So I grew up in a very book-friendly environment and my education as a writer was reading. I think that’s the best education. Reading, and taking from the people I admired.
My job on ‘Dark Shadows’ was to make it fun and funny, first and foremost. It can still be dark and it can still even be gory and gothic at times, but it also needed to be fun and it needed to be an experience that people would enjoy having.
Movie characters rarely get to think out loud or talk very much about their emotions. Instead they have to, very briefly, show their feelings through their action or through dialog.
If you’re Stephen King and you have a massive body of huge-selling well-respected work, you can pivot and do whatever you want. I don’t have that body of work, I don’t have that audience that’s comfortable with me enough yet to follow my bliss with me.
If a novelist has created vivid characters, interesting relationships, settings the reader can easily imagine, and intriguing stories, a screenwriter has loads to work with. The challenge comes with deciding what to cut and what to keep.
I always say that the characters in Jane Austen’s original books are rather like zombies because they live in this bubble of immense wealth and privilege and no matter what’s going on around them they have a singular purpose to maintain their rank and to impress others.
My day job is making TV shows.
If you write really good material, the rest just falls into place. There’s really no trick to it.
If a movie has more characters than an audience can keep track of, the audience will get confused and lose interest in the story.
I’ve been a lifelong horror fan, but at the same time, I would say 90 percent of my reading is biographies and nonfiction history.
I’ve always enjoyed reading history, particularly presidential biographies.
I want to be judged harshly because that forces me to really sit down and focus.
I think any period in history can be adapted into interesting fiction, as long as you approach the actual history with respect.
There are so many stories to tell in the worlds of science fiction, the worlds of fantasy and horror that to confine yourself to even doing historical revisionist fiction, whatever you want to call it – mash-ups, gimmick lit, absurdist fiction – I don’t know if I want to do that anymore.
Of all the weapons in the world, love is the most dangerous.
All I ask is that my final months be happy ones, and that I be permitted a husband who will see to my proper Christian beheading and burial.
Thank you, sir, but I am perfectly content being the bride of death.
I think zombies have always been an easy metaphor for hard times. Because they’re this big, faceless, brainless group of evil things that will work tirelessly to destroy you and think of nothing else.
Father may have been wanting in some things, but here he was masterful. Night upon night, I marveled at his power to hold listeners in rapt attention. He could tell a story with such detail, such flourish, that afterwards a man could swear it had been his own memory, and not a tale at all.
No ninjas! How was that possible? Five daughters brought up at home without any ninjas! I never heard of such a thing. Your mother must have been quite a slave to your safety.