Karyn Kusama Quotes

Horror films and genre films are interesting, because I always look for a deeper meaning or a deeper theme in the film.

People used to always complain that horror films have no stories, that it's all just about kills and stuff like that.

I love Carpenter, I love Craven - these are all the classics - the Romeros of the world, but I think the biggest influence on me as a storyteller and as a filmmaker is actually Steven Spielberg. I love that even though Steven isn't known for being a horror director, he started out his career making scary movies.

What I would like to do is a thriller. I've been wanting to do that for a long time, but one that was not at all dependent on special effects. Just purely psychological, but will scare the hell out of you. That's what I would like to do. I have not found it yet.

A big producer offered me the part of the pretty girl that waits at home for the guy, and I couldn't do it. That's not a story I ever want to tell.

'Hereditary' is unabashedly a horror film. In a lot of ways, it's in dialogue with other horror films. But I do know that it was important for me that the film functioned first as a family drama. I know that I'm never affected by anything if I'm not invested in the people to whom the genre things are happening.

The great thing about horror films is that they work on a low budget. The genre is the star. You don't need big movie stars, and I actually think a lot of times that the best horror films are the low budget contained ones.

Sci-fi and horror, particularly, allow a storyteller to depart from, let's say, the demands of cinema verite or kitchen-sink realism or, even, just relatable dramas and can go into areas that are either - in the case of horror - more primally effective or, in the case of sci-fi, more speculative or imaginative.

I love horror films. I love ghost movies and haunted-house movies.

I'm actually a fan of horror films.

I like psychological thrillers but when it's demonic, there's no uplifting message.

The audience simply don't find a heroine picking a fight with 10 guys as convincing as a hero. So the industry always sticks to psychological thrillers and ghost movies for heroine-oriented projects and this can sustain only for a short time.

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

As far as horror films are concerned, I guess Vikram Bhatt is a brand name.

It's intriguing to me, when I see a horror script, or something like that, that's actually original. I think that's why I love 'Stranger Things,' because it's not just horror, it's everything, and when they use horror it's right.

I love scary films.

I think the problem with the cinema currently is that so much of the money that goes movies that offer a certain kind of repetition.

I think in the late '80s and early '90s horror was dead.

I'm a big horror fan. I'm a genre fan. I like to make these movies. They're my favorite kinds of movies to make.

I was looking for projects, as you always are, and I read this scene . . . and I'm in the Hollywood Hills. So I thought, 'This is interesting.' You have this setup that seems to be based in some reality and you can only wonder where Black's going to go with this.

Edgar Allan Poe is considered the great writer of horror stories, perhaps the greatest - I will say the greatest

There should be a greater register that the public is quite interested in mature women. It's really about the story; it shouldn't matter whether it's male- or female-driven. What should matter is if the story is powerful and interesting. And this has been going on forever.

I'm ready for conventions. You know what's interesting, the sort of questions that Lost raises are of a different sort from this movie. In other words, Lost is about figuring out the world of the show, whereas this one seems to raise questions about the world that we know. But I'm happy to entertain both.

I have a lot of stories. I had done a thing called Nightmare in Red White and Blue, which was an anthology of horror films. I narrated it with a man named Joe Maddrey, who's a writer. He came to my house and said, "Lance would you consider doing this?," and I like Joe so much that I completely relaxed.

Now it's somewhat easier for a woman to be a film producer or something like that if she wants, though it's not that easy. But to be any kind of successful woman took a lot of doing in the '30s, '40s, '50s, '60s... in the '70s it's getting simpler.