary (ironic, given how much Hereditary has borrowed from other films).
Aquí, en particular, parece evidente la relación de Midsommar con el gran clásico de Robin Hardy, The Wicker Man de 1973.
Whilst tonally Midsommar could be likened to Hereditary , and its folk horror mentality easily links itself to the 1973 British classic The Wicker Man , this film very much harnesses its own identity.
Visually the movie harkens back to other folk horror entries, most notably Robin Hardy's 1973 classic "The Wicker Man," with bright colors and a pastoral setting cleverly juxtaposed against the sinister activities.
It would seem like Ari Aster’s Midsommar is created from the same mold as Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973), The Green Inferno (2013) and other horror films that mine fear, shock and shlock from fictional cultures that swerve away from mainstream civilization.
Y de ahí podemos pasar por Holocasuto caníbal (Italia, 1980) y algunos capítulos de la hoy mundialmente famosa Eso (en sus dos capítulos, 2017 y 2019) y claro The Wicker Man (Reino Unido, 1973) esa obra maestra del terror bucólico dirigida por Robin Hardy y de la que Ari Aster pretende mamar.
…akin to cynical neo-Westerns like the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men…
I could not help but compare it to the work of the Coens, especially No Country for Old Men (2007) and Burn After Reading (2008). Like the former, Eddington is a stark look at the contemporary American Southwest…
It has the window dressing of rich Coen Brothers thrillers like Blood Simple and No Country for Old Men.
…the film shifts from somber to suspenseful, echoing the cat-and-mouse tension of No Country for Old Men.
…which fittingly recall the best bits from Roger Deakins’ lensing of No Country for Old Men (2007).
…something akin to a violent cat-and-mouse chase, à la the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men (2007)…
One Battle After Another (2025)
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
influenced by Eddington (2025)
Themes
(*cough* Eddington cough*) Instead of emphasizing, "Hey, everything sucks now,"…
Like Eddington, Friendship, and Weapons, One Battle After Another is one of the best movies of the year because it so deftly diagnoses America…
Earlier this year, Ari Aster’s equally timely Eddington focused on how flawed both sides of the American aisle can be.
It succeeds in obtaining thematic symmetry with its focus on political extremism, whereas someone like Ari Aster nearly obtains it but falls a little short in his recent film Eddington (2025)—a cinematic retrospective of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Yet when Ari Aster attempted it earlier this year with Eddington, a dark political comedy about a town gone mad during the COVID-19 epidemic, it felt at times like staring directly into the sun, feeling so blinding (and unpleasant) that any perspective was hard to come by.
Like Eddington, One Battle After Another is the work of someone so comfortable in their bubble that it believes a generalized fart in all directions is an effective form of satire.
“Scream” is hip with the times much in the same way its predecessors were, throwing nods to Rian Johnson, “It Follows” and “Hereditary” and playfully toys with audience expectations.
Scream is hip with the times much in the same way its predecessors were, throwing nods to Rian Johnson, It Follows and Hereditary and playfully toys with audience expectations.
What’s the most impressive about this installment of Scream is how much fun it’s having, poking fun at the horror genre, with characters referencing films such as It Follows or Hereditary , but also riffing on the Stab series in its own Scream universe.
In the movie’s opening phone call, one that mirrors the call Drew Barrymore received in the original, Tara (Jenna Ortega) — after initially ignoring a strange call on “the landline” — tells the strange voice on the other end (again Roger Jackson, franchise MVP) that she prefers “elevated horror” like “The Babadook,” “Hereditary” and “It Follows.”
No more last-century horror shoutouts when the kids have such newbies as "It Follows," "Hereditary" and "The Witch" as reference points.
But this movie also understands and references "high-minded" horrors like The Babadook and Hereditary .
Relic (2020)
Directed by Natalie Erika James
influenced by Hereditary (2018), Midsommar (2019)
Themes
Esta no es la tradicional familia norteamericana armoniosa y unida contra la adversidad que nos vendió Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1982), sino que deja al descubierto las miserias, las debilidades y las fracturas de sus protagonistas, de manera similar a lo que hicieran Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014) y Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018).
