Algernon Blackwood Quotes

Where there is no imagination there is no horror.

People's imagination is the most effective tool in creating terror or dread.

Every time that I'm in the dark, I imagine what might be lurking in the shadows. It's kind of like a drug in that way - darkness seems to change the way I think - making me way more prone to fear.

I pretend something scary is in front of me.

I think in the case of horror, it's a chance to confront a lot of your worse fears and those fears usually have to do, ironically, with powerlessness and isolation.

Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life, horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is.

I've always had this in a kind of worst-case dark imagination. I want to know what the dark form in the window is. I want to know what the noise under the staircase is.

I definitely am afraid of the dark. Somehow, in my mind I can always come up with some horrific stuff to worry about.

Ghost stories really scare me. I have such a big imagination that after I watch a horror movie like 'The Grudge', I look in the corners of my room for the next two days.

The scariest part to any story is the sliver of truth you hide in the horror. Sometimes its not about the axe wielding murder, but the fact that he's lurking somewhere in your basement. Sure, you keep telling yourself that you'll replace the burnt out light every week.

I'm afraid of the dark because I picture things; I see things. I'm a freak. I see, like, little demons coming out of the floor and other little things running around. It's scary.

Good horror is about so much more than slashing: it's a way of examining grief and loss of self.

My adult life is filled with the things horror movies are made of.

my imagination persisted in sticking horrors into the dark- so I stuck my imagination into the dark instead, and let it look out at me.

I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving, as I turned my head, so that I never quite saw it.

The whole forest was peopled with frightful sounds-the creaking of the trees, the howling of wild beasts, and the yell of Indians; while sometimes the wind tolled like a distant church bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar around the traveler, as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn. But he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors.

I don't want you leaving laughing, I want to leave you shaking. That to me is true horror.

The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you.

Imaginary evils soon become real ones by indulging our reflections on them; as he who in a melancholy fancy sees something like a face on the wall or the wainscot can, by two or three touches with a lead pencil, make it look visible, and agreeing with what he fancied.

I just gave them a little scare. A touch of psychological terror. As Joseph Conrad once wrote, true terror is the kind that men feel towards their imagination. (from Super-frog Saves Tokyo)

There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves

Terror. When you come home and notice everything you own has been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It’s when the lights go out and you feel something behind you-you hear it-you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around there’s nothing there.

Though he’d never know for sure what had happened to them, his mind was super talented at imagining the absolute worst.