Quotes

I believe the cinema is one of our principal forms of art. It is an incredibly powerful way to tell uplifitng stories that can move people to cry with joy and inspire them to reach for the stars.

On horror movies: "It's like boot camp for the psyche. In real life, human beings are packaged in the flimsiest of packages, threatened by real and sometimes horrifying dangers, events like Columbine. But the narrative form puts these fears into a manageable series of events. It gives us a way of thinking rationally about our fears."

Horror films don't create fear. They release it.

I like to address the fears of my culture. I believe it's good to face the enemy, for the enemy is fear.

I think there is something about the American dream, the sort of Disneyesque dream, if you will, of the beautifully trimmed front lawn, the white picket fence, mom and dad and their happy children, God-fearing and doing good whenever they can, and the flip side of it, the kind of anger and the sense of outrage that comes from discovering that that's not the truth of the matter, that gives American horror films, in some ways, kind of an additional rage.

In retrospect, it's usually pretty easy to look at horror movies and see the influences of the time. And I think right now, with the post-9-11 world and Iraq, creative people are almost being goaded to look at things in the strongest way possible. If you look at the Academy Awards [movies], those are films about real issues. I think everybody is saying, 'We have to talk about the nitty-gritty stuff here.' It's not the time for confections. [March 2006]

Certainly the deepest horror, as far as I'm concerned, is what happens to your body at your own hands and others.

"If we don't get out of Iraq soon, it'll be like A Nightmare on Elm Street" (April 2007)

If I were interested in reality, I'd be making documentaries.

There is rage in my films, but it's a complete matrix. Sone could be directed at my father, a scary figure.

A producer said, 'Make a horror movie'. I said 'I've never seen one.' He said, 'You're a fundamentalist, you must have demons rattling around.

I think sometimes you might expect or want greater recognition. But to me it's a little like how French Impressionists felt about formal recognition. You know, once you're a member of the academy you never pose any danger or threat. I don't know if I'd like that.

[on A nightmare on Elm Street having sequels] I thought they'll never be a sequel. Boy was I stupid.

[on his 1999 movie Music of the Heart] That's my mom's favorite movie of mine, because it was the only one she saw. It was something that I was really drawn to. Horror films are not me, or they're not all of me. They're a very thin slice of me.

[on his 1996 movie Scream] It's almost on a comic book level as far as the danger. And also kind of soap opera-ish.

[on his 1995 movie Vampire in Brooklyn] That was kind of a screwed-up thing, because I wanted to work with a big star. I suppose it could have been better if it were a horror movie, but it wasn't. Eddie (Murphy) didn't want to be funny. He wanted to be serious and he was very difficult.

[on how he got Drew Barrymore to look scared and crying in Scream] Drew Barrymore told me a story of a boy who tortured his...I think it was his dog, with a lighter and it set it on fire and she burst into tears. And being the exploitative bastard that I am as a director, I said "do you mind if we use that?"

So every time on the set if I wanted her to cry, I'd say "the boy has the lighter" or something like that, and she'd burst into tears and be just frantic.

[on the film business] It's a strange business, because once you finish a film, there's this deafening silence and you say, "I'm not working," and the phone doesn't ring. You utterly panic. It's harrowing. Everything is so short-term, so dependent on the whim of public taste and business things you have no control over, like how the economy is going, and how well your film is distributed, or what ad campaign they come up with, or even what the title is.

[on horror films in general] I think they can work two ways. They can distort the reality of violence in a way that makes it seem very attractive; they can show the Dionysian side, which is a whole orgiastic, cruel thing, getting off on the suffering of other people. I think that's a very dangerous kind of horror film. I try to make the kind that shows the end result of violence is something quite appalling. But in the long view, I'm not so sure anymore what the hell it all means.

When you have an idea that really fascinates you and you can honestly say, 'I've never seen anything like that,' what you get is, you get that first audience goes out and tells everybody. And the reason they do that is they've never seen anything like it. You're trying to be the avant-garde of horror. That's where you want to be.

It was a great pleasure to make [Music of the Heart], and to see Meryl [Streep] nominated [for a best actress Oscar] for it. But most of the people I run into who loved it are surprised that I made it. When you have a name that means scares, you have to live with that.

I've always felt like [Scream's] Sidney or [A Nightmare on Elm Street's] Nancy could never go back to that state of mind that they were in before, but that's the life of a warrior, and in a sense, there are no more civilians anymore. You're a warrior. You're in combat. Because the whole world's in combat.

You have a responsibility to really help the [horror] genre grow, 'cause there's no limit to how profound it can become. If you go back to those guys like [Federico] Fellini and [Luis] Buñuel, talking about really profound things. Now, I don't know whether you can get a big audience with films that abstruse, but you can in horror if you scare the shit out of them about every eight minutes. So you do a fun deal with the devil: I've got to put a lot of interesting ideas, but I'll hide them and I'll also scare people and make them laugh.