Just like the nonsensical stuff that plagues Hereditary, Relic doesn’t play by its own rules.
From 2014's The Babadook to 2o18's Hereditary to The Lodge earlier this year, this sub-genre is here to stay, and Natalie Erika James' Relic deserves a spot among the best of them.
It’s less ambitious and aggressively complicated than, say, Ari Aster’s Hereditary —another movie about the sometimes-unnerving complexity of parent-child bonds—but it’s also, in the end, more thoughtful.
While Relic is too measured and its frights too oblique to have the same popular impact as the similar Hereditary, it shows James’ ability to use genre to confront uncomfortable truths.
Directed by Natalie Erika James , who also wrote the script along with Christian White, Relic effectively weaves in elements from Hereditary and The Visit to deliver a terrifying tale that tugs at the heartstrings.
En cualquier caso, el pitch de esta película, antes de que Aster aceptara escribirla, fue hacer “una versión de Hostel (2005) en un rito folclórico sueco”.
This culminates in the film feeling like an arthouse version of HOSTEL or CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, with detached westerners coming in to judge a different society while displaying their own horrible ways.
It’s been a staple of the horror genre as far back as An American Werewolf in London (1981), and more recently the formula was honed with the likes of Hostel (2005) and The Ruins (2008).
Louder, more gory horror films have been made about this idea (“Turistas,” “Hostel”), but now comes an unusual marriage of cautious observation with twisted motivation.
“Torture porn” was still in vogue (in some sense, it’s never not) and the company was envisioning a Hostel -style movie involving “American tourists going to Sweden and them being killed off during Midsummer,” the summer solstice festival with deep pagan roots.
The remainder of Midsommar plays like a high-toned version of Eli Roth's xenophobic gorefests Hostel (2005) and The Green Inferno (2013), following the American tourists (and a couple of British students they meet along the way) as they come to realize that Pelle's seemingly peaceful commune is really a death- obsessed cult.
Comparisons will inevitably be made to The Wicker Man (1973) (with shades of Shirley Jackson's haunting story The Lottery) and on a surface level they share similarities, but on a subtextual level they differ greatly.
The setup — civilized visitors among the eldritch agrarians — is overly familiar from films like “The Wicker Man,” and there are echoes of stories like “The Lottery,” songs like XTC’s “Sacrificial Bonfire,” documentaries like “Wild Wild Country.”
Likewise, Shirley Jackson’s classic short story “The Lottery” seems an obvious reference point as well.
When one of them pees on what turns out to be a sacred tree, well, you can guess we’re headed for a Wicker Man /Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” situation (to name just two folk-horror influences).
Sure, there were the duds along the way, but for every Slender Man we got a Babadook, and every for every Vampires Suck we got a Hereditary.
At its best, the minimalist setting creates the haunting impression of “The Others” in the woods, with hints of the precise formalism that made last year’s “Hereditary” such a haunting immersion.
The eerie rhythms of the universe that gave us Deep Impact and Armageddon, Antz and A Bug’s Life, and Fyre and Fyre Fraud have conspired to make The Lodge exist in Hereditary ’s shadow, but while some tonal and iconographic similarities exist, the two films jump off their shared diving board into very different corners of the psycho-mom pool.
While the set design features an overdependence on parallels with a doll house (a la Hereditary , 2018), the early establishing characteristics work best with Silverstone’s character, a Christian woman whose skewed faith is much more perverted than the various icons and crosses decorating her exterior living spaces would suggest.
Of all of the three traumatized IT children orphan movies, it’s the most effective, recalling Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, and especially, Ari Aster’s Hereditary, due to its liberal use of miniature figures and dollhouses in the imagery.
Reminiscent of Midsommar with a critical doll house that is eerily similar to the one in Hereditary, The Lodge is a psychological horror film filled with shocking scenes that keeps the audience on the edge of their seat with their head buried in their shirt.
