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I'll give you my worst nightmare. I'm dreaming that I'm onstage, the curtain goes up, and I have no idea what my lines are or what's going on. I think I should know, I kind of know, I remember rehearsing... and the audience is there waiting.

Some actors get by with behaving, not acting. You've got to sell the effect. I act more in the 'Nightmare' movies because it's not like me. I'm acting, not reacting.

Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.

In a weird way, that's the beauty of being an actor. You get to live out things that you're afraid of, and you get to say, 'Well, maybe I can get to the end of it and survive it intact and I can be the hero of my own story.' It's kind of a way of exorcising fear.

I think some horror authors are trying to scare you, but with me, I'm as scared as the reader is of the story. I've always been that way, since watching the 'Twilight Zone' movie - watching 'Firestarter' when my parents were out, or sneaking out to watch 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' at a friend's house because I couldn't watch it at my house.

Most of my nightmares involve me forgetting my lines in a stage play.

If you're going to play a villain, there's no greater compliment than being told that you give people nightmares. I never thought I would be the actor that would give people nightmares.

Anyone can write a story based on the kind of horror where you see a guy in car and then there's the bad guy in the back seat. It's infantile to rely on that for telling a story. That's like going to bed and thinking there's a monster under your bed. It's silly.

There's a crazy, false notion that audiences are not patient or will not watch a story, that you have to put in a scare every ten minutes. But I always thought that was insane.

I forgot how scary plays are. The audience is so much a part of the night - I know that a lot of it is trying to shut that out and just do your own thing.