Ari Aster names “the most breathtakingly beautiful horror film ever made”
Many would argue that we are currently in a golden age of horror, with the genre reaching heights it hasn’t seen since the 1980s. In the last decade, movies from It Follows to The Witch and Get Out have signalled a resurgence in genuinely good horror movies, with the latter even receiving an Oscar for ‘Best Screenplay’ in what is a rare feat in the genre.
However, one of the biggest names to emerge in the past few years as a master of scary movies is undoubtedly Ari Aster. In an interview with The Verge, the filmmaker explained that when he was younger, “I just exhausted the horror section of every video store I could find. I didn’t know how to assemble people who would cooperate on something like that. I found myself just writing screenplays.”
During film school, Aster made many short films, such as The Strange Thing About the Johnsons and Munchausen. However, once he made his debut feature, Hereditary, in 2018, the director garnered widespread acclaim, with the movie becoming one of A24’s highest-grossing. He followed the terrifying flick with the folk horror, Midsommar, inspired by films like The Wicker Man. The Florence Pugh-led movie firmly established Aster as one of contemporary horror’s biggest names, leading to his third project, Beau Is Afraid, which premiered in April 2023.
During an interview with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences magazine A.frame, Aster shared some of his favourite horror movies that have inspired his love for the genre. Since the filmmaker could only pick five, his list is incredibly varied, ranging from Andrzej Żuławski’s divorce-themed horror Possession to Brian De Palma’s supernatural horror classic Carrie.
However, there was one film that Aster referred to as “the most breathtakingly beautiful horror film ever made” – Kwaidan. The 1964 horror movie is an anthology collection comprised of four segments directed by Masaki Kobayashi. It was nominated for an Academy Award for ‘Best Foreign Language Film’ and remains one of the most revered Japanese horror movies of all time. Although Aster claimed that “there are so many Japanese horror films that I felt compelled to include — from Onibaba to Ugetsu to The Face of Another to Cure,” he described Kwaidan as “ethereal and haunting and possessed of a totally devouring commitment to artifice”.
Aster’s other picks were The Night of the Hunter by Charles Laughton and Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. Discussing the former, he wrote: “Its legacy is unmatched. Prefiguring so many coups to come — from Lynch’s work to the Coens’ to Kubrick’s to Greenaway’s — Laughton’s Expressionist masterpiece is so great that it makes me want to pull my arms off.”
Check out the trailer for Kwaidan below.
