A Quote by Mike Flanagan
What's so exciting and unstoppable about the horror genre is that I view it all as metaphorical exploration. It's the safe place that we, as a culture, can deal with things that upset and frighten us - the darker side of our nature.
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The realization of our soul has its moral and its spiritual side. The moral side represents training of unselfishness, control of desire; the spiritual side represents sympathy and love. They should be taken together and never separated. The cultivation of the merely moral side of our nature leads us to the dark region of narrowness and hardness of heart, to the intolerant arrogance of goodness; and the cultivation of the merely spiritual side of our nature leads us to a still darker region of revelry in intemperance of imagination.
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.
In our traditional culture, people have a very different view towards nature than in Western culture. We consider humans as part of nature. But in the West, they talk about protecting nature. That's a joke because nature doesn't care; it's humans who need to protect themselves.
With The Exorcist we said what we wanted to say. Neither one of us view it as a horror film. We view it as a film about the mysteries of faith. It's easier for people to call it a horror film. Or a great horror film. Or the greatest horror film ever made. Whenever I see that, I feel a great distance from it.
For me, a theme that's always circling around in my head - which is why I love the horror genre - is what we're ready to do for metaphorical and physical survival.
One of the things we must do to begin to solve our hate problem is to put down our metaphorical weapons, our defenses, our special interests - and be honest about the role that guns play in this culture of hate in America.
We have a history in country music of writing about the darker side of things - maybe not as much in modern times, but there's a lot of cheating and self-deprecation. We sort it out in song, in country music, as a genre.
I was born on Halloween night, 2:00 am on November 1st, but still Halloween night in the USA. I think it was a destiny for me to work quite a bit in the horror genre. I love the horror genre. Since I was a teenager, my friends and I used to go to a video store and rent many horror movies that we would watch over the weekend and then scare each other at school. I've been fascinated with the horror genre all my life.
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.
Anger is a response that can lead to harm if we don't evaluate what we are upset about. Ask yourself what you are afraid of, as anger is almost always fear in disguise. If we think something or someone threatens us, we feel fear-fear that we are inadequate, that our lives are out of control, that things won't go our way. Then we fight. Find out what you're upset about. We rarely are upset for the reason we think.
I love the horror genre for how cinematic it is. I gravitated, I think, initially, toward the horror genre because, of all the genres, I think it is the genre that is most friendly to the subject matter of faith and belief in religion.
When things mean a very great deal to you, exciting anticipation just isn't safe.
Horror itself is a bit of a bullied genre, the antagonist being literary snobbery and public misconception. And I think good horror tackles our darkest fears, whatever they may be. It takes us into the minds of the victims, explores the threats, disseminates fear, studies how it changes us. It pulls back the curtain on the ugly underbelly of society, tears away the masks the monsters wear out in the world, shows us the potential truth of the human condition. Horror is truth, unflinching and honest. Not everybody wants to see that, but good horror ensures that it's there to be seen.
I think that the kinds of stereotypes that people have about Haitians or about HIV sufferers exist because we don't realize that these are our brothers, our sisters, our aunts and uncles, our neighbors. They are us. And I don't mean that in some metaphorical sense. They are literally us.
Many people prefer a view of human nature that includes a true side and a false side - in other words, humans have a single genuine aim and the rest is decoration, evasion, or cover-up. That's intuitive, but it's incomplete. A study of the brain necessitates a more nuanced view of human nature.
I tend to fall more into the fun horror genre than the traumatic horror genre. I love the films where you're laughing as much as screaming, but that doesn't mean I don't like the other ones.
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