Mark Duplass Quotes

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 film like 'The Sixth Sense' burns an image of who you are into people's minds.

The best horror walks a line that's completely on a psychological level, not needing the typical tropes of traditional horror filmmaking, then also having to tease out those elements in a way that makes the audience feel like they know what they're in.

What I like about the Carpenter take on The Thing is the fact that it just has so much suspense. It seemed like a different story, with the horror elements. Those films that really speak to the primal fear that we, as human beings, have about the unknown have always intrigued me. That's the really scary thing, not the slasher, macabre movies.

'Eraserhead' is a weird, horrible nightmare, and it doesn't narratively make sense. Stuff's happening, but you honestly feel like you're in a nightmare, and it has such disturbing imagery that it stays with you forever once you've seen it.

Fear has disappeared. No more fear. In Asia, it is different. They've discovered again the fear and the psychology of the characters. Without psychology, the horror film doesn't exist.

Psychological horror I've always appreciated, like 'Rosemary's Baby.' The slasher movies and the grotesque movies are the ones that I've really been off for a while.

I started in the psychological thriller side of feature filmmaking with 'Spiral,' which was the first one that I wrote and directed and played the lead in.

Any horror element is as much psychological as special effects.

Even my pathological love of Japan and its beauties, glories and eccentricities is sorely tested by 'The Grudge 2,' from Takashi Shimizu, a movie so bewildering and impenetrable that I believe it siphoned off a good 40 IQ points.

Psychological horror is more interesting to me than the explicitly physical.

I've been a fan since I was a kid of that sort of bump-in-the-night stuff. I don't tend to go in too much for the slash-and-burn-'em or the walker kills on 'The Walking Dead.' That stuff's not necessarily the stuff that frightens me or gets me going. It's more the terror of waiting, the thriller aspects, that I find compelling.

I wouldn't exactly describe 'Detention' as a horror movie. I mean, it does have horror elements in it, but it's got a lot more to it, and it's not a typical horror movie.

I don't think you need to spend $40 million to be creepy. The best horror films are the ones that are much less endowed.

I don't write that much horror. People tell me my books are scary, but they're not really; I don't go there.

I do like sci-fi, and I do like horror - those are my favorite genres. Good horror, though, not like slasher horror... psychological horror like 'The Shining' - really good stuff!

For me, it's very easy to write a horror movie that's just a succession of scary sequences, but it's hard to find horror movies that have a genuine theme to them that are really exploring some aspect of our psychology and our fears.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

I think that true horror is accomplished by slowly getting into your brain. The old way is much more scary.

The scariest movies, to me, are like Michael Haneke's 'Amour.'

'The Shining' scares me so much.

'Session 9' can be interpreted in different ways. You can get the sense that Gordon breathes in an evil spirit but can also be read as a much more clinical movie that shows a man who becomes unhinged or may be going mad. An inspiration was Nicolas Roeg's 'Don't Look Now.'

What's important to me about horror stories is to look at what's actually horrifying about humanity, instead of shining a flashlight on it and running away giggling.

My favorite movie of all time is 'The Silence of the Lambs.' I think Hannibal Lecter is the scariest movie monster ever because he's smarter than you are.

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