30 Perfect Horror Scenes Of The 2020s

More than possibly any other horror film released this decade, Ari Aster's Beau is Afraid is a true original. There's nothing else quite like it. It's no exaggeration to say that there's at least one WTF, 'you've never seen that before' moment every quarter of an hour throughout this film's mammoth three-hour run-time. 

Its most captivating sequence is the unforgettable Orphans of the Forest segment, where Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) comes across a theatre troupe in the forest who are performing a play, one which Beau than imagines himself as the protagonist of. The play tells an almost biblical fable about a depressed man searching for his lost family, so it neatly ties in with Beau is Afraid's core themes of family and mental illness, and it unfolds as an extraordinary mixture of live-action and animation, with Phoenix being placed in an animated landscape. 

Aster worked with Chilean animators Cristobal Leon and Joaquin Cocina (who directed 2018's The Wolf House) for this visually exquisite sequence, and the pair deployed a multitude of different animation techniques in order to create this unique, beautiful and profoundly moving excursion into the absurd. The results were undeniably stunning.  

Beau is Afraid was a polarizing picture and sure, it is self-indulgent and somewhat messy but it's also pretty awesome in its own unique way. It's such an audacious piece of cinema, and it's worth watching for this animated sequence alone.