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.

Audiences are very sophisticated and they know the nuts and bolts of the genre - certainly with horror more than others I think. But they attract lots of people, they're much derided as a genre but people go and see them and they're not all dumb. There's some very clever horror films. Stephen King gets a lot of flack for not being a proper writer because he's a horror writer, but I think he writes some brilliant books. I think it's wrong to just bin it before looking at it.

Mainly horror movies and exploitation movies and a lot of stuff comes from those press books from those old movies. Lines out of old movies, comic books that we collect, all the old horror comics of the 50s, probably about the only comics that we collect are obscure horror comics, the real sick ones from the 50s. Some stuff comes from there but mainly just old records, old rockabilly records and that stuff, singles mainly, 45s.

You have to have horror that is entertaining, where you can laugh. Most people don't want you to laugh at horror. They just want you to just be disgusted and terrified.

I think when the joke comes from the situation in a horror film, it's really great. I don't like jokey horror films like where people are cracking a joke or being post-modern about it.

My brother and I are huge fans of foreign horror. Some of the most interesting movies are coming from overseas. I guess if there was one change we'd like to see, it would be more original horror films made by the studio system and less of a reliance on remakes.

I'm looking at some comedic horror films because I have often been accused of being too dark. I'm not dark, not compared with 'Saw' or anything like that. So I'm looking at live-action horror films, but not slasher ones - ones that have humor and maybe some social satire.

In junior high I read a lot of Stephen King, whose Americana approach to writing was often about "the terror next door" and at the same time I was reading a lot of Clive Barker, who was on the other end of the horror pendulum: insidious and disturbingly psychological. I found it fascinating how these two authors came at horror from two totally different perspectives.

A cowboy, a lawyer, and a mechanic watched Queen of the Damned,” I murmured. Warren—who had once, a long time ago, been a cowboy—snickered and wiggled his bare feet. “It could be the beginning of either a bad joke or a horror story.” “No,” said Kyle, the lawyer, whose head was propped up on my thigh. “If you want a horror story, you have to start out with a werewolf, his gorgeous lover, and a walker.

Horror is a reaction; it's not a genre. Somebody's life would have to be in danger for it [story] to be a horror story.

If a country has a fascist leader, this is a great horror for that country; but there is much greater horror: The existence of ignorant and unethical masses who support that primitive leader!

Horror is like comedy. Woody Allen's comedy is going to be very different from Ben Stiller's comedy which is going to be different from Adam Sandler's comedy which is going to be different from Judd Apatow's comedy. They're all comedy, but they're all very different types and you can enjoy all of them. Horror is the same way.

And another thing about German symphonic development. I tell you, our cold kvass soup is a horror to the Germans, and yet we eat it with pleasure. And their cold cherry soup is a horror to us, and yet it sends a German into ecstacy. In short, symphonic development is just like German philosophy and soup-all worked out and systematized. When a German thinks, he reasons his way to a conclusion. Our Russian brother, on the other hand, starts with a conclusion and then might amuse himself with some reasoning.

Horror movies often work better when we have a stake in the game. The more we care about the characters, the more human they are to us, the more appealing they are to us and the more effective the horror tends to be.

I love horror movies in space. I love it when the genre switches over and what was sci-fi becomes horror.

Horror need not always be a long-fanged gentleman in evening clothes or a dismembered corpse or a doctor who keeps a brain in his gold fish bowl. It may be a warm sunny day, the innocence of girlhood and hints of unexplored sexuality that combine to produce a euphoria so intense it becomes transporting, a state beyond life or death. Such horror is unspeakable not because it is gruesome but because it remains outside the realm of things that can be easily defined or explained in conventional ways.

I read a lot of ghost stories because I was writing a ghost story. I didn't think at all I was writing a horror or a thriller or whatever because it is about a ghost, whereas a horror film can be about aliens or things that rise out of the marsh that have no human shape.

I don't want to just make horror movies; I don't want to just make any type of movie - I don't just like horror movies, I love movies.

People say 'Scott's [Derrickson] movies are kind of scary, is this a horror movie?' Of course, [Doctor Strange] it's not a horror movie. But what Scott has done so well in the best of his films is have one foot completely in the real world and one foot in this whatever supernatural sub-genre he was playing with.

