Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm a natural born skeptic.
I'm a Stephen King fanatic.
Well when I hear 'slasher' I think about the 80s.
It's a wonderful thing to watch an actor just act.
I have an allergy to sequels and remakes in general.
I've always been fascinated with the '60s in general.
Audiences are savvy. You can never go wrong assuming the best of them.
In high school, I started studying movies and not reacting to them emotionally.
I'm a firm believer that what you don't see is always scarier than what you do.
I am always fascinated by the mental struggles that people and characters have.
When horror is about something - capital-A about - that's when it's really landing.
Well, as a kid I did all the Bloody Mary games and using a mirror to scare yourself.
When you talk about people being haunted or wrestling demons, that is a rich metaphor.
Depending on how 'Doctor Sleep' does, we'll see what movie opportunities there will be.
Horror movies feel like comedies when you're making them because everybody laughs so much.
Gerald's Game,' we could not have made it at a studio without substantive changes to the story.
With 'Gerald's Game' in particular, we didn't have enough money or time and it was really hard.
I don't like the fact people watch things on their phones and tablets, it kind of hurts my heart.
I did not growing up watching a lot of horror. I wasn't allowed a lot of it and I was a real chicken.
I'm a major NASA nerd, so I've spent a lot of time learning about the space race and the Apollo missions.
Building and sustaining tension is always my priority, so home entertainment provides challenges to that.
I'm sure many more people saw 'Hush' in the first weekend it was on Netflix than saw 'Oculus' in theatres.
I always liked the challenge of that, how to take an inanimate object and build something around it that's scary.
I grew up in a very healthy nuclear family, and I was fortunate enough to not have to deal with loss and grief as a child.
One of the things about horror movies that I've noticed with the children I've worked with is that they have a great time.
When I read Doctor Sleep, when it was first published, I was so taken with getting to spend time with Danny Torrance again.
I like to say that Hollywood is one of the most democratic entities in the world and the reason why is every ticket is a vote.
I never shoot my movies like I'm shooting 'a horror movie,' I shoot them like dramas. Dramas and then something horrible happens.
For me, 'The Haunting of Hill House' is a series about life after a haunting, what happens after the credits roll in most horror films.
People will bemoan the quality of horror but then they'll go out and support horror films that are lacking qualities that they say they want.
I do not have the female experience. I don't, and I strive to understand it, but I'll never truly be able to. I don't think any men will, really.
I think in a lot of ways, 'The Shining' is about alcoholism and 'Doctor Sleep' is actually about recovery. They go together pretty well that way.
We always try to leave room for the actors to come in and make discoveries on set, in their interpretation of the scene. The shot list is scaffolding.
We're all storytellers in this business, and I personally love to sit back and watch someone tell a story. If it's done well, there's nothing like it. It's pure.
I'm wide open to evidence of the supernatural, but I also think that the majority of those experiences are probably natural phenomena we don't understand just yet.
I'm always drawn toward family drama, and dysfunctional family stories. It speaks to me, in a really profound way, and I think there's so much to explore within it.
I hate jump scares. I really hate them. I think there's nothing special about being able to startle someone - that's an involuntary reflex, and it makes people laugh.
There is only one act of violence in 'The Strangers' and it comes at the very, very end... the movie could have worked just as well if we didn't see it, in my opinion.
I always tend to tilt dark on an ending, because I feel like, especially with horror movies, those are the endings that don't evaporate. Those are the ones that stick with you.
For me it's about creating and sustaining tension for as long as possible, and I'm not generally interested in allowing that tension to be deflated, especially by a jump scare.
At home, people are more likely to be distracted than in a theatrical environment. They're checking their phones, pausing to get a snack, or sometimes jumping from show to show.
Midnight Mass' is kind of my baby; I've been working on that for six years. I started writing it while 'Oculus' was in preproduction, and it's a very personal, scary little story.
With digital technology there's a huge spectrum of flexibility in what you can do to manipulate sound and image - which you can push into a really artificial realm if you aren't careful.
A movie studio has to answer to a marketing department, and to shareholders, to ensure the broadest audience possible for its product; it tends to err on the side of caution as a result.
Gerald's Game' had such an impact on me when I read the book in college that I think I've actually, consciously or unconsciously, been incorporating elements of that story into my work ever since.
Well, I'm always drawn to the drama first. A story is really only interesting to me, if you can remove all of the genre moments and remove the supernatural element, and it still works. Then, I'm interested.
I associate a family as the safest place in the world. So when it comes to things that scare me, introducing instability and tension into where you're supposed to be the safest really strikes a chord with me.
Audiences are embracing more and more unique material. I think they can sense the cynicism when people are just cranking something out to try to ride off the success of something else. I think they can feel it.
Horror is fascinating because it's so seasonal and it's like you've got these periods where slasher movies are in and it's like everyone loves them. Next thing you know zombies are in. Then vampires are acceptable.
A viewer's imagination is a powerful storyteller, and can often come up with things way more frightening than what you can explicitly show in a horror movie... try to engage that imagination, and the results can be magical.