In a chart with no water but Neptune, you get the feeling of a strange disconnect with feeling itself in the work of this dark director. The details of darkness itself are his emotional stock in trade with Moon, Pluto, and Venus conjunction in Virgo. Add out-of-sign Uranus in Libra into that stellium, and there’s your strangeness, and your disconnect. Finally, Saturn in opposition to Neptune (something we’re just finishing up in the sky now) leads the chart, tangling the height of two opposites that really don’t attract, but undercut each other. Things are seldom what they seem in his films — they’re usually much worse.

Spiritually, he has a tale to tell, with fire ruling spirit and his two fire planets being Sun with Mars rising ahead of it in Leo. You could expect some anger there, and you’d find it. Although of Hindu parentage, he was brought up in the U.S. going to Catholic and Episcopal schools, so there’s a real inner disconnect that comes right to the surface in his autobiographical Praying With Anger, about a Hindu who returns to seek his parental gods but cannot relate to them.

Also notable is the chart shape. It’s a bowl pattern, making him self-sufficient and not dependent on others to get his work done, but it’s also got the nodes sticking out right through the middle. Essentially transforming the chart into a bucket with a nodal handle, it’s a sure sign of someone who is following destiny without too much question, letting the inner side run the show without questioning it too much. In this case it’s the North Node leading the way, so it’s all about taking on new responsibilities and new methods of approach that are uniquely his, but which he hasn’t a clue if they will or won’t work for him in the end. It’s about following “the muse,” but also about supporting her on your shoulders while you do it, rather like Sharon Stone in the movie of that name.

Current events: His progressed Venus and Jupiter are just now conjoining, and progressed Moon in Aquarius two years from the full means he’s got his stride and is playing it for all it’s worth, as you’ll see in The Happening when it comes out next year. It’s R-rated, so expect both sexuality and horror to be kicked up a notch. But, all the while, he’ll be undergoing a big Saturn transit to that Virgo stellium, so he will have to work hard indeed to pull out every stop until he’s pushed his version of the genre as far as it can go.