Fear Representation Quotes

I'm a big fan of monsters. Number one, they're fun, and two, they're such great ways to access the subconscious fears and beliefs of any group of people.

I discovered the fun of genre is... you get to explore your fears, and you get to use the metaphor of the genre - whether it's a giant monster or a... 12-year-old vampire. Whatever it is, you can sink something underneath the surface and make a personal film under the guise of great fun romp.

But what are our stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?

Monsters almost always are culture's way of working out their fears.

We sometimes need to create unreal monsters and bogies to stand in for all the things we fear in our real lives.

My fear represented the failure of the human system. It is a sad truth of our creation: Something is amiss in our design, there are loose ends of our psychology that are simply not wrapped up. My fears were the dirty secrets of evolution. They were not provided for, and I was forced to construct elaborate temples to house them.

Monsters almost always are culture's way of working out their fears and are thus inherently incredibly interesting and powerful.

The ghost is the outward and visible signs of an inward fear.

Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible, or the physiology of fear.

I believe these stories exist because we sometimes need to create unreal monsters and bogies to stand in for all the things we fear in our real lives: the parent who punches instead of kissing, the auto accident that takes a loved one, the cancer we one day discover living in our own bodies. If such terrible occurrences were acts of darkness, they might actually be easier to cope with. But instead of being dark, they have their own terrible brilliance. . . and none shine so bright as the acts of cruelty we sometimes perpetrate in our own families.