I'll take any vampire fans I can get. Dracula isn't a serial killer story.
I have an idea for a Godzilla movie that I've always wanted to do. The whole idea of Godzilla's role in Tokyo, where he's always battling these other monsters, saving humanity time and again - wouldn't Godzilla become God? It would be called 'Living Under the Rule of Godzilla.'
When I was a lecturer at UC Berkeley, I wrote a book about monsters.
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.
'Frankenstein' feels like an ancient tale, the kind of traditional story that appears in many other forms.
There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them.
I think the fascination with zombies is that they don't obey the rules of monsters. The first rule of monsters is that you have to go find them. You have to make a conscious choice to go to the swamp or the desert or the abandoned summer camp.
Vampires have always been hot. They are one of our most durable monsters. It's one of those stories that galvanizes us early and it's always going on.
We no longer believe in fairy tales. But we will learn to believe in monsters
Zombies are a fairly new addition to the cannon of monsterdom. Really, the modern zombie goes back just to the 'Night of the Living Dead.' There's a ton of material out there, but it seems like there's not a lot of diversity out there.
If they do something like that, maybe a Freddy Krueger fan, a girl, a really sick goth girl starts killing kids herself and Freddy has to put a stop to it, or they have to fight it out.
...what was the good of being a movie werewolf? You howled at the moon; you couldn't remember what you did, and then somebody shot you.
Villains used to always die in the end. Even the monsters. Frankenstein, Dracula - you'd kill them with a stake. Now the nightmare guy comes back.
But other vampire stories? Well, no, I really haven't read too many, and I can't say I'm crazy about romantic vampires anyway - to me the vampire is simply an evil monster.
Since 'Buffy,' vampires have become kind of softer and gushier instead of, you know, man-eating monsters.
Vampires are a genre now.
I was way into 'Voltron,' Ray Harryhausen: anything with giant monsters, I was really into. Even dinosaurs - for a while, I wanted to be a paleontologist. So it's almost like primal, ancestral mythology to me, this fascination with monsters.
You know honestly I think there's a Dracula, a Wolf Man, and a Frankenstein's Monster in all of us. They are sides of our own character so that's why I think we can relate to them in terms of a 'I know how that feels' kind of thing.
It's not like vampires are inherently bad. It's just people need to make better vampire movies.
Zombies sort of typify this ambiguity, that they're not dead and not alive.
I like zombie movies. I like 'The Walking Dead;' I like the metaphor of it, simply because when we go with the zombie concept - if you're bitten by a zombie, you don't transform into something else like a vampire or a werewolf or whatever. You become something that's not you.
The way I love monsters is a Mexican way of loving monsters, which is that I am not judgmental. The Anglo way of seeing things is that monsters are exceptional and bad, and people are good. But in my movies, creatures are taken for granted.
Frankenstein's actually interesting; he's kind of like a zombie.
Before vampires were aesthetically appealing, they were physical anomalies and ostracized outsiders whom we banished to the dark, and they didn't have the appeal that they do now.
The idea of a Frankenstein-like creature is something I've done several times. It's such an icon of the horror scene.
