Quotes About Horror

When you're talking horror or sci-fi, you're working in a genre that has loosely certain thematic elements, or, you could even call them rules. But rules are there to be broken. I think that young filmmakers should go all the way back to the history of horror, from silent films like "Nosferatu", and through to today's horror films, so they understand the history of horror films and what has been done. Understand that, and then add something new or original.

I like horror, but I tend to like it as seasoning. I'd get very bored if I was told I had to write a horror novel. I'd love to write a novel with horror elements, but too much, and it doesn't taste of anything else.

Obviously loss of family is huge and critical, but I think really it's more about losing a sense of family. The horror of that kind of incompleteness. Writing this book, I tried not to think about my father, which does no one any good fictionally. I did try to imagine not just the horror of that moment, but the horror of having witnessed it, and the lifelong void. And I think that's what's so frightening.

I think horror comedies tend to skew more comedy than horror, for the most part.

We've had mass shootings in the United States in the part of violent antiabortion protesters, in the part of violent pro-ISIS militants. The trick and the trap and the horror is not faith, Scott. I don't think the trap and the horror is fanaticism.

This, then, is the ultimate, that is only, consolation: simply that someone shares some of your own feelings and has made of these a work of art which you have the insight, sensitivity, and — like it or not — peculiar set of experiences to appreciate. Amazing thing to say, the consolation of horror in art is that it actually intensifies our panic, loudens it on the sounding-board of our horror-hollowed hearts, turns terror up full blast, all the while reaching for that perfect and deafening amplitude at which we may dance to the bizarre music of our own misery.

I thought I could capture the stories of the city on paper. I thought I could write about the horrors of the city. Horror stories you see. I tell you I didn't have to look far for material. Everywhere I looked, there were stories hidden there in the dark corners. . . . I wrote and still there were more. . . . No one would publish them. 'Too horrible,' they said. 'Sick mind,' they said. I thought I could write about the horrors of the city but the horror is too big and it goes on forever.

Somebody pointed out to me that there's no horror film on my resume, which is true, but I also don't really go see those movies. Although when I was thinking about it, I was thinking "I would probably have a really nice beach house if I made a horror movie." They seem to be very popular. I just don't think it's my thing.

In my own personal time, horror films freak me out too much, so I tend to steer clear of watching horror films on my own.

Horror has been a genre since the beginning of cinema, all the way back to the days of silent films. I don't think it will ever go away because it's so universal. Humor doesn't always travel to other countries, but horror does.

Mental hospitals are great for horror movies because they're already scary even without the horror or supernatural elements. This is a place where you can play with the ideas of one's sanity, what's real and what's not.

When people make a horror movie, it's a few months. This is years of horror, that these guys have to play out. It just hit me and I was like, "Wow, that's heavy."

From an early age I loved horror movies. I read books about horror, cops, firemen and military. Over the course of the years I started to see that there's a reality to this. The first movie I was really conscious of seeing was THE EXORCIST and I don't know if any of you have seen that but it scared the sh*t out of me. It really frightened me.

Don't you see, if when we die there's nothing, all your sun and fields and what not are all, ah, horror? It's just an ocean of horror.

There are a lot of war memorials around the UK. It's usually a part of the war memorials. I loved the way The Glorious Dead sounded. It's kind of a strange thing to say. There's nothing particularly glorious about being dead. It sounded like a strange, horror film. It just grew from there, really. It seemed quite apt for the record. We're kind of obsessed with zombie movies and horror films. It seemed like it just fit, at the time.

I make unpopular versions of popular things. I make a horror film and it's not a horror film. None of my genre movies function as genre movies.

Buddy Hackett [was] talking - this is Hackett, not me - about the Virgin Mary, a limerick sort of thing, and all these children and families ... the look of absolute horror. He's going on and on and on, and finally he stops. It's just total horror, and the camera's still rolling. You can hear it, sort of a grinding noise. And the director says, "Anything else, Bud?"

Physical reality is one of the biggest horror movies of all, and you know how we love horror movies.

Getting sequestered and not really knowing what to do with your time and then discovering, 'Oh, I can watch a bunch of horror movies' has probably played out in a lot of people's discovery of horror.

Horror is a totally different animal. It's intense. You can do drama or comedies, but in horror, you really have to trick yourself into believing a lot of unbelievable phenomena.

The horror of our history has purged me of opinions.

I also wonder why is it that so many of the movies and books that are detective stories are also the most aesthetically interesting? From Hollywood noirs to horror movies like The Shining [1980].

Isn’t it only through laughter that we become one with the gods and thus can endure life and can overcome all the horror and waste and suffering here on earth? …Isn’t it only through laughter we can stay human?

