A Quote by Jordan Peele
I find campfire stories and urban legends are kind of the bread and butter that inspires a lot of people who are making horror and thriller. There is a nugget of truth behind these sort of cautionary tales.
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I do like crime thriller stories. That's because these stories have a lot of layers. There are always three sides to such stories... there is a truth, there is a lie and then there is the ultimate truth. Different human emotions and intense interpersonal relationships form the core of stories in this genre.
In a lot of ways, the way you're making your bread and butter is off people who aren't necessarily who you're writing for.
You can think of my films as cautionary tales, but you might even think of them as despairing tales, because at least in a cautionary tale, you have this idea that by listening to the story you can assure a better outcome. Whereas I'm not at all convinced that's the case. In fact, if anything, I'm convinced that it's the opposite.
Sometimes one sees people butter their slices of bread with long, slow, admiring strokes in the same way in which Tom Sawyer's friends whitewashed the fence. Never butter an entire slice of bread at one time.
I liked that sort of thing, those one-off stories like 'Tales of the Unexpected,' 'Hammer House of Horror,' 'The Twilight Zone' and 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents.'
People have been modeling their lives after films for years, but the medium is somehow unsuited to moral lessons, cautionary tales or polemics of any kind.
Writing an informative yet compact thriller is a lot like making maple sugar candy. You have to tap hundreds of trees - boil vats and vats of raw sap - evaporate the water - and keep boiling until you've distilled a tiny nugget that encapsulates the essence.
I find the horror genre quite challenging. That's not to say everything I've done has been straight horror - a lot of them have been more on the thriller side. But regardless, I find it the most challenging as an actor to create sheer anxiety and terror out of nowhere because there's nothing scary going on and you have to act like it is.
The thing is, horror is a big part of 'Sherlock Holmes.' Doyle also wrote a lot of great horror stories, so there's a lot more horror in 'Holmes' that people possibly think of. There's a lot of curses and mysticism and real scares.
Writing stories, adopting other characters, making up fantastic stories and tales, this is a way of perhaps enhancing who I am. Writing stories takes a commonplace old life and makes it all somehow more interesting. And hopefully I can do that in a way that touches a lot of people in their lives, too.
The definition of horror is pretty broad. What causes us "horror" is actually a many splendored thing (laughs). It can be hard to make horror accessible, and that's what I think Silence of the Lambs did so brilliantly - it was an accessible horror story, the villain was a monster, and the protagonist was pure of heart and upstanding so it had all of these great iconographic elements of classic storytelling. It was perceived less as a horror movie than an effective thriller, but make no mistake, it was a horror movie and was sort of sneaky that way.
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.
'American Horror' goes for a very specific kind of Seventies suburban downer ambience - 'Flowers in the Attic' paperbacks, Black Sabbath album covers and late-night flicks like 'Let's Scare Jessica to Death.' It even has 'Go Ask Alice'-era urban legends.
When I was in Boy Scouts, back in the day, we'd tell stories around the campfire. That's why I love movies. It's literally you and your friends, telling stories around a campfire, whatever they may be.
There are moments in 'Body Snatchers' that touch the sort of thing that I find scary... like isolation and the inability to trust even familiar things. But - is that a horror movie - or a thriller? I don't really know the difference.
I read a lot of ghost stories because I was writing a ghost story. I didn't think at all I was writing a horror or a thriller or whatever because it is about a ghost, whereas a horror film can be about aliens or things that rise out of the marsh that have no human shape.
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