The Witch (2016)
Directed by Robert Eggers
influenced Midsommar (2019), Hereditary (2018)
Themes Characters
Movies like The Witch, or It Comes at Night, or Hereditary are not easy sells, and offer no simple encapsulations.
But Hereditary , The Witch , The Babadook , Get Out , and most recently, Us , prove the genre is ripe with potential.
Much like Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth and Robert Eggers’ The Witch , Midsommar belongs to a growing series of films by anointed male auteurs using cult homages to explore female sexuality – yet can sometimes seem contrived in intuiting the desires of their subjects.
One the one hand, Midsommar presents it pagan zealots as agents of ecstatic liberation, paralleling the way that Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015) ultimately portrays satanic pacts as preferable to stifling Puritanism (especially for women).
Midsommar has more in common with inaccessible cult thrillers like The Wicker Man (1973) and The Witch (2015) than mainstream horror faves like those in The Conjuring universe, but it may have some crossover appeal.
At least there is Florence Pugh, whose seamless transition from innocence to all-knowingness as the beleaguered Dani recalls a character in Robert Eggers’ The Witch, another movie that Aster has evidently seen.
Synecdoche, New York (2008)
Directed by Charlie Kaufman
influenced Beau Is Afraid (2023)
Themes Visuals
The film feels inspired by everything from Kafka to Albert Brooks to Charlie Kaufman’s postmodern masterpiece, Synecdoche, New York , but never derivative.
It recalls films as eclectic as The Ninth Configuration and Jacob’s Ladder in its use of symbolism, tone and imagery and Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York in the way Aster plays with ideas of artifice – particularly the overtly theatrical scenes in the forest and the sound-stage setting of the final “trial”.
Sospeso allora tra Synecdoche, New York di Charlie Kaufman e The Truman Show di Peter Weir, con un tocco di inconcludenza alla Under the Silver Lake di David Robert Mitchell (la nostra recensione) o alla Southland Tales – Così finisce il mondo di Richard Kelly, Beau ha paura manca di una chiave di lettura univoca che ci permetta di definire, quantomeno, una prospettiva da cui interpretare ciò che viene messo in scena.
Waarbij Aster met Beau is Afraid dus ook wel z’n meest ‘grootse’ film maakt, want op dit moment schiet zelfs Charlie Kaufmans Synecdoche, New York door m’n hoofd heen.
Charlie Kaufman’ın 2008 yapımı Synecdoche, New York filmini andıran Beau is Afraid filminin son katmanı düşsel olduğu kadar yıkıcı bir yana da sahip.
In the grand tradition of Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook and Robert Eggers’ The Witch , writer/director Ari Aster’s debut (in theaters June 8) is a work of malevolent formal precision and mounting-hysterics performances, all of which combine to create an expert atmosphere of dawning dread and, later, supernatural madness.
As with so much inspired horror, from Rosemary's Baby to 2014's psychologically acute The Babadook, the movie gets its breath and a palpable sense of unraveling identity from a fearless female performance, this time by Toni Collette, the revered Australian actor capable of sustained fits of mania.
Hereditary does offer less of the clean-cut metaphoric flair that a film like The Babadook chases after, since its ghosts don’t exactly function as walking metaphors for depression, grief, or alienation - or a combination of all three.
The best female lead performance in a horror film since The Babadook–which, while having more of a funhouse creature vibe, shares a similar sense of intensifying dread–the actress brings a relatable throughline of familial frustrations and maternal regrets.
Annie Graham (Toni Collette, in an intense, phenomenally complex performance to rival the one Essie Davis gave in The Babadook ) is a work-from-home artist who specializes in dioramas of her spaces, emotional and physical.
Ari Aster’s debut feature feels, in many ways, like a culmination of the art-horror renaissance ignited by the likes of Robert Eggers’ The Witch and Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook and elaborated upon by Nicolas Pesce’s The Eyes of My Mother and Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s Goodnight Mommy .
Elsewhere, Aster’s references are just as obvious: the entire first episode plays like a more aggro retread of Eraserhead (complete with noisily defective elevator), and the film’s denouement, with its atmosphere of hypermediated surveillance and cosmic judgment, is directly cribbed from Albert Brooks’s Defending Your Life .
