Barry Watson Quotes

Most of my films have a lot of character development and exploration, whereas in most horror movies the characters are just cardboard.

Most horror films fail to scare me. I think 'The Ring' plays more as a psychological thriller. It's smarter, there's more character development and some of the themes explored go a little deeper.

In horror, character development is often pushed aside in favor of the shock value. The best genre movies to me are movies like The Shining. You had a connection to the characters in that film.

'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.

A lot of modern horror can leave me cold, and I'm not good with blood and gore and all that stuff. It's not fun for me. There's nothing entertaining about watching a film like that.

When you think of the 'Exorcist,' you think of Linda Blair and pea soup and all this madness, but really if you look at the first half of that film, the stuff between her and Ellen Burstyn is so naturalistic and so real.

Even if you look at the 'Paranormal Activity' movies, at the end of the movie things get really crazy and nutty, but they all start in a very mundane situation that people can relate to, and that's also to some degree what we tried to do in 'Chernobyl Diaries.'

When you get into a film, it is one story and one set development of a character, and you are able to delve into one character for a short period of time and discover everything about them.

What 'Scream' was great at was presenting ironic detachment and then making you actually care about the people that were having it, and juxtaposing it with their situation, all in the service of making a great horror movie. It was fresh.

I like emotional horror. I don't like horror movies. I hate them. But, if you can make emotional horror movies, I'm in. If I can care and root for the main character, then I'm in.

Typically in horror films the character just services the plot, and you really are just going from 'point a' to 'point b,' just so that you can end up at 'point c.' They are just sort of stick characters. That's just not interesting to me.

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

With 'The Sixth Sense,' my dad and I discussed how this was not so much a horror story as a story about communication. I understudied with my dad, in a sense. It made a huge difference.

It's very hard to connect with a character when you haven't gotten a sense of who they are.

I really love horror novels, horror films, that are pointing at deeper ideas and thematic meaning. It's a way of thinking about films differently; that's what I think I like the most about it. I love the fact that's it's pointing at a more mysterious world - that the world is more of a mysterious place than we tend to let ourselves believe.

In 'Poster Boys,' every character is well defined.

The film industry is mostly about unidimensional characters.

It's not that I'm not a horror fan, it's just that the horror scripts I've been sent have been rubbish and obvious. Because they usually are in horror films - it's just about scare factor. You're always one step ahead, you know who's going to die first, you know who's going to survive, you're going to get a jump every twenty minutes.

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

I think you've got to understand your character and where they're coming from.

When it comes to a character, I make sure that it adds to the plot.

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

I separate myself from my characters as much as possible, but I have these books that I create which are interactive diaries/timelines/memory books/pictures of the character's entire world.

You're living with these characters for years and years, you need to have a lock on who they are as people, what they like, what they don't like, what they experience, and what they go through.

I love the horror genre. I consider myself a genre filmmaker. I love genre, but I think there's a certain amount of complacency that comes with watching a genre film; people know what the devices are. They know what the tropes are. They know the conventions.