I think the important thing about staying creative and staying sharp and original is not to look back too much, and to kind of look to where your vision is going now. But I have felt over the years a definite progression or arc from feeling guilty about what I had done with the first one, because certainly there was all that fundamentalist guilt that came pouring back in. Feeling like I'd done something horrible, "I'm a despicable person and I'm perverse," and all these things, to a sense of the power and the necessity, in a sense, of horror films and dealing with dark material.

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

Horror films don't create fear. They release it.

Dad, girls don't fall down every time they run.

I've found that if you have two films that don't perform well it doesn't matter that you've had a bunch of successful ones. The phone stops ringing, and after Deadly Blessing and Swamp Thing that's what happened.

People who are kind of at the cutting edge of life and survival, and being near the nitty-gritty, like my films, and I like that.

I did have the resource of having taught Greek mythology and the history of Western civilization, and you can go back into the plays of Aeschylus and follow what happens when people seek revenge, and there are people plucking their eyes out. And Greek mythology is filled with all kinds of monsters and whatnot.