People who work in horror know they are contributing to a genre that has always been loved and will always be loved - privately. It's the forbidden evil working behind the curtain. My job scoring a horror movie is like being the barker at a carnival. A good barker can get anyone to walk into the roped-off tent.
When I was a kid, my favorite movies were the George Pal version of 'War Of The Worlds,' 'Them,' and 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers.' Those movies were scary! They haunted my nightmares for years, so when I started writing, I wanted to write a story that was just as big and just as scary.
I love scary movies and respect the filmmakers of scary movies, and it's just as hard to make a great scary movie as it is to make a great comedy or drama or anything else.
You just find the best actors that you can. There's an inherent drama within the framework of scares and killings and all that. In 'Scream,' there is very real drama that would be in almost any drama.
'Penny Dreadful' is so realistic. The tonality is so earthy and so real that I actually believe it is in the realm of possibility for all these extra species to exist among us.
I'm not a horror fan. I get scared easily.
Horror fans are a particular breed. They analyze films with such detail and expertise that I am reminded of the Canadian literary critic Northrup Frye, who approached literature with similar archetypal analysis.
For me, the sound design and the musical score is a big part of what makes scary movies work.
I've seen little pieces of 'Interview with a Vampire' when it was on TV, but I kind of always go yuck! I don't watch R-rated movies, so that really cuts down on a lot of the horror.
When I was old enough to go to movies alone, I got to see 'Frankenstein' and 'Dracula' on the big screen. I just fell in love with them.
When I was 12, I had a fondness for horror movies like the 'Wolfman.' The boy next door said I should read Poe.
It is the creature that stands at the center of horror movies, not those who have made it their business to bring the beast down. We're all the same.
Horror is like comedy. Woody Allen's comedy is going to be very different from Ben Stiller's comedy which is going to be different from Adam Sandler's comedy which is going to be different from Judd Apatow's comedy. They're all comedy, but they're all very different types and you can enjoy all of them. Horror is the same way.
I thought The Shining was just absolutely wonderful. Stephen King reaches all kinds of people. In the beginning he was just dismissed out of hand, which was terrible.
Zombies are kind of a perennial.
'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' - I had a lot of friends who told me to watch it. And I was like, 'I'm not buying seven seasons of a frickin' show.' It got to the point where, 'Seriously, you have to watch it.' Buffy is not my favorite, but it's amusing.
Maybe 'Bhoot' wasn't scary for me because I made it.
Now, after 18 years, not a sign of Lovecraft in my work.
The Shining' is one of the few horror movies that I actually like and it actually scared me.
I think it is beyond doubt that H. P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.
I want to direct a feature film. Horror is my main genre.
People used to always complain that horror films have no stories, that it's all just about kills and stuff like that.
I grew up loving horror films. But I had to step away since I didn't want all that negative stuff in my psyche. I didn't want to conceptualize those thoughts into my life.
'Night of the Living Dead,' then 'Dawn of the Dead' is a few weeks later, 'Day of the Dead' months later, and 'Land of the Dead' is three years later. Each one spoke about a different decade and was stylistically different.
You can't compare David Cronenberg's 'The Fly' to the older version.
