Halloween put me on the map, and I'm very sad to hear of his death.

Horror found me. I got into the movie business to make westerns.

Horror has been a genre since the beginning of cinema, all the way back to the days of silent films. I don't think it will ever go away because it's so universal. Humor doesn't always travel to other countries, but horror does.

There are two different stories in horror: internal and external. In external horror films, the evil comes from the outside, the other tribe, this thing in the darkness that we don't understand. Internal is the human heart.

I have two different categories of favorite films. One is the emotional favorites, which means these are generally films that I saw when I was a kid; anything you see in your formative years is more powerful, because it really stays with you forever. The second category is films that I saw while I was learning the craft of motion pictures.

I never got in this business, in cinema, to make horror movies. They arrived on my doorstep and I got typecast. Which was fine, I enjoy it, but I got into this business to make westerns. And the kind of westerns I used to see, they died. So that didn't work out.

Movies are pieces of film stuck together in a certain rhythm, an absolute beat, like a musical composition. The rhythm you create affects the audience.