In junior high I read a lot of Stephen King, whose Americana approach to writing was often about "the terror next door" and at the same time I was reading a lot of Clive Barker, who was on the other end of the horror pendulum: insidious and disturbingly psychological. I found it fascinating how these two authors came at horror from two totally different perspectives.

We often do to people what people are very comfortable with doing to animals without a second thought.

You are what you worship. There's something so true about that, with how we're operating as a culture in America. People believing in a wide variety of things, and rarely believing in the same thing. It gives us an opportunity to have a conversation: What is faith? What is belief? What is your personal responsibility for how you see yourself in the grander scheme of the universe, and life, and your contribution to it?

I'm always looking for the idea in a scene or the philosophy that makes a scene worth existing beyond exposition.

Race totally matters. Race totally changes your point of view. It's a different experience.

Horror films have always been quite operatic for me. I always sort of scratch my head at people's offense to them. If you don't get them, and you don't like them, then don't watch them.

If you see the blood, then there's an easy association of the violence. The violence that happens when there isn't blood is actually much more subversive and unsettling.