Last House offended a lot of people. The results in the theaters, even in Boston, reminded me a bit of things from when I was studying theater of the absurd, and the rise and the appearance of Ionesco plays, and things like that. Thinking, "My God, people actually are getting into fistfights. People are having heart attacks. People are actually trying to get into the projection booth to destroy the print."

If you're in a theater, people are texting, all around you. You have the little glowing screens everywhere. Think of how annoying that can be.

[I was] 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.

All of us have our individual curses, something that we are uncomfortable with and something that we have to deal with, like me making horror films, perhaps.

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

But I made him the Deputy Secretary for Homeland Security because that added an element of political espionage.

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