“It's a relief to see a monster on the screen instead of feeling it in my chest.”— Lindsay King-Miller, vice.com
“Telling scary stories is something people have done for thousands of years, for most of us like being scared in that way. Since there isn't any danger, we think it is fun.”— Alvin Schwartz, amazon.com
“I believe the desire to be frightened is as universal as the desire to be loved. We want to take the journey that allows us to survive what the people with whom you're taking the journey do not survive.”— Clive Barker, youtube.com
“The characters felt real, the world felt like our own, and there was no safety net — you weren’t safe in the daylight, your family could turn on you, and children weren’t safe from the monster. In fact, sometimes they were its favorite food.”— Mike Flanagan, ew.com
“Half the work of getting over anything is shining a light in the closet and realizing there aren't any monsters inside.”— Brianna Wiest, twitter.com
“The strongest human emotion is fear. It’s the essence of any good thriller that, for a little while, you believe in the boogeyman.”— John Carpenter, flavorwire.com
“Monsters in movies are us, always us, one way or the other. They’re us with hats on. The zombies in George Romero’s movies are us. They’re hungry. Monsters are us, the dangerous parts of us. The part that wants to destroy. The part of us with the reptile brain. The part of us that’s vicious and crue…”— John Carpenter, flavorwire.com
“What scares me is what scares you. We're all afraid of the same things. That's why horror is such a powerful genre. All you have to do is ask yourself what frightens you and you'll know what frightens me.”— John Carpenter, flavorwire.com
“To make Michael Myers frightening, I had him walk like a man, not a monster.”— John Carpenter, chasingthefrog.com
“Well, the first thing is that I love monsters, I identify with monsters.”— Guillermo Del Toro, amazon.com
“To learn what we fear is to learn who we are. Horror defines our boundaries and illuminates our souls. In that, it is no different, or less controversial, than humor, and no less intimate than sex.”— Guillermo Del Toro, amazon.com
“Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.”— Clive Barker, amazon.com
“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”— H. P. Lovecraft, amazon.com
“In the vaults of our hearts and brains, danger waits. All the chambers are not lovely, light and high. There are holes in the floor of the mind, like those in a medieval dungeon floor - the stinking oubliettes, named for forgetting, bottle-shaped cells in solid rock with the trapdoor in the top. Not…”— Thomas Harris, amazon.com
“I collect church collapses, recreationally. Did you see the recent one in Sicily? Marvelous! The facade fell on sixty-five grandmothers at a special mass. Was that evil? If so, who did it? If he's up there, he just loves it, Officer Starling. Typhoid and swans - it all comes from the same place.”— Hannibal Lector, Thomas Harris, amazon.com
“Fear comes with imagination, it's a penalty, it's the price of imagination.”— Thomas Harris, amazon.com
“What humans want most of all, is to be right. Even if we're being right about our own doom. If we believe there are monsters around the next corner ready to tear us apart, we would literally prefer to be right about the monsters, than to be shown to be wrong in the eyes of others and made to look fo…”— David Wong, amazon.com
“Our core is madness. The prime directive is murder. What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle.”— Stephen King, amazon.com