(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
There is, after all, a fine line between terror and laughter, and though he may be known primarily as a horror director, Ari Aster almost invariably adds comedy to his movies.
Some of his movies, like Hereditary and Midsommar, are so extreme that laughter is the only option, while Beau is Afraid is the sort of wince-inducing comedy that is so uncomfortable that laughing feels more like a gasp for air than an expression of enjoyment; thus, when it comes to the director’s own tastes, it’s anyone’s guess.
You could imagine him enjoying the equally excruciating work of Charlie Kaufman, for example, maybe I’m Thinking of Ending Things, which is actually just a comedy about hopelessness disguised as a suicidal cypher of woe that only someone like Aster could solve, or perhaps he might like the ice-cold comedy of Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster, which involves stabbing, dog mauling, and self-inflicted eye-gouging.
As it turns out, though, we do not have to speculate, because Aster has conveniently provided us with the details in an interview with /Film in 2023, revealing that he loves comedy, and even got into specifics. “I’ll just knock some off,” he said, and proceeded to list nine, running the gamut from classic comedies like Dr Strangelove, Naked Gun, and Airplane, to non-traditional romantic comedies like Annie Hall and Defending Your Life.
He also mentioned two Paul Verhoeven science fiction action movies that are not widely regarded as comedic, in the form of RoboCop and Starship Troopers, with the former, released in 1987, following a dystopian version of Detroit where city officials add a killer android to their police force, with predictably disastrous results. Apparently, Verhoeven went so overboard with the violence that some scenes had to be cut, but he was doing so with comedy in mind.
Starship Troopers also went to the extremes of genre conventions in the name of satire, but again, Verhoeven went so far that many critics couldn’t detect the humour at all, and like the director’s legendary flop-turned-cult classic, Showgirls, it was perceived by many to be deadly serious, and it was panned as a result.
“Verhoeven is a hero of mine, somebody I’m always thinking about,” Aster said, explaining that he had the Dutch director in mind while making Beau is Afraid.
Not surprisingly, Aster also has a soft spot for comedies that venture into extremely delicate territory, with one of the films he listed being Four Lions, the 2010 satire about a group of hapless, would-be terrorists attempting to stage an attack in London that was conceived of and directed by Chris Morris, the man behind the impossible-to-categorise, deeply unsettling series Jam, and its strange mixture of endearing characters and razor-sharp one-liners has made it a pitch-black classic.
Last on Aster’s list was the wildly underrated 1985 Martin Scorsese comedy After Hours, which follows the surreal, nighttime misadventures of an office drone trying to navigate the surprisingly treacherous terrain of Lower Manhattan to get home. It is yet another comedy that is difficult to categorise, containing elements of absurdism, body horror, a Kafkaesque series of tribulations, and the art of papier-mâché, and as such, of all Aster’s choices, this one seems to be the most in keeping with his own work: surreal, painful, and comedic in the darkest sense.
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