It is interesting: in France, the horror films are not so popular. People go to see them, but not for the same reason. It is more artistic and process.
The key to a good horror movie is what happens between the scares. The scares aren't the tricky part. If you're involved in what's going on in between, the scare is going to trick you. If you're not, the best scare in the world will not be scary.
PG-13 horror, I just don't watch that.
The southern Chinese are a mixture of the Han, or northern Chinese, and the local tribes, some of which allowed women a great deal of freedom - much to the horror of the Chinese who were good Confucians. As a result, the folklore from southern China has strong females; and I found that the folktales mirrored my own experience.
Some people think that horror films are some sort of second class filmmaking, and the only way to bypass that thinking is being proud of the fact that we do it.
I spent a lot of my adult life overcoming fear. It was a subject I knew a lot about, and it's one of the most important and most powerful human emotions. Fear is one of the greatest driving forces in the world. So I thought I could go into the horror genre and do things differently and contribute a different point of view.
Whether you're writing a horror show or a James Bond film, I think what bubbles beneath is interesting characterization. The colors that emerge through storytelling is what a dramatist does. There's always got to be something bubbling underneath that will erupt at some point.
I don't care how inventive you are; once you introduce strings into the ensemble for a horror film, you're entering into a world where a tradition has been thoroughly established. So it's repeated use over the years is like, 'Oh God, another film with strings, another spooky movie with strings.'
I want to get a hit record, and I know I can be good in horror movies.
Tell a man that he is putting on a stage performance in order to get what he wants, and he will irritably reject your observation. Why? Because most people go through life as cunning actors with a permanent horror of getting found out.
Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law or cosmic alienage or 'outsideness' without laying stress on the emotion of fear.
I don't like being pigeonholed at all. It stemmed from after 'Mandy Lane': I was being offered all these horror movies. I love horror movies, but when I dreamed of being a director, it was always doing all sorts of things.
Marvel has, like, 9,000 characters. They could do a horror movie tomorrow and call it Marvel. They can do anything.
In college, one of my favorite classes was a six-week class watching horror movies. 'The Bad Seed' was one of them and was the first time I had seen it, and I really fell in love with it.
Any horror element is as much psychological as special effects.
People used to always complain that horror films have no stories, that it's all just about kills and stuff like that.
We had many good directors - John Carpenter, Brian De Palma - but things have become polluted by business, money and bad relationships. The success of the horror genre has led to its downfall.
There are moments in 'Body Snatchers' that touch the sort of thing that I find scary... like isolation and the inability to trust even familiar things. But - is that a horror movie - or a thriller? I don't really know the difference.
I'm not really a horror movie fan.
I'm not interested in gothic storytelling or the horrific for its own sake. I'm always interested in it as a way of getting at larger ideas or important meaning. And you don't see that as much as you'd think in the history of horror cinema. A lot of times, it's scariness for scariness' own sake.
When you are interviewing refugees, each person you talk to has a different story that could come from a horror movie. So many people talk about seeing their families get murdered before their eyes. Then I go to Central Park, and people are talking about their third divorce and paying tuition.
I'm not necessarily a horror fan. I just never really watched them that much.
I did love horror films from the '70s and '80s. That was my sweet spot.
Of the big horror movies of the '70s, you have 'The Omen,' 'The Sentinel,' 'Rosemary's Baby,' 'The Stepford Wives,' 'Burnt Offerings' - these are all romantic fatalist movies where there's a sort of glimmer of hope... but darkness wins.
The First World War was a horror of gas, industrialised slaughter, fear, and appalling human suffering.
I stopped watching horror movies after I watched 'Candyman' when I was - I don't know, fifteen or something. I remember my sister rented it, 'Candyman,' and it really, really scared me. And so it was only after I found myself in a horror film that I really went back and kind of rediscovered the genre.
Prison has a universal fascination. It's a real-life horror story because, given the right set of circumstances, anyone could find themselves behind bars.
I want to direct a feature film. Horror is my main genre.
I'm not sure whether I've been happy. After my last book tour, I sat on my balcony with a cup of tea. I thought: 'You can't rewind the movie. I've spent more than half my life in the Middle East. There have been great moments of horror and depression and loneliness.'
I love horror movies in space. I love it when the genre switches over and what was sci-fi becomes horror.
It's just my natural way - to be funny. I don't know why that is. But as I've said, humor is a quick cover for shock, horror, confusion. The critics hate funny writers for the most part. They think funny is not serious, but I think that funny can be even more serious than nonfunny. And it can be more affecting, too.
I've always been a fan of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. I like working with larger-than-life characters in fascinating worlds - places where the rules are different.
Even though there's a lot of horror from Asia in the American cinematic tradition, I hadn't seen Asians at the center of it.
We think craft is important, and the irony has always been that horror may be disregarded by critics, but often they are the best-made movies you're going to find in terms of craft. You can't scare people if they see the seams.
The normal storyline of a horror film or a slasher film is the young, beautiful college folks go camping and get systematically killed by the person in a mask. So that's how it normally is.
When I was seven or eight, I was bought a fantastic book called 'The Movie Treasury of Horror Movies' by Alan G. Frank; it became my bible. It's packed full of the most amazing photos and is still fantastic to look at.
