Movies are about escape.
My stuff is my stuff. I do it for my own reasons, using my own peculiar set of guidelines. I’m not a student of the genre. I don’t care what anybody else does.
Just because I’m showing somebody being disemboweled doesn’t mean that I have to get heavy and put a message behind it.
Collaborate, don’t dictate.
My zombies will never take over the world because I need the humans. The humans are the ones I dislike the most, and they’re where the trouble really lies.
I don’t want a zombie society. I don’t want to go that far.
When there’s no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth.
I don’t think you need to spend $40 million to be creepy. The best horror films are the ones that are much less endowed.
I always thought of the zombies as being about revolution, one generation consuming the next.
Everybody knows the rules, even though some break those rules.
I’ll never get sick of zombies. I just get sick of producers.
I’ve always felt that the real horror is next door to us, that the scariest monsters are our neighbors.
As a filmmaker you get typecast just as much as an actor does, so I’m trapped in a genre that I love, but I’m trapped in it!
It would be very hard to write a serious drama and say some of these things. You can be much more abstract and allusive with horror, and it’s very forgiving to the author. You don’t necessarily have to take an absolutely positive position. You can just write whatever.
I keep a little notebook of things that I can do to the zombies that might be silly and fun.
I can’t really make fun of zombies. They’re not liars. They’re not cheats.
When I was old enough to go to movies alone, I got to see ‘Frankenstein’ and ‘Dracula’ on the big screen. I just fell in love with them.
As great as Ed is, the wisdom out here is that he can’t carry a movie. They’ll pay him $3 million to be the second banana in Julia Roberts things. But they won’t put up $3 million for an Ed Harris movie.
Collaborate, don’t dictate. Every department head has something to offer. Listen and gratefully accept their offerings. They’re moviemakers, too.
I grew up on DC Comics, moral tales where the bad guys got their comeuppance. To me the gory panels or grotesque stuff just made me chuckle.