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I was a scared kid... I think I was born a nervous wreck, and I think movies were one way to find a way transferring my own private horrors to everyone else's lives. It was less of an escape and more of an exorcism.

It's the idea that anticipation is as scary as anything in a movie could be. People's imagination is the most effective tool in creating terror or dread.

We were asked to believe that the variety and the novelty of even the crude films of the early days would provide a means of entertainment which would cut out the stage.

Horror movies started to wane around the onset of World War II, and after World War II, when all the troops came home, people weren't really interested in seeing horror movies, because they had the real horror right on their front doorsteps.

It started getting too crazy with 'Earth A.D.' The concepts started becoming too brutal and violent. It was less about fiction and more about the real world, the past, present, and future. I think a lot of people got freaked out by that.

There's something really fun about being scared, and I guess that was at least part of why I wanted to film certain scenes from my new book, 'Skeleton Creek.'

I remember going to the theatre when I was little and the lights going down and just getting really scared about what was going to happen up there.

Being closer to the genesis of this whole period, it captured the importance of the concept of making contact and accurately depicted the paranoia of the time. It's an excellent film.

The history of horror movies goes back a long way... of people trying to convincingly be terrified when looking at a piece of tape on the side of the camera box. I have a whole new respect for it.

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.