I never thought I was doing the same thing as directors like John Carpenter, George Romero, and sometimes even Hitchcock, even though I've been sometimes compared to those other guys. We're after different game.

I think of horror films as art, as films of confrontation. Films that make you confront aspects of your own life that are difficult to face. Just because you're making a horror film doesn't mean you can't make an artful film.

You know, there's a saying in art that in order to be universal you must be specific. So I think every artist feels that he is dealing with specific things but that it also has significance universally.

Long live the new flesh.

It was apparent to me that religion was an invented thing, a wish-fulfillment thing, a fantasy thing. It was much more real, dangerous, to accept that mortality was the end for you as an individual. As an atheist, I don't believe in an afterlife, so if you're thinking of murder, if your subject is murder, then that's a physical act of absolute destruction because you're ending something, a body, that is unique. That person never existed before, will never exist again, will not be karmically recycled, will not go to heaven, therefore I take it seriously.

I don't think that the flesh is necessarily treacherous, evil, bad. It is cantankerous, and it is independent. The idea of independence is the key. It really is like colonialism. The colonies suddenly decide that they can and should exist with their own personality and should detach from the control of the mother country. At first the colony is perceived as being treacherous. It's a betrayal. Ultimately, it can be seen as the separation of a partner that could be very valuable as an equal rather than as something you dominate.

I have a real aversion to ghosts because I don't believe in them. I think ghosts are actually a religious concept, because it means you believe in an afterlife. And I don't.