Katherine Waterston Quotes

You need to be invested in what happens. The characters are your conduit to the story. Many modern horror films are fun but not frightening because one has not connected with the characters.

I think good suspense and horror is really about creating situations that are relatable, and throwing a wrench in it and watching how people respond to it.

If you don't invest in the characters, you don't care if they get killed. It's more fun if you know them.

I feel that in horror movies, especially, if you don't care about the characters, you've lost the audience. No one cares, and it becomes a process of watching people get killed.

It's hard to be scared if you don't feel for a character, because you don't care if they die or live.

For me, what usually makes a horror sequence scary is the journey not the destination.

There's nothing scarier than silence. A lot of horror movies lean on hits and score to try and create tension, which actually does the opposite. The best scares come from a desire to see the character overcome what they're dealing with in the scene. If you care about the character you'll care about the scare.

Gore, like blood and guts and stuff, I am fine. Suspense, I get super sensitive. I can't handle it.

I find that usually when I watch something like horror film, I'm constantly thinking no, it's not going to happen.

It's not as if the stories merge to a point where you think they are your life, but you do let them in the front door and the back door, and it's okay that sometimes certain characters stay for dinner.

You can't tell an audience to like a character. And I think the best way to get the audience on someone's side is to embarrass them.

I like to think if something scares me, then there's a very good chance an audience will feel the same way. The key is creating scenarios that people can relate to.

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.

The characters don't all have to be likable, and they don't all have to be hateable. As long as it's interesting and you connect to them and they resonate with you and you want to find out what happens and it feels authentic, then we have something.

In life, we like tranquility; in books, we love tension.

I think if a horror movie is really scary, you'll think about it for weeks, and there's something kind of fun about that - about our art, really.

I think there is a difference between connecting with a character and supporting and believing their policies.

A lot of horror movies just look at how they can scare people, and no matter which character dies, you don't ever really feel enough to actually care.

We all are scared of bad things… So when you are watching a film, you see your fears on the screen.

I think it's touching that the fans feel so close to the characters that they feel personally hurt. I've felt that way in plenty of TV shows - 'Game of Thrones,' 'Mad Men.' How could they do that to that character? That's drama.

I love horror because you can never just sit back in your seat. You always have to be on the edge of it.

It doesn't matter whether characters are real people or not; if they're not vivid on the page, then the reader doesn't care about them that much, and, if the reader doesn't care about them that much, then they don't care what happens to them.

I'm a huge baby and horror films just terrify me, they're very effective with me.

I think that there's something really special about doing a series. You get inside the skin of that character 'cause it's such a long time.

From a tale one expects a bit of wildness, of exaggeration and dramatic effect. The tale has no inherent concern with decorum, balance or harmony. ... A tale may not display a great deal of structural, psychological, or narrative sophistication, though it might possess all three, but it seldom takes its eye off its primary goal, the creation of a particular emotional state in its reader. Depending on the tale, that state could be wonder, amazement, shock, terror, anger, anxiety, melancholia, or the momentary frisson of horror.