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Horror serves a cathartic role in human society, all throughout the world. It is a way of confronting the darkness, both within and without.

I'm not so sure that horror should be dismissed as something less than literature.

Horror isn't only about ghosts or monsters. For example, paranormal romance seems the antithesis of horror. Once you have a sexy, fun vampire who is sweet, and you have a happy ending, it's not horror.

Horror is about dreams and heightened states. It really is about taking away the logic on some level and getting right to the emotion of something.

Horror, for me, is not defined by the thing that provokes one's fear, but the human being who has contact with it.

The horror genre gets you in touch with our primal instincts as a people more than any other genre I can think of. It gives you this chance to sort of reflect on who we are and look at the sort of uglier side that we don't always look at, and have fun with that very thing.

Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life, horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is.

It's not an easy place to be - to write a horror film. You go down the stairs to the dark to find these characters. It's not a place anyone can go, and sometimes it's not a place that you want to go.

To me, the horror genre is the genre of non-denial. It's about admitting that there is evil in the world and recognizing that there is evil within us and that we're not in control and that the things that we are afraid of must be confronted in order for us to relinquish that fear.

Some people ask why people would go into a dark room to be scared. I say they are already scared, and they need to have that fear manipulated and massaged. I think of horror movies as the disturbed dreams of a society.