Laird Barron Quotes

I don't go to scary movies. I don't like the experience of being scared. I think it's very weird that some people do. Obviously, humans are the only animals that do that. You don't see a wolf walk to the end of a cliff and look over the edge to freak himself out.

There is a fascination with fear. It grabs our attention.

I’m always looking for the monster. Not even just in horror. I want them in everything. Just give me the monsters. Logical conclusions don’t satisfy. Monsters satisfy, absolutely.

If you go back to, say, the Brothers Grimm or Roald Dahl, you see so much darkness in children's material.

I am trying to give the best performance possible in 400 pages. I want readers to be scared; I want them to be moved. Entertainment doesn't necessarily mean something trivial, but it does mean people wanting to get to the end of a book.

There's something about a roller coaster that triggers strong feelings, maybe because most of us associate them with childhood. They're inherently cinematic; the very shape of a coaster, all hills and valleys and sickening helices, evokes a human emotional response.

And I think I'm an adrenaline junkie, and there's nothing that will spike your adrenaline more than sitting in a theater and listen to an audience react to something you've written.

If it's scary, it's supposed to be scary. If it's funny, it's supposed to be funny. That's all I try to do.

You go to see movies to feel something, and being terrified - there's something so fun about that.

I'm fascinated by the whole clown phobia thing because I personally don't have it.

Establish character - otherwise, it is difficult to connect with what is frightening.

I definitely love to be scared. It draws the primal side out of you.

Scary things are good, aren't they?

When you're made to be frightened within a safe context, like watching a horror film, you have that tension/release which triggers all those happy chemicals that feel good.

The beauty of the horror genre is that you can smuggle in these harder stories, and the genre comes with certain demands, but mostly you need to find the catharsis in whatever story you're telling. What may be seen as a deterrent for audiences in one genre suddenly becomes a virtue in another genre.

When most kids were hiding their eyes or cowering under the covers, I was three inches away from the television when horror movies were played.

It's not until after you've been hit by a car and landed all right that the fear kicks in.

People love drama. They feed off of it.

We have this amazing ability to turn on the exactly same stress response worrying about a mortgage that a zebra does when it's sprinting away from a lion.

I always wanted to write a raccoon story. I don't know why. It's not like I want to own a raccoon or anything like that. I'm just fascinated by them.

I love watching audiences scream.

I grew up on Edgar Allen Poe, and I loved Alfred Hitchcock's movies.

I want to write books that keep people up at night, where they cry through the first forty pages and keep reading anyway.

I like scaring myself.

I have a long, complicated history with horror.