Carlos Ruiz Zafon Quotes

Gothic in its purest sense is actually a very powerful, twisted genre, but the way it was being used by by journalists - 'goff' with a double f - always seemed to me to be about tacky, harum-scarum horror, and I find that anything but scary. That wasn't what we were about at all.

I find inspiration in the movies I've loved, especially all films ever made about Dracula.

Shirley Jackson's writings are a must for aficionados of the gothic and of good literature.

I definitely fell in love with 'Dracula' when I was 13. I found it so fascinating and so dark and romantic.

I love all that kind of gothic Bram Stoker kind of thing. I love to get lost in that kind of escapism.

I don't really begin with ideas about genre. I certainly wrote a gothic novel, 'The Keep,' that conformed to and, in some ways, played with every convention I knew of to work with in the gothic, but the way I came to it was very instinctive and visceral.

After college, I went on a real big classics kick. Read everything by Faulkner, Hemingway, Woolf, Proust, Dostoevsky. And that classics train dropped me off at 'Dracula.' Halfway through it, I understood I'd never be going back, never 'leaving' the genre again. Since then, I've been on a fairly strict horror diet.

I think the Hammer films really made death quite sexy.

Dracula can sustain many interpretations and exists in many phantasmal forms... and Johnny Alucard is my attempt to explore the multiplicity of Draculas unloosed on the world in the long wake of Stoker's novel.

I am drawn to Americana, and I am drawn to gothic stories, and I love American gothic stories.

'Dark Shadows' was the spark that lit the fire of my childhood imagination. It wasn't polished; it wasn't perfect. But it gave us characters with real personalities and complicated motivations.

Right away I think of two books - 'Wuthering Heights' and 'Rebecca' - and of just sinking into them as a young reader. I think they must have appealed not just to my romantic adolescent soul, but I suppose there's also an appealing darkness in both of them.

There was a perverse side of me, with things like Van Helsing coming out. I didn't want to go down that route.

I read 'Rebecca' when I was a teenager and was swept away by the powerful voice, the gut wrenching suspense and the dark, twisted love story at its center.

One of the reasons I think Dark Shadows still runs is that it's dependent on nothing else other than a story.

I would like to see the technology used to explore more period horror genre works, for example, E. A. Poe.

There's such a fan base for 'Dark Shadows'. I remember watching the show as a kid, but I wasn't an ardent fan. I didn't run home from school to watch it.

Actually I liked that 'Let the Right One In,' that Swedish vampire movie.

Certainly Dracula did bring a hell of a lot of joy to a hell of a lot of women. And if this erotic quality hadn't come out we'd have been very disappointed.

I had always liked, well, who didn't love Lestat and fall in love with 'Interview with the Vampire,' and 'Nosferatu,' and Coppola's 'Dracula' with the awesome costumes? So I loved all that.

To be in something as iconic as a Dracula film, and to be playing Jessica van Helsing, who would have been Dracula's choice for a bride, through history and beyond the grave, was a thrill.

I do enjoy Gothic fiction or books about zombies if they are well written and I like vampires.

I certainly didn't want to make another movie that's 'just another Dracula film.'

I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.

For me, Dracula has always been associated with travel and beautiful historical places.