The safest genre is the horror film. But the most unsafe - the most dangerous - is comedy. Because even if your horror film isn't very good, you'll get a few screams and you're okay. With a comedy, if they don't laugh, you're dead.

Horror has been very good to me in my career. Doing horror films is for the fans and helps keep that part of my career alive.

I love horror movies. I mean, who doesn't like a good horror movie every once in a while? It's fun to get scared.

I like making sci-fi movies because I like watching sci-fi movies. I like watching horror. I like being in a horror movie. I'm a fan. My perspective's a little different just because I get to participate as well as spectate.

The cool thing about making a Western is that people want to be in them. You rarely get the opportunity. With horror movies you are always trying to convince them. People in horror are always worried it's going to be this schlocky thing, and you're always trying to convince them that it's not. With Westerns, people immediately react with, "Oh, I've always wanted to do one."

I love horror movies, but it's not the only thing I want to do.

I woke up one day and I realized I wasn't born beautiful, but my wife was, so I decided to make a horror film about it: what it would be like to be born beautiful.

I'm mad, true. But only about one thing. Horror movies. I love spooks. They are a friendly fearsome lot. Very nice people, actually, if you get to know them. Not like these industry chaps out here

I have a lot of stories. I had done a thing called Nightmare in Red White and Blue, which was an anthology of horror films. I narrated it with a man named Joe Maddrey, who's a writer. He came to my house and said, "Lance would you consider doing this?," and I like Joe so much that I completely relaxed.

I was lucky enough to have a plethora of types of roles before and during the horror movie part of my career.

I think that some laughter comes from escaped horror, doesn't it?

People who sleep around to get roles are frail and scared and most likely without talent. It's their own little horror show that only they can deal with.

One phrase summarizes the horror of hell. "God isn't there."

Oh dear, is that a skunk?" Leonora asked. "No," Alessandro gasped in horror. "No the smelly cat!" "I've told you, Alessandro darling, they aren't cats." "They look like cats. Like the big fluffy cat she's been stepped on and flattened to a big fluffy pancake cat," Alessandro argued.

That's why I've come to you, to seek release from a curse of misery and horror against which I'm powerless to fight alone.

I am actually a big sissy, and growing up, I never used to watch horror movies. Bambi gave me nightmares.

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.

I was struck with a bolt of distilled horror like I have never known before. Far worse than suddenly finding yourself walking through a prison cafeteria wearing Daisy Duke shorts and a Jane Fonda headband.

A good horror film is something that taps into something absolutely truthful about us - about what we want, about what we're terrified of - and brings that to life on screen in such a way that we can get close enough to that character to let our defenses down and want them to be safe.

It's just person after person in every different country that has a life that I can’t even imagine and has gone through horror that I can’t even imagine.

Horror films do not prepare us for the hours lost in searching after one clear thought.

The photographs of one dead terrorist mastermind carry no real news or information about the nature or horror of war. They just create sensation instead of deeper understanding.

That's also why comedy and horror are my two favorite genres of film to write, because you get these outbursts of emotion from people, laughter and shock, and it's really thrilling, and I like to be thrilled.

I'm having fun with what I'm doing but I'd never categorically say no to something because it's not horror. I'm keeping an open mind.

One day I want to write a full-on horror book.

Documentary is a little like horror movies, putting a face on fear and transforming threat into fantasy, into imagery. One can handle imagery by leaving it behind. (It is them, not us.)

For the best part of my childhood I visited the local library three or four times a week, hunching in the stacks on a foam rubber stool and devouring children's fiction, classics, salacious thrillers, horror and sci-fi, books about cinema and origami and natural history, to the point where my parents encouraged me to read a little less.

The daemonic-divine object may appear to the mind an object of horror and dread, but at the same time it is no less something that allures with a potent charm, and the creature, who trembles before it, utterly cowed and cast down, has always at the same time the impulse to turn to it, nay even to make it somehow his own.

Carrie was a terrific piece of work. At the end of the movie comes, when Amy Irving kneels down to put the flowers on Carrie's grave, a hand comes up through the grave and seizes her by the arm. The audience went to the roof, totally to the roof. It was just the most amazing reaction. And I thought, 'We have a monster hit on our hands. Brian De Palma has done something new. He's actually created a shock ending that shocks an audience that was ready for a horror film.' And there were several people who did it after that.