A Quote by Peter James

The crime genre's always been regarded very well by the literary end of the book world, whereas horror, although it had that spell in the late eighties, by and large, it's sort of ghetto-ized, and considered to be exploited literature.
I think the big thing is that Stephen King is just a phenomenon, and when he came along, for the first time horror was suddenly considered a very commercial genre. It had always been around, of course, but now, the books had the word 'horror' actually printed on their spines.
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 was a late bloomer. I was 38 when my first book was out and 43 when my first crime novel was out. I had a story that could only be told as a crime story. I think the genre is good; it deals with the fundamental questions of life and death. The problem is there are too many bad crime stories.
My first horror film was - well, I don't know. 'Bless the Child' is sort of genre, but 'May' was such a cult hit that after that, I just started getting offers for horror. I think I got a little bit pigeonholed in it right off of 'May' because there was just such a large response to that film.
Whereas in the past optimism had been regarded as rather shallow - because 'oh well, it's just your temperament, you happen to be just a cheerful sort of person' - what I wanted to do was to establish that in fact it is the pessimists who are allowing all kinds of errors to creep into their work.
I do think that once a horror genre is commonly parodied in other movies it sort kills that genre or that specific take on that genre. Once it sort of becomes a joke in and of itself, so you have to push and find something new.
I think there's been a gigantic shift in the way we talk to each other, and the way that we communicate with each other. So as a filmmaker, the stuff's always been really interesting to me, and I sort of considered a lot of my films horror films, the ones that were relationship dramas, because I feel like it was very easy to look at modern communication and the Internet and cell phones and all that stuff as horror movies, basically.
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.
Well, the idea of God as a supreme being means that he is simply like us, writ large, and just bigger and better, the end product of the series; whereas this divine personality that we meet in the Bible was, for centuries, regarded simply as a symbol of a greater transcendence that lay beyond it.
That partially due to the world of media and commerce, the idea of a comic book has been lost in the ghetto, whereas the graphic novel is now being held up as something to aspire to and as something that's respectable for adults to read.
I had this whole issue of doing a crime film in the 2010s. The genre's been mined very, very heavily. Post-Scorsese, post-Tarantino, post-Guy Ritchie, what do you do? I wasn't attracted to pulp so much as all of a sudden I had a pulp problem. I had to find a way to make this interesting, because there's a lot of crime films that come out on VOD every week, and a number of these star Nicolas Cage.
Horror is so often a 'thinkless' genre, sort of considered popcorn movies, but you really put a lot of, not just heart and soul, but a lot of physical energy into it.
There’s always been a need for horror fiction, though - ghost stories have been a staple of every human society since the beginning of recorded literature - and while commercially the field may have its ups and downs, it will never go away. Hell, look at the Bible: gods, devils, ghosts, witches, giants, resurrections. That’s one big horror story. And it’s the most popular book on the planet.
I'm a horror movie fan to begin with, so to come back to the genre, I feel like horror has been very good to me.
I had always loved horror films, so I wanted to do something in the horror genre but wanted it to be sweet and charming at the same time. Because there's a difference between watching horror, where you can leave it behind, and writing horror, where you have to live in it for months and months at a time.
I more seriously considered publishing it under a pseudonym than I considered publishing it as fiction. I think the decision to write it as nonfiction happened at the very outset of the process, because the overwhelming impetus for writing this book was to understand what the experience meant, and to override my own reductions and rationalizations, whatever story I had that was not true. It didn't sit well with me and I needed to answer that. That's sort of the reason I write everything.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!