Stephen Karam Quotes

I'm so interested in taking tropes from other movies and putting them on something where it doesn't belong.

'Hereditary' is unabashedly a horror film, whereas 'It Comes at Night' was a lot of things: it was a thriller; it was a postapocalyptic drama. It was a slow-building, very dark movie about relationships. 'Hereditary' is also about relationships, and I hope it functions as a vivid family drama, but it is also very much a horror film.

I read what I like to write: romantic suspense. I also love thrillers and novels of suspense, but I can't handle extreme violence and torture.

With a genre like film noir, everyone has these assumptions and expectations. And once all of those things are in place, that's when you can really start to twist it about and mess around with it.

I see genres as generating sets of rules or conventions that are only interesting when they are subverted or used to disguise the author's intent. My own way of doing this is to attempt a sort of whimsical alchemy, whereby seemingly incompatible genres are brought into unlikely partnerships.

'Dark Circles' is a great relationship/character piece and also a horror film. It tinkered with the genre, which I loved. I was sick of seeing the same thing, sick of people just trying to get a movie made.

People tend to think of Brisbane as a sleepy, sub-topical place. I don't know. It's like Baltimore or something. I don't know. You would hear the family dramas going on behind closed doors.

I am not doing comedy because the genre is successful. If that was the case, I would have done a run-of-the-mill comedy film. I set my own trends. I like to give something new and different to my audiences. I want to do the kind of comedy that has been missing till now.

The best movies now are called 'thrillers.' Because if you use the word 'horror,' people's associations are straight-to-video crap.

'What Doesn't Kill You' is a really great movie that was little seen but, I think, is one of my personal favorites.

I love thrillers, and I always have.

When I started writing the third book, 'The Kill,' the intention was just to write a thriller, a crime novel for myself, really, in which there would be no body, no solution - where you would look at an event from different people's perspectives.

It's kind of like Silence of the lambs meets Boogey Nights.

I mean, horror films in general put humans in these awful supernatural or horrible situations, but 'Cabin In The Woods' cranks it up a few notches and becomes outrageous and totally bizarre.

Actually, I loved Chucky. It's one of the strangest movies I've ever seen.

Some people aren't touchy-feely, but I grew up in a family where you'd walk into the family room and there'd be five people on the couch with an arm here, an arm there, everyone scratching and taking turns.

A good ground rule for writing in any genre is, start with a form, then undermine its confidence in itself. Ask what it's afraid of, what it's trying to hide - then write that.

I'm so excited to see 'Horns' because it's so many different genres in one film. It's a sci-fi, it's a love story, it's a horror movie, it's a fairy tale.

The book I always say that influenced me, subconsciously, because at the time I didn't know I wanted to be a writer, was William Goldman's 'Marathon Man.' That was the first adult thriller that I loved. I read it when I was 15 or so, when my father gave it to me.

In particular, what I loved about 'Creep' and 'The One I Love' was the combination of naturalism, horror, and comedy that felt kind of new and fun.

In 'Crush,' it still has a lot of elements of other genres, and then the horror is layered on top of it, especially towards the end.

The best comedy and horror feel like they take place in reality. You have a rule or two you are bending or heightening, but the world around it is real.

I'm not interested in making horror-comedies, but I'm very interested in making scary movies with funny parts.

I love horror, sci-fi and action, or I wouldn't make these kinds of movies, but those designations are Trojan horses to make these personal comedies.

I think the amazing thing about 'Twin Peaks' was that it completely changed television from that point forward. It showed everyone that you can just sit really quiet with storylines and characters. It can be scary, it can be uncomfortable, it can be weirdly funny.