Like a lot of us, Ari Aster spent the summer of 2020 trapped inside and scrolling on social media. “I was living on Twitter,” Aster tells WIRED, “and it was really agitating me.”But unlike most people, the director of Hereditary, Midsommar, and Beau is Afraid wasn’t just doomscrolling on Twitter to pass the time. To create a realistic approximation of social media, Aster went straight to the source. I started different accounts and created an archive. “This is a movie about people living in different realities who are unreachable to each other,” Aster says, musing that the modern internet has changed humanity in ways we likely still don’t fully understand.