Dark Themes Quotes

I found a lot of fairy tales scary. They really didn't sit well with me.

Americans love to read about violence.

The last Christmas movie I really liked was 'It's a Wonderful Life,' probably. It's sort of a schmaltzy movie, but it's not without its dark moments. It still gets to me every year.

Noir was a brainchild of the United States. And most of the creators of classic noir - novelists and screenwriters, directors and cameramen - were men. Women were their mysterious, sometimes villainous, always seductive objects of desire.

I'm such a horror geek, comic geek and action figure geek. I'm inspired by so much - from Hunter S. Thompson and Quentin Tarantino to 'The Dark Knight' and 'Halloween'. Just show me something that doesn't suck, and I'm happy.

Doing a film and saying, I've done a really dark film and now I have to do a comedy... That's not me. If a script comes along and it's dark I'll absolutely do it and take the consequences. I'm not fussed about the image that goes along with it.

Look, I happen to still like really dark, dramatic, fractured characters.

I don't know why, but I respond well to tortured characters.

People don't call them horror movies, but Hitchcock, for me, is my favorite storyteller. He was really exploring dark themes, and I don't know what category you put his movies in. Thriller? Horror? Some of them go in either one.

Art is an attempt to integrate evil.

Octavia Butler, of course, is brilliant and disturbing.

You want to put out good vibes for the viewers, even if so many stories that have to be told and that need to be told have a lot of darkness in them, because the world has a lot of darkness in it.

Edgar Allan Poe is amazing because he was so dark. He's from Baltimore and so cynical that you can feel it when you're reading, it feels so honest.

I was influenced by people like David Fincher and William Friedkin, and these directors who kinda paint their films with these dark shades.

I also have just my own limits about stuff. I'm not interested in writing graphically about sexual assault for example. I feel like the stuff that I'm fascinated by is the stuff that's part of the public imagination of what horror is. The bleakness is a different issue. I think that just stems from my personality. I wish that I offered a little more glimmer of hope sometimes.

The number of mystery and horror writers I've met who are just the sanest and the nicest people... it's crazy. Maybe it's because the writing gets something out of the system?

I like dark, hopeless, beautiful tragedies.

Television has shied away from being too dark, because so much has happened to us recently here in the West, and people are sort of wanting to see more uplifting sorts of things.

I'm afraid the negative things are always the great subjects. Failure is much more interesting than success.

I remember the first time I ever showed my parents a song that I had written. The content may have been a little darker than they were used to, or really introspective in a way that may have been uncomfortable. I thought they'd retaliate with some kind of judgment or concern about whether I was feeling all right, but they were proud of it.

I've written so many songs that are hopeful - songs that are, like, about an old man that gives all his possessions away because he wants to help people. I wrote 'Pumped Up Kicks' just to tell a different type of story.

I've been pretty lucky - or slothful - in that I've never been a 'career builder.' I take the jobs that come along that feel right, and that's left me fairly open to all genres, really. But with 'Caprica,' the complex, dark and very smart script was the draw.

I've always been a huge fan of thrillers like David Fincher's 'Se7en.' I am fascinated by the disturbing, dark underbelly of life. I find such films deeply engrossing. They delve deep into the human psyche, and that's a place worth exploring.

I've only read three books by Stephen King. When I was 10 I read 'The Long Walk,' one of his pseudonymous Bachman books. In my early 20s, while trapped on a family vacation, I read 'The Dark Half,' which taught me a word I have never forgotten: psychopomp. Now I have read '11/22/63.'