James Wan Quotes

One of my favorite things about making horror movies is, the first time you screen them in front of an audience, it's very fun to hear people audibly react to the work you put into a movie. You don't wonder at the end of the movie whether it worked or not.

It's really hard to scare people on network television. You've got to be smart about it. You've got to parcel out the scares.

I think in the old days, films really went for the shock, with the blood and guts, but movies are getting better. The writing and directing have improved a lot, because the audience demands it.

Scaring someone's the hardest thing to do, and that's why most of these scary movies are not scary. They're sick, but not scary. There's a lot of sickness out there, of people who then sit there and watch it, which I think is absolutely dismaying.

I like horror movies, and in fact I like them even more now after making one. I just think they're much more liberating because you don't really have to apply a very strict logic.

Unless you're making Marvel movies, I think CGI usually suffers, especially in mid-budget-range horror movies where you see CGI.

Everybody's making horror films and, to me, not especially well.

I believe if you come out of a movie and the first thing you say is, 'The cinematography was beautiful,' it's a bad movie.

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.

Some horror movies are just for shock value, so it doesn't really feel scary.

If I'm going to direct a horror movie, I'd have to be the one writing it, because I have to make it personal.

I will say that when it comes to the horror genre, for me, the scariest thing is when something is actually in the frame.

There's been a lot of aesthetically rich horror films that have come out in the last several years. 'The Babadook' is this perfectly paced, beautiful film. 'The Witch' is a beautifully made film. 'Get Out' is so intelligently written. I feel like there's so many great things happening right now.

I get sent horror scripts every week and most of them are putrid. A lot of people think it's an easy medium but it's not. Not if you want to make ones that last.

If a movie has three decent scenes and a decent character, I think, 'OK, at least they got that guy right.'

The most fun part of making a horror movie is watching it with an audience.

I go to these horror conventions all the time, and these audiences get so deep into it. They've pulled apart every movie fifty ways from Sunday.

'The Thing from Another World' was the first movie that really scared me. But the one that made me want to make movies was 'The Tales of Hoffman.' That's my favorite film of all time. It's a fantasy film. It's an opera. I never get tired of it.

With 'The Conjuring,' I really wanted to create classical cinema-style film-making, pure cinema as it were.

I always feel in movies, I don't know if it's because I'm jaded, but I always feel like we don't go far enough.

The real scares on CNN, etc. and the scares in a movie, like 'The Purge,' are totally different. One of the ways you can tell when someone, whether it's a film maker or executive or producer, wants to make a scary movie but doesn't understand that distinction is they'll want to recreate too much of what's on TV.

With supernatural type of movies, if they're not done correctly, there are a lot of actors just running and screaming and looking scared for an hour and forty, and that can get a bit old.

I actually do like scary movies. I used to hate scary movies. You know, when I was young, I saw 'The Changeling,' with George C. Scott, which I think is the scariest movie ever made. After I saw that, I swore I would never see a horror film again. Then I started making them.

If you don't do the suspense correctly, then your jump scares are not going to work.

The business of horror movies goes up and down, and people are always like, 'It's working,' 'It's not working,' but generally, I think if you make a good movie that's scary, people will come.