Every season I teach zombie school. The casting people in Georgia look for like 200 new recruits. They come in in groups of 20, and I audition them and grade them based on their look and their performance ability.

It's funny, I worked with a lot of directors in the many years that I've been doing this, and generally when you hear a director yelling on set, everybody scatters in the other direction.

I always say that, if you have great actors and great storytelling and great monsters, and you mix them together, nine times out of 10, it explodes in your face.

I grew up really loving horror movies and genre movies. I was a big fan of Universal Monsters movies, read Famous Monsters magazine. I built monster models and creature effects...

I love the expression 'makes your skin crawl,' because when you have that sensation while you're watching something, it really does.

During the preproduction when I'm shooting and then once we wrap we go away. And then the visual effects guys take over. And then they add all those little bits and pieces. They come up with ideas during the cut in the editing, and they said while would be really cool if we did this thing here where the blade pops out. So then you see the movie and say wow that's a really neat idea. I wish we would have thought of that.

At my house I have a full-size time machine that I’ve built over a couple of years... I love looking at people’s faces when they walk into my office. They’re literally astounded.