I think, specifically with the horror genre, you have to make it very believable because it can come across ridiculous.
The thing is, horror is a big part of 'Sherlock Holmes.' Doyle also wrote a lot of great horror stories, so there's a lot more horror in 'Holmes' that people possibly think of. There's a lot of curses and mysticism and real scares.
Since I was a kid, I've had this morbid fascination with dark and scary subject matter.
To me, the scariest movie ever made to this day is 'The Exorcist.' It still scares the living hell out of me, and it's because of the fantasy element. It's the exorcism. It's the Devil. It's not a guy breaking into your house trying to torture you or cut your whatever off. Those kinds of movies don't do it for me, and I don't call them horror.
When I was a kid, I used to sneak down the stairs when my folks were listening to 'The Witch's Tale' and 'Inner Sanctum' on the radio. I went to see 'Frankenstein' in the movie theater and got the pants scared off of me.
I tend to write about dark things that happen in a very domestic setting 'cause that, to me, is much scarier than the unknown.
I'm kind of a scaredy cat - I don't watch a ton of them. I mean, I started reaching this script at night and had to wait until the next morning to finish it so it would be light out. It really scared me. The scary movies I like are The Others and Pan's Labyrinth - they're so scary but they're about real things, and hopefully this is too.
There's not a lot of pop music in the mainstream that makes you feel scared, that makes you wonder what's happening.
I love the 'Omen' films because they're real and scary; 'The Exorcist' because I really thought that could happen; 'The Believers' because that was really great.
I love 'Paranormal Activity' because it scares you more with little effort. I like 'The Blair Witch Project' and the 'Omen' series and 'The Exorcist.' I love 'Exorcism of Emily Rose.'
I love horror movie soundtracks like 'It Follows' or 'Halloween.'
I'm not great at fear. I made the least frightening vampire show ever on TV. I'm pretty much good at heroic narratives and making people laugh, and that's pretty much it.
There are moments in 'Body Snatchers' that touch the sort of thing that I find scary... like isolation and the inability to trust even familiar things. But - is that a horror movie - or a thriller? I don't really know the difference.
Rather than a taste for the macabre, I like the full range of human emotion in a story, which means darkness and light. It means warmth, but it also potentially means scares.
I was always interested in films that scar.
Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.
I can't just watch a horror movie and leave it at that. The scary parts just stick with me. It kind of infiltrates my brain and sometimes I can't sleep at night, so usually I don't go and voluntarily watch one.
I suppose that it's my impulse to mine, as a writer, these scary parts of ourselves and the world.
It's the ones that deal with the inner fear, the unknown realms and the mysticisms that are scary. You had that in the Carpenter version, and you have that in this prequel. It's paying homage, very much, to that.
I've always wanted to be involved in an exorcism movie. But I thought, "How do you make something scarier than The Exorcist?" The answer is you don't. But that doesn't mean you can't make something that is original and interesting.
