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

Many, many things are dangerous in our world, commercials and TV are dangerous, and so is the world of sitcoms. But nobody does anything about them because they're turning in alot of money.

It's quite rare that you make something and think that you did something that no-one else had done.

I realized that I really, almost by accident, had fallen into a labyrinthine, very powerful paradigm for dealing with these things through genre films. And once I realized that and realized the power of it, and the fact that because horror films aren't, in general, studio products - studios back them sometimes, but they don't try to meddle too much, because they kind of don't want to sully their skirts - you have a lot of freedom.

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 came from a very strict background. [So if you want to make a scary movie] if you were raised as a fundamentalist, just pull all the skeletons out of your closet.

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.