In addition to the themes in Aster’s first two films (“Hereditary’s” plotting mother, decapitation and horrors in the attic; “Midsommar’s” horrible parental death relayed by a phone call from a stranger, rural rituals and drug use), one can see the influence of such films as “A Serious Man,” “The Truman Show,” “Defending Your Life” and numerous monstrous mother movies.
When something like Hereditary or Prometheus comes along and insists on explaining every little thing, the main criticism is that exposition dilutes the horror…
It has a bit of Hereditary's familial trauma beats…
Seven years ago, it reached a peak with Ari Aster’s Hereditary—a film that explored generational trauma, the stress of parenting, and the hollow reality of death.
I’ve seen a lot of comparisons between Weapons and Hereditary and I get why. Both are disturbing horror films that revel in human depravity. However, there’s a glaring difference. Hereditary director Ari Aster makes horror films that come across like he’s intent on punishing the audience.
There’s a hint of Hereditary in Weapons.
Weapons isn’t explicitly political in the manner of a film like Eddington (2025) — there are no red MAGA hats or slurs thrown around — but the predominantly white, middle-class characters (and how the movie handles violence) speak to the white picket rot that Cregger tackles.
Get Out (2017)
Directed by Jordan Peele
influenced Midsommar (2019), Beau Is Afraid (2023), Hereditary (2018)
Themes
Midsommar me deslumbra como otro espejo social de Estados Unidos; un espejo como los que encontramos en formas intrigantes y grotescas en Don’t Breathe de Fede Álvarez y Get Out de Jordan Peele.
Similar to how fellow genre manipulator Jordan Peele ( Get Out , Us ) invites his audience to analyse his work, Aster has layered Midsommar with deeply contextual imagery – almost of a foreshadowing nature – but, at the same time, you don’t need to take it all in to appreciate what he has achieved.
The first, of course, was Us —which didn’t quite deliver the bracing kick of Jordan Peele’s debut Get Out , but it was a pretty gripping ride nonetheless.
Film-makers such as Jordan Peele (Get Out), Jennifer Kent (The Babadook) and Robert Eggers (The Witch) are consistently forsaking traditional horror movie norms (shaky camera, jump-scares, buckets of gore) for something far more considered.
It’s no wonder director and Oscar-winning screenwriter Jordan Peele (Get Out) has been singing the praises of writer and director Ari Aster’s folk horror film Midsommar over the past few weeks — Peele even called it “the most idyllic horror film of all time.”
In 2017 it was Jordan Peele’s Get Out ; in 2016 it was Robert Eggers’ The Witch ; in 2018 that honor goes to Ari Aster’s Hereditary .
Saint Maud (2020)
Directed by Rose Glass
influenced by Hereditary (2018), Midsommar (2019)
Plot Visuals Themes Music
For reasons I obviously can’t go into here, the parallels between Saint Maud’s ending and that of Ari Aster’s Midsommar* could probably sustain an essay on their own.
There are definite similarities between Saint Maud and Hereditary and Midsommar in particular, with director Rose Glass appearing to have taken some cues from Ari Aster’s first two features.
When things get brutal in “Saint Maud,” it’s not at all in the same way things got brutal in a female-centered horror thriller such as Ari Aster’s “Hereditary.”
The psychological game of cat-and-mouse that develops between these two women boasts a tense, almost Hitchcockian vibe, and the slow-burn pace and blistering third-act payoff finds Saint Maud slotting neatly into distributor A24’s horror repertoire, alongside acclaimed entries like The Witch and Hereditary .
Likewise, the film’s A24 will understandably lead some to expect a supernatural blow-out in the vein of Hereditary or The Witch.
From barely heard whispers to scrapes and clicks that feel like they’re working their way into your ear canal, Saint Maud makes the best use of sound since Ari Aster’s terrifying 2018 film Hereditary .
