The strongest human emotion is fear. It's the essence of any good thriller that, for a little while, you believe in the boogeyman.
What scares me is what scares you. We’re all afraid of the same things. That’s why horror is such a powerful genre. All you have to do is ask yourself what frightens you and you’ll know what frightens me.
It [horror genre] never dies. It just keeps getting reinvented and it always will. Horror is a universal language; we're all afraid. We're born afraid, we're all afraid of things: death, disfigurement, loss of a loved one. Everything that I'm afraid of, you're afraid of and vice versa. So everybody feels fear and suspense.
There are two different stories in horror: internal and external. In external horror films, the evil comes from the outside, the other tribe, this thing in the darkness that we don't understand. Internal is the human heart.
To make Michael Myers frightening, I had him walk like a man, not a monster.
Movies are pieces of film stuck together in a certain rhythm, an absolute beat, like a musical composition. The rhythm you create affects the audience.
Evil hiding among us is an ancient theme.
We all question our sanity. Everyone has had an experience of loss of control of something.
Directing is all about storytelling. It's not about equipment, or anything else.
When you have no money, you need invention.
Horror has been a genre since the beginning of cinema, all the way back to the days of silent films. I don't think it will ever go away because it's so universal. Humor doesn't always travel to other countries, but horror does.
Horror found me. I got into the movie business to make westerns.
Fears are all psychological. Being afraid of death, loss of a loved one and disfigurement are all powered by your mind, and that's very powerful stuff.
I don't want to be a part of the demographics. I want to be an individual. I wear each of my films as a badge of pride. That's why I cherish all my bad reviews. If the critics start liking my movies, then I'm in deep trouble.
To make movies you just have to want it enough. You have to have the passion for telling stories. You have to get by the love-of-movies aspect. You can't just be a movie fan.
When somebody who makes movies for a living - either as an actor, writer, producer or director - lives to be a certain age, you have to admire them. It is an act of courage to make a film - a courage for which you are not prepared in the rest of life. It is very hard and very destructive. But we do it because we love it.
Horror is always the same. It changes with the culture and changes with technology. The stories are always the same. There are just two basic stories in horror, two simple ones -- evil is outside and evil is in here [points to his heart].
Horror is a reaction; it's not a genre. Somebody's life would have to be in danger for it [story] to be a horror story.
I'm pretty happy with who I am. I like myself and what I'm doing. I don't need to be the world's greatest director or the most famous -- or the richest. I don't need to make a whole lot of great films. I can do my job and I can do it pretty well. This is the realization I've come to, later in life. It's called growing up.
A lot of it [success] is luck. That's a huge part of it that no one wants to talk about. You just got to be in the right place at the right time.
Horror stories have always worked on film. It's where they work. That's where vampires and ghosts and UFOs are real. They're not particularly real in life, but they're real on the screen. It's the communal aspect of movie-watching.
I don't watch my films. I've seen 'em enough after cutting them and putting the music on. I don't ever want to see them again.
Anybody can make a movie, if you have the will. The digital revolution has made it very inexpensive to make a film. Anybody who wants to can do it.
Film buffs who don't live in Hollywood have a fantasy about what it's like to be a director. Movies and the people who make movies have such glamour associated with them. But the truth is, it's not like that. It's very different. It's hard work.
What a director does... essentially, it's storytelling, but a director also controls the feeling and the sounds and the texture. It's an act of creation, like a symphony or a painting or a story. But with different tools.
