As we noted in our review, Ari Aster’s second gut-churning exercise in horror film-making, Midsommar, is also a surprisingly funny movie, blending its visceral shocks with a steady dose of culture clash comedy. Now Aster—whose 2018 debut Hereditary was decidedly not a laugh riot of any kind, trucking as it did in a heady breed of madness-flecked tragedy—has said he’s ready to lighten the hell up a little bit, making it clear in a Reddit AMA he gave today that he’d really like to pull a reverse Jordan Peele and make the move into laughs for a minute.
Certainly, Aster cracked plenty of jokes in the multi-hour interview itself, including suggesting that his next aesthetic, after Gothic Dollhouse and Terrifying, Smiling Swedes, might be “Cheesecake Factory,” and cracking wise about Krippendorf’s Tribe. (He also, on a non-comedic note, briefly touched on his efforts to keep his latest movie out of the NC-17 arena, and noted that its home release will likely include at least half an hour of excited material from its 2.5 hour run-time.)
But when someone asked Aster about whether he had any plans to expand his genre offerings into the world of explicit comedies, he was positively effusive in his answer, responding, “YES. And hopefully very soon.” He followed that idea up in a later answer to a more direct question, telling a questioner asking what his next movie will be that “Next one will either be a zonky nightmare comedy or a big, sickly domestic melodrama.” One thing he made clear, though: Despite his love for the genre, it probably won’t be a horror movie. (Or at least, not how we traditionally think of it; “zonky nightmare comedy” sounds pretty close to his current wheelhouse as it is.) “It might take me a few movies before I wind back around to [horror],” he responded to another question, “But I love [it] and I’m sure I’ll be back.”