The Shining (1980)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
influenced Midsommar (2019), Hereditary (2018), Eddington (2025)
Plot Themes Visuals
His spiral into delusion and violence recalls the best psychological horror. Think The Shining, but with QAnon and AR-15s.
It all felt too pompously overblown and lazily obvious to me, Aster channeling films like Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man , Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (just to name three) as he attempts to bring his character-driven plunge into pagan ritual to life.
Placed in the permanent daylight of Harga, Midsommar is an heir to The Shining for showing terror in broad daylight.
This is obviously true of Rosemary’s Baby —probably Aster’s biggest influence—but also The Shining , Don’t Look Now , and The Wicker Man , all of which involve some degree of mordant comedy.
Dani has a nightmare full of what might be called Kubrickian visions while huddled beneath a blanket whose hexagonal decorations look like a cool-hued homage to the carpet in The Shining .
Aster’s sense of precedence carefully curates some of the most effective tricks of horror’s past greats: the wide-angle shots that shape Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, a dash of the paranoia which wracks Rosemary’s Baby, and - to dial things forward in time - the sense of stillness that haunts It Follows.
Bajo el manto del folk horror , con igual importancia, se incluyen cintas más ancladas a la brujería como The Witches (1966), Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), The VVitch (2015) o Hagazussa (2017), y las películas más apegadas a la idea de ritos ancestrales como The Ritual (2017), las dos joyas de Ben Wheatley, Kill List (2011) y A Field in England (2013), o la reciente Apostle (2018) de Gareth Evans.
For me though, I’d place the meaner leaner 1973 Wicker Man, Ben Wheatley’s Kill List and maybe even Gareth Evans’ Apostle from last year higher.
It all felt too pompously overblown and lazily obvious to me, Aster channeling films like Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man , Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (just to name three) as he attempts to bring his character-driven plunge into pagan ritual to life.
As with Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (another movie Aster has clearly absorbed), the relationship here to The Wicker Man is both superficial—Hippies!
There is a whiff of Von Trier’s “Antichrist” to this movie’s gender politics, and there are also strong echoes of Alex Garland’s “Annihilation,” Ben Wheatley’s “Kill List” and especially Robin Hardy’s 1973 pagan-cult classic, “The Wicker Man.”
While its mythology might be a bit more complicated than it really needs to be, Hereditary still manages to overcome a slight sense of convolutedness to deliver a mind-blowing wallop of an ending that’s on par with the likes of Carrie, Kill List, Possession, The Witch, or even Sleepaway Camp.
…the kind of baffling twist that veers dangerously close to South Park-level satire.
Joaquin Phoenix does a terrific job of channeling Randy Marsh from South Park.
The film exists somewhere between Repo Man, No Country for Old Men, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and South Park.
Rosemary's Baby (1968)
Directed by Roman Polanski
influenced Hereditary (2018), Midsommar (2019), Beau Is Afraid (2023)
Themes Visuals Plot
Rather than make turn Midsommar into a slasher, he takes a page out of the Rosemary’s Baby playbook.
There’s no second act shift, no lean in to something like how Hereditary had Ann Dowd’s drag-like aping of Ruth Gordon in Rosemary’s Baby, but rather a constant presence of off-beat humor mixed into the horror.
Hereditary showed the influence of claustrophobic and occult movies like Rosemary’s Baby and The Mephisto Waltz .
Despite the fact that, at the moment of truth, Aster bent the knee to Roman Polanski (specifically, the paranoiac, all-of-them-witches ending of Rosemary’s Baby ), the triumphal tableaux of a kid being crowned king of his own private cult could also be taken, however coincidentally, as a bit of self-portraiture.
If his first film, "Hereditary," was indebted to "Rosemary's Baby," his second clearly mimics "The Wicker Man," yet beneath these genre homages, the themes and tics are much the same - a family, dysfunctional unto death, leaves one standing in an altogether creepier one.
As with so much inspired horror, from Rosemary's Baby to 2014's psychologically acute The Babadook, the movie gets its breath and a palpable sense of unraveling identity from a fearless female performance, this time by Toni Collette, the revered Australian actor capable of sustained fits of mania.