Horror movies are the best date movies. There's no wondering, 'When do I put my arm around her?'
— Eli Roth
I never put out a vanilla edition of a DVD.
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.
I'd love to see us get to a point where you can make a movie and not worry about the limits of the violence. Then I think they'd get so violent that people would get bored of it.
You know, I'm from Boston, and in Boston, you are born with a baseball bat in your hand.
I think that horror films have a very direct relationship to the time in which they're made. The films that really strike a film with the public are very often reflecting something that everyone, consciously or unconsciously feeling - atomic age, post 9-11, post Iraq war; it's hard to predict what people are going to be afraid of.
Creative writing and shooting are muscles that atrophy. But when you work them, you become a self-generator who can branch out.
I want people to see my name on a movie, pay money and know they're going to be entertained for 90 minutes.
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 have so many different projects, I hear voices in my head - the characters talking all at once - and I have to write to make them stop.
Horror audiences don't need to see some TV actor they're familiar with.
I would love to do a musical!
'Eraserhead' is a weird, horrible nightmare, and it doesn't narratively make sense. Stuff's happening, but you honestly feel like you're in a nightmare, and it has such disturbing imagery that it stays with you forever once you've seen it.
I've realized that I can't multitask in the writing department; I can only kind of do one thing at a time.
Well, anytime I make a movie, I like to load it up with more things than you could ever catch on the first viewing.
There's fear in everything, but we can't just succumb to that. We have to suppress it, so we get used to suppressing fear to make it through the our day. Otherwise, we'd become paralyzed by them.
When I go see an R-rated horror movie, I want lots of violence.
I think characters are most terrifying when they're relatable. It's best when your most horrible characters make sense, and are believable. That's when a movie is most terrifying.
What is important to me is that people know I respect the business of making movies.
Anytime you make a movie, the goal is a wide theatrical release, with the right distributor.
Once I got over the fear of writing female characters, it actually came quite easily and I was really happy with it. I just thought about girls I knew really, really well and I'd just have conversations with them and tried to relay how they talk about certain things.
Las Vegas is a 24-hour city. It never stops.
I need to eliminate 'like' from my vocabulary. I begin sentences with, 'That's seriously like... ' I hear myself talking in this Los Angeles high-school student kind of way, and I hate it.
I love movies. I mean, I really, really love movies.
When you make a film for a million and a half dollars and it opens at 20 million, the next question out of everyone's mouth is, 'When's the next one, when's the next one, when's the next one?'
'Cabin Fever' was very much inspired by 'The Thing.' It's really a perfect guy's horror movie: There's no love story, it's just straight-up horror. And it's so well-done. It moves at a slow pace, but it's really terrific.
Anytime you're the first to speak out against something, there's going to be a backlash.
Much of my youth was spent in the parking lot or inside a Dunkin' Donuts.
I think that many people are ashamed when they feel afraid. There's this thing in our society that you're not allowed to feel scared. You have to be a man and put on a brave face, but we all have fears.
I feel like in the '90s, horror just lost its way and everything became so safe and watered-down.
I generally follow my own compass and make films about what's scaring me.
As a kid, my idols were Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson, and I get into crazy races with myself. Raimi was 21 when he made movies, and when I didn't get 'Cabin Fever' made that fast I thought I'd failed.
I like to take risks and do weird things and stuff that's not normal compared to other Hollywood movies. Not stuff that's totally avant garde and daring, but doing stuff that's in other languages and not using stars and using real people - things that they generally don't do in mainstream films.
It's just assumed that a horror sequel is going to be bad. It's never going to be as good as the first one.
I've always dreamed of having a year-round haunted house.
I get a little too obsessive with work.
Look at comic books. It used to be something that only geeks were into. And now it's everywhere.
Even post-WWII, nobody talked about the Holocaust. It wasn't until the '50s that people started talking about it.
