Over the course of the past eight years, Ari Aster has become one of the most influential voices in the landscape of horror cinema. The writer-director burst onto the scene in 2018 with his highly acclaimed and successful debut feature, Hereditary. Not only was the film an artistic achievement, but it was also an incredibly beneficial financial one for both Aster and A24. In many ways, Hereditary would become the standard against which many subsequent A24 productions would be measured or formulated in relation to. And yet Aster was far from content to rest on these laurels.
His sophomore feature, Midsommar, released less than a year later, despite its three-hour-long runtime. The film kept Aster’s streak going, being both a critical and commercial win for the filmmaker that showcased his burgeoning ambitions and commitment to craft. From there, the filmmaker moved into a new era of sorts, past the initial confines of these supernatural horror films and into something more mythic. The results were 2023’s Beau Is Afraid and 2025’s Eddington, both of which were wildly divisive on every front but which I genuinely believe to each be nothing short of masterful. Now, in very much this same vein, Aster is prepping his next film, Scapegoat, and the Academy Award-nominated Jacob Elordi is apparently circling a key role.
What has made Aster’s more recent batch of films so controversial and split in terms of reception? There’s a lot going on in Beau and Eddington that is not necessarily palatable to general audiences. In many ways, Beau is a natural and organic extension of the thematic material that was self-evident in both Hereditary and Midsommar, just without the framing of the explicitly supernatural horror subgenre, instead embracing a more odyssean structure. Eddington, on the other hand, as a western set explicitly during the COVID lockdowns of 2020, is a staunchly political film with pitch-black humor baked into every facet of its being. As such, these films were not exactly widely marketable, nor were they necessarily easy pills for even many critics to swallow.
With Elordi now heavily considering boarding Aster’s new film alongside already signed-on star Scarlett Johansson, though, is Scapegoat shaping up to be a different, more readily accessible film from Aster? Not at all, which you have to admire, even if you’re not on the same frequency as I am about Beau and Eddington. Rather, Scapegoat is set to be about a surgeon who performs an operation on a social media influencer and has to deal with the ramifications of what happens when that surgery goes awry. Johansson is set to play the surgeon, which could leave Elordi to play the aforementioned influencer.
If anything, the basic hook for Scapegoat sounds even more deliriously anchored in present-tense chaos than Eddington was, so Aster is very much further pursuing his present-tense passions and idiosyncrasies; he just has Johansson and Elordi coming along for the ride.
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