I don't want you leaving laughing, I want to leave you shaking. That to me is true horror.

It's a convention, but in horror movies the female characters usually tend to believe easier in a supernatural event.

I was voted Most Humorous in my senior class in high school, and I was a fan of comedy, my whole life. I never got into the horror genre, and action was fine, but I just loved comedy. Any comedy I could get my hands on, I would. I watched Saturday Night Live religiously. I've just been a fan of comedy, my whole life.

I've wanted to work with [Kairo aka Pulse director] Kiyoshi Kurosawa, but he has not been making horror movies recently.

I think there can always be beauty in struggle. I mean, as far as childbirth, I had my son in the hospital, but then I had my daughter at home. There's no doubt that there's a struggling in birth, and a beauty and a horror and fear and joy too.

I have never written a book that I wouldn't want to read. The trouble is, I love to read horror, sf, fantasy, mysteries, hero pulps - romantic fiction, in the original, traditional meaning of that term, as opposed to mimetic fiction. But most of all, I love thrillers.

I enjoyed Adam McCormick, it was this odd mix of coming-of-age, of horror, of suspense, of almost romance. These kind of disparate elements that for some reason blend really nicely into Jamie Marks is Dead quiet story. And I like that the scope of the film is very intimately focused. It's really fascinating and I didn't quite get the script at first, and I liked that, it made me want to keep thinking about it.

The advantage of horror books is to take the reader and cut him out of the pack and work on him one on one. It has its advantages because the people that are there in the movie theater really are a mob. If you get one guy alone you can do a more efficient job of scaring him.

I have a hard time with extreme imagery. Like I can't watch horror movies or anything like that.

I've always said that with a lot of the horror franchises that I've started, it's like directing a pilot. I come in, I direct the first movie and all these directors come in and direct all the sequels after me and hey have to kind of retain the look, the tone, and the characters.

When I write my novels, I'm not writing them to make political points. I'm writing them because I passionately love monsters and the weird and horror stories and strange situations and surrealism, and what I want to do is communicate that. But, because I come at this with a political perspective, the world that I'm creating is embedded with many of the concerns that I have. But I never let them get in the way of the monsters.

Fear has disappeared. No more fear. In Asia, it is different. They've discovered again the fear and the psychology of the characters. Without psychology, the horror film doesn't exist.

I had Paterson, and The Art Lover, to guide me for The Tales of Horror (written from 1988-'97 and published in 1999), but I still was so lost, back then, as I tried to understand what I was writing and how it went together. There was a draft of that manuscript that had all these brightly colored paper clips on the pages so I could visualize what I saw as the book's themes and threads - that was a long time ago.

It is interesting to note that the best periods of Italian Horror films came out of the Sixties, when Italy was enjoying a carnival period of phenomenal optimism, and the shadowy side surfaced with all of its attendant dark, beautiful, baroque, catholic symbolism.

There is nothing in the world I hold in greater horror than to see a body moving against its head: and I shall be very careful notto ally myself with such a monster.

Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.

At this point in my career, it doesn't bother me much that I'm probably hopelessly typecast. I like to work, and horror films definitely keep me working.

I seem to remember telling you both that I would have to expel you if you broke any more school rules,” said Dumbledore. Ron opened his mouth in horror. “Which goes to show that the best of us must sometimes eat our words,” Dumbledore went on, smiling.

Horror is the badge of humanity, worn proudly, self-righteously, and often falsely.

Horror, let's face it, is basically pretty dumb. You're writing about events that are preposterous, and the trick is to dress them up in language so compelling that the reader doesn't care.

I'm a goner, a kid who stays up half the night trying to figure out the horror of the world and trying to survive it.

I'm not a crazy horror fan. At that time i wasn't really looking to do something like that. But I thought to put a twist on it to put a werewolf versus vampire... 'What's the best opponent for a werewolf?' Became the idea of vampires and what about putting those two together? And ultimately it got turned down. But we loved the idea and shopped it around.

And I guess I'm a kid at heart in that when I go for entertainment, I want to be totally transported. I want to go somewhere else; I want to encounter different things, different beings, different universes. And so I love that aspect of being able to play those things in both 'True Blood' and in 'American Horror Story.'

Hell is out of fashion - institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th century are more private affairs, the gaps between the bars are the sutures of one's own skull. A valid hell is one from which there is a possibility of redemption, even if this is never achieved, the dungeons of an architecture of grace whose spires point to some kind of heaven. The institutional hells of the present century are reached with one-way tickets, marked Nagasaki and Buchenwald, worlds of terminal horror even more final than the grave.

Alien is one of my favourite films. I'm a classic horror fan. It's a tough one for me, because I get scared quite easily.