My grandparents were classic Indian grandparents. My grandmother would put so much powder on her face that it was like a Kabuki play and she'd come down the stairs. I was like 8 or 9 years old. My grandfather apparently had no teeth because he would take out his teeth and put them in a glass, and then he would try to scare me with it. I started to try to scare them when I was a little older.

A TV show where all of the characters are trying to figure out what's going on, and the suspense of that, fits my [voice] really well. You feel their frustration, anger and fear, and then, when the reveal happens, their sense of dread or horror, or whatever it is, and I like to paint with those colors.

I like to write in a shroud of secrecy because I have to keep finding ways to scare myself.

I try to take B genre movies and treat them as if they're A dramas. Get the cinematographers, get the actors to do an A drama, but it just happens to be about aliens or ghosts or crazy people, or killers, or whatever it is.

When I was a kid, I had two great guilty pleasures. One was horror movies and the other was martial arts movies.

There are scenes that were right on the edge, but I always try to err on non-indulgence. It's something that I'm very careful about, that I'm just leaning too hard into something.

You're never the same. You're degrading, or you're getting better. You don't stay the same.