Movies are designed to tell us stories, engage us on an emotional level and keep our attention. This can be done with a wide range of emotional triggers - Love, adrenaline, comedy. But fear is a highly potent sensation.

Zombies - obviously they're doing it in a much more expansive way on The Walking Dead - basically, what you used to do is you put a bunch of goo on an actor and have them shamble towards you, and it's a very effective creature. It always has tremendous impact, just that feeling of death coming for you; that's universally accepted.

On the lower budget pictures, you go overtime more, you're sort of scrambling for the shots and cobbling together more ideas at the end.

Comic books, if you're adapting a comic book - like X-Men, for example - you've got 40 years of amazing stories to dig into, things that incredible artists have been thinking about for decades.

A vampire is very easy; you just take a very good-looking actor, put some teeth on them, make them pale, and you're there.

All sizes of film sets have the same level of excitement and friction and tension and then vast sections of boredom that define the process, so I love it all.

If you can get an audience to identify themselves with a character, they will subconsciously feel that their own lives are in danger. People tend to pay attention in situations like that. I think fear is the easiest, and most visceral, emotion to activate in an audience.