A Quote by George A. Romero

A lot of my friends are people who do horror films: Wes Craven, John Carpenter, Stephen King. — © George A. Romero
A lot of my friends are people who do horror films: Wes Craven, John Carpenter, Stephen King.
Wes Craven is obviously a horror film icon so I was definitely very interested in bringing something back to life that Wes had created.
It was seventh grade or something like that when we started falling in love with stuff like Sam Raimi and Wes Craven and John Carpenter. Also, our filmmaking skills were getting a little more polished, so we thought we could actually make something that was not funny.
Audiences are very sophisticated and they know the nuts and bolts of the genre - certainly with horror more than others I think. But they attract lots of people, they're much derided as a genre but people go and see them and they're not all dumb. There's some very clever horror films. Stephen King gets a lot of flack for not being a proper writer because he's a horror writer, but I think he writes some brilliant books. I think it's wrong to just bin it before looking at it.
I grew up on all sorts of horror - Hammer Horror and Vincent Price's 'Theatre Of Blood.' I loved the hidden, scary layers, but there wasn't that much around for youngsters in terms of horror books. I can remember reading Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot' and 'Cujo,' but I thought there should be more for teenaged horror fans.
I got very lucky to work with Wes Craven, very early on in my career, and continued to work with Wes for almost 19 years. I learned so much from him, and about his sense of story and his sense of horror, and that was great to be a part of.
If you look back at a lot of these Spielberg movies and Stephen King books, even though there's a lot of fun and a lot of camaraderie, there's also a bit of sadness there, whether it's 'E.T.' with the divorce or in Stephen King's 'It,' where there's racism. There's always some sort of evil - there's sadness and people aren't happy.
Stephen King says that if you forget an idea, then it can't have been any good. He means he, not you. You are not Stephen King. Do not attempt to emulate Stephen King at home.
Whenever I would see horror movies I would be traumatized and I'd have to watch them behind my hands or behind the couch sometimes. So I grew up first with authors like John Bellairs and R.L. Stine for kind of the young adult horror. But I found Stephen King in the sixth grade and that was it. I became a rabid fan.
Stephen King in many respects is a wonderful writer. He has made a contribution. People in the future will be able to pick up Stephen King's books and learn a lot about who we were by reading those books.
Stephen King writes a lot of things that are really charming and quirky, and that are more ironic than horror.
My earliest memories of horror are 'Friday the 13th Part 2,' John Carpenter's 'The Thing,' 'Halloween,' 'An American Werewolf in London,' and 'A Nightmare On Elm Street'... and 'Hatchet' is so obviously inspired by those films that I may as well have made it in 1984.
In junior high I read a lot of Stephen King, whose Americana approach to writing was often about "the terror next door" and at the same time I was reading a lot of Clive Barker, who was on the other end of the horror pendulum: insidious and disturbingly psychological. I found it fascinating how these two authors came at horror from two totally different perspectives.
I never played Freddy as real. In the true bible of Wes Craven's outline for the films, Freddy only manifests himself in dreams. And a lot goes into a dream, not the least of which is imagination. So Freddy is secondhand information. Freddy is an urban legend that's been handed down to these teenagers over the years.
I think if anybody had a roll of dice with a lot of money at stake, they would not want Wes Craven and a romantic comedy.
I like serious films, the moneymaking blockbusters that don't make any kind of sense and John Carpenter films.
I think that, back in the day, there used to be a lot of horror films that kind of had a checklist of what went into making the 'perfect horror film', and I think now people are raising the bar in the industry, as far as the types of horror films that are being made.
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