Fundamentalism is rooted in fear, and it's another reason I'm interested in the horror genre, because I know the fear that fundamentalism is built upon.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
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.
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.
I'm quite a rational person. I'm not very superstitious, but I really do enjoy horror as a genre.
For me, there is a basic recognition of horror as the most open doorway where the intersection of philosophical and religious ideas can come tighter.
For me, it's very easy to write a horror movie that's just a succession of scary sequences, but it's hard to find horror movies that have a genuine theme to them that are really exploring some aspect of our psychology and our fears.
Psychological horror I've always appreciated, like 'Rosemary's Baby.' The slasher movies and the grotesque movies are the ones that I've really been off for a while.
Psychological horror is more interesting to me than the explicitly physical.
I spent a lot of my adult life overcoming fear. It was a subject I knew a lot about, and it's one of the most important and most powerful human emotions. Fear is one of the greatest driving forces in the world. So I thought I could go into the horror genre and do things differently and contribute a different point of view.
Fundamentalists are crazy. They're the real world equivalent to the evil geniuses of our spy fiction and our superhero comics. They want to mold the world into a specific shape that they really believe in, and if you don't believe in that, if you can't relate to that, it just seems crazy.
Horror, for me, is not defined by the thing that provokes one's fear, but the human being who has contact with it.