For me with all this stuff, both the horror films and thrillers like this, the most interesting thing is what goes on inside people's heads.

The horrors of retirement. These are scarier than any horror movie I can dream up.

'Happy wife, happy life' is a mantra it seems unwise to ignore.

You don't enter the theater and pay your money to be afraid. You enter the theater and pay your money to have the fears that are already in you when you go into a theater dealt with and put into a narrative. Stories and narratives are one of the most powerful things in humanity. They're devices for dealing with the chaotic danger of existence.

Certainly the deepest horror, as far as I'm concerned, is what happens to your body at your own hands and others.

What you want to do is you want to put your audience off-balance. You have to be aware of what the audience's expectations are, and then you have to pervert them, basically, and hit them upside the head from a direction they weren't looking.

It seems like all the powerful people on earth just want to build condos and knock down all the trees... As somebody once said with wonderful succinctness, the golf course is man's boot on the neck of nature.

Horror movies have to show us something that hasn't been shown before so that the audience is completely taken aback. You see, it's not just that people want to be scared; people are scared.

The first monster you have to scare the audience with is yourself.

I learned to take the first job that you have in the business that you want to get into. It doesn't matter what that job is, you get your foot in the door.

[on his 1995 movie Vampire in Brooklyn]: "I thought it was good, fun little film and it was nice to get a chance to do comedy but i think the script really hampered it".

[on Sandra Peabody] I'm trying to think which of those actors had acted before. I think maybe Sandra Peabody had one role, and I believe the others had not.

[on Sandra Peabody] You know, the character of Mari took an enormous amount of abuse. I liked Sandra Peabody a lot; I thought she was very pretty, and very plucky... because she was a very young actress, she wasn't nearly as confident and easygoing as Lucy was, and she had become involved in something that was very, very rough. And she hung in there. When the character was raped, she was treated very roughly, and I know Sandra said to me afterwards, "My God... I had the feeling they really hated me."

[On directing horror movies] A lot of the films I've made are just kind of using the genre, because that's where I was in effect, to talk about violence and hallucinative reality and kind of the irrational curve of the 20th century. I mean Last House on the Left didn't feel like a horror film so much as a bizarre political commentary in a B-movie format. People Under the Stairs was certainly very political. I'm kind of talking about the ones that I wrote myself because I kind of did some real dogs in there, too. And even the end of Nightmare on Elm Street, the seventh one I did there last was already kind of deconstructing the whole format and looking behind the scenes at the people who made it and confronting issues of censorship and everything else. I don't know if anyone in the genre has, but I've never felt--especially since I didn't have a big background in the genre that I was ever consciously making "horror films."

It's very difficult for me to even define what a horror film is. I think a lot of the films I've done are quite far from the "classical horror film."

I had high hopes for Shocker, but it didn't quite turn out the way I envisioned. It was my attempt at a kind of rock 'n' roll horror film, but I was a little too eccentric in my approach."

I did The Hills Have Eyes Part II mainly for the money. I wasn't very proud of the film, because I didn't feel I had any control over it. It was basically a job for hire, and I didn't put my heart into it.

I thought The People Under the Stairs was an incredibly fun movie to make, but it had a weird tone that was very hard to nail. It's a film that has both humor and horror, and for some people, that's a very difficult balance to strike.

[About making Deadly Friend] It was just a terrible experience. I think we all knew it was not the film it was supposed to be... I didn't think it turned out very well.

It was a very strange experience making Shocker. I think I was trying to do something innovative, but it didn't really come together. I didn't realize until afterward that I was getting distracted by trying to make something that was too different.

I made Deadly Friend... and I can't tell you why. It was a film that I think I was trying to make a more accessible story, and it just didn't work.

I think Vampire in Brooklyn is one of those films that didn't quite find its audience right away, but over time, it developed a following. It's always interesting to see how certain films, for whatever reason, become cult classics

[about working with Eddie Murphy on Vampire in Brooklyn] Eddie Murphy is a genius, but he's also a very difficult person to direct. He has a very strong personality and he knows what he wants. He was very invested in the project, but I think we had a different idea of what the film should be

There was a definite evolution in the 1990s in the way I approached filmmaking. The People Under the Stairs was a bit of a horror fairy tale, New Nightmare was my meta-commentary on Freddy, Vampire in Brooklyn was an experiment with blending comedy and horror, and Scream and Scream 2 were about revitalizing the genre.

[about Eddie Murphy and Angela Bassett on Vampire in Brooklyn] Eddie Murphy brought a kind of exuberant energy to his role, whereas Angela Bassett grounded the film. Her strength and intensity were the perfect counterpoint to Eddie's more over-the-top performance. Their chemistry really worked because they each brought something unique to the table.

[about working on Vampire in Brooklyn] Angela Bassett was wonderful to work with. She brought a level of depth and seriousness to the character that balanced Eddie's wild energy. John Witherspoon, on the other hand, brought a comedic energy to the film that was absolutely needed