nightmarish Quotes

In horror stories or in fairy tales, the fascination with the morbid is also, at least for me, a way to prepare for the unthinkable… That’s why it’s very important for me to show the artificiality of it all, because the real horrors of the world are unmatchable, and they’re too profound. It’s much easier to absorb – to be entertained by it, but also to let it affect you psychologically – if it’s done in a fake, humorous, artificial way.

...it was a huge creature, luminous, ghastly, and spectral. I have cross-examined these men, one of them a hard-headed countryman, one a farrier, and one a moorland farmer, who all tell the same story of this dreadful apparition, exactly corresponding to the hell-hound of the legend. I assure you that there is a reign of terror in the district, and that it is a hardy man who will cross the moor at night.

Far away, I could hear them lapping up my brains. Like Macbeth's witches, the three lithe cats surrounded my broken head, slurping up that thick soup inside. The tips of their rough tongues licked the soft folds of my mind. And with each lick my consciousness flickered like a flame and faded away.

When the dawn was still long hours away, bad thoughts took on flesh and began to walk. In the middle of the night thoughts became zombies.

If you ever watch police chases on, like, helicopter cams, they very quickly become nightmarish when you start to see the police coming in from the edge of the frame. I always find that terrifying.

We exponents of horror do much better than those Method actors. We make the unbelievable believable. More often than not, they make the believable unbelievable.

Making night hideous.

'Martha Marcy May Marlene' is excellent. I adore how the film is both grounded in realism and, at the same time, it has an ethereal, nightmarish atmosphere.