I love the fact that a lot of my audience is people from the inner city. African-Americans love my films.

Something like Nightmare On Elm Street, to me, was kind of an examination of levels of consciousness and the pain of facing the truth, and how easy it is to fall asleep, or want to fall asleep.

My mother wouldn't even let me read DC Comics.

I came to terms with living mostly in a world of horror pictures or genre pictures. I have had a few chances to get outside and do something different, like Paris, Je T'Aime or Music Of The Heart, but mostly it's been my lot. And to have created, with a few shocking films, an awareness or a perception of me as somebody dangerous and scary - that can be sold, but trying to sell me for some other kind of picture, like Music Of The Heart, was very difficult.

I like to address the fears of my culture. I believe it`s good to face the enemy, for the enemy is fear.

When I was a kid, I was taken to something called Telenews in Cleveland by my best friend's father. My own father was gone by the time I was 5, I think, but this man would take us to Telenews at the end of World War II, and we'd watch all these newsreels. I'd seen real stuff. That kind of stuck in my mind.

I have felt over the years a definite progression or arc from feeling guilty about what I had done with the first one [film], because certainly there was all that fundamentalist guilt that came